It's hard to top media's naked ambition

I REALISE I'm a bit of a Johnny-come-lately on this one but it seems quite a few media people have been getting naked over summer.

I REALISE I'm a bit of a Johnny-come-lately on this one but it seems quite a few media people have been getting naked over summer.

It started with Bianca Dye, who stripped off in Brisbane. She thought it was a big deal but, hey, Bianca! You're on the radio. Nobody knows you're nude. Anyway, next to take her creases to the pitch was Jennifer Hawkins, who posed naked for the cover of a magazine. This was apparently "controversial", which to men must surely mean "an astonishingly good idea".

On the other hand, women got their knickers in a twist.

Bianca took it badly, saying she got naked to show people what a "real" woman looks like, whereas Jennifer is beautiful.

That got up the nose of a reporter in Melbourne, who decided that if the public wanted to know what a "real" woman looked like naked - and, at this point, we should say the poor public had expressed no such desire - they should get a load of her saddle-bags and caesarean scar, and promptly stripped off for the Herald Sun.

Not to be outdone, The Age published nude shots of a male reporter who declared himself the fattest, hairiest and nudest of all.

Now I'm sure these reporters thought they were doing something new and daring, but here at The Australian, naked is something we do all the time. Imre Salusinszky, for example, proves he's Jewish in the picture byline we run every day, except that we show it only from the neck up.

Then there's Joe Hildebrand, who works naked at The Daily Telegraph, and is nude in his picture byline, except for a cravat. Again, we show it only from the neck up. Ask why and Joe insists it's not his fault: he works for a tabloid and they can't get the whole thing into a smaller format.

Not to be outdone, I asked my editor here at Wry Side what we might do, to go one better than these buck-naked hacks, and we believe we've done it.

Today's edition of the paper - well, this column, anyway - is totally interactive. You, the reader, are invited to strip me, the writer no, no, not naked, we're going one better than that. You can get me down to nothing at all.

What you need to do is this: rub the image on this page, extremely vigorously, with your wet thumb. Go on, keep rubbing. There you go, I'm gone.

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