I'm a straight 40-year-old male who doesn't much like Madonna and isn't still nursing psychic wounds from being profoundly tortured for his lunch money in the 9th grade -- which means that I couldn't care less about Glee.
That said, it's entertaining the level of at best concern, at worst outright indignation currently being voiced over a new GQ pictorial which features a couple of members of the Glee cast cavorting around in fantasy tart-wear on a set made to look like a high school hallway. The arguments seem to be that a) showing grown women who play teenagers on TV sexing it up is creepy/sick (the straight female argument), b) it's sexist and entirely unfair that Lea Michele and Dianna Agron strip for the photos while hunky guy Cory Monteith remains predictably clothed (the gay male argument), and c) "Arrrgh!!! No!!! Sex and television characters!!! What about our children?!? GOD SMASH!!" (the Parents Television Council argument).
For the life of me I'll never understand the current pop cultural obsession with Glee; it's not an awful show by any means, but it's a damn near perfect example of a phenomenon that's taken on a life of its own and which is now wildly out of proportion with the thing that spawned it. To its legion of rabid fans, Glee is critic-proof; try bringing up the show's many flaws to any self-proclaimed "Gleek" and you may as well be at a Tea Party rally trying to reason with an obese woman on a Hoveround.
But back to the photo shoot: Artists have been creating and patrons have been commissioning images of attractive, underdressed women since just about the dawn of time. Jesus, at least Michele and Agron are actually legal, as opposed to, say, Miley Cyrus, who has no issue giving potential pedophiles real spank material by posing topless before the age of 18. And that's really what it comes down to anyway: Whatever you think of the pictures, even if you've got a problem with the fact that the photographer who took them is kind of a notorious letch, the fact remains that the two adult women -- and one adult man, for that matter -- willingly went along with the shoot and did it for a magazine aimed at fellow adults. If they don't have an issue with posing that way, I can't bring myself to raise holy hell about the fact that they did.
Plus, at least something finally made Glee, and these characters, interesting for me.