This Friday Serena Williams will appear on newsstands naked. She's posing for the cover of ESPN's body issue. Although I'm generally a little squeamish about the commodification of women's bodies that comes with the naked woman on the cover (magazines often use it to boost newsstand sales). But I couldn't help but feel a little happy that for once the naked woman was a beautiful, curvy, dark-skinned woman. All too often the women that pose naked on magazine covers all look the same: bronzed white women that look freakishly thin. But on Just Jared goes ahead and askes the problematic question, "Hot or Not?"

Some of the answers are wonderful. They mention how empowering it is for women to see a healthy black woman on the cover of a magazine.

Many comments pointed out that the cover was probably Photoshopped. Well, duh. Every commercial image we see has gone through Photoshop. France is even considering a law requiring that advertisements that are Photoshopped carry a "health warning."

But there are some comments that are pretty horrifying:

• Why? @ 10/06/2009 at 3:00 pm

  I don’t know why she had to do this. She’s a great athlete, but her body could be a lot better if she slimmed down some. I think she’s a little too thick and she does not have pretty feet.

• Tom @ 10/06/2009 at 3:11 pm

  She is a bit scary. I would love to do her in the ass.

• this family is so fubar @ 10/06/2009 at 3:14 pm

  Oh yuck - tubby checkers!

• Neorules2112 @ 10/06/2009 at 3:15 pm

  Gross
  Gross
  and Gross

• ew @ 10/06/2009 at 3:31 pm

  Ew, she’s so dark!

• pam @ 10/06/2009 at 4:42 pm

  Yuck, don’t like big black women..

• ilovemykittyb @ 10/06/2009 at 5:05 pm

  gross. like A Monkey…..