• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 1, 2016

It’s a strange world out there, when the New York Post publishes something unflattering to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and a bunch of liberals get upset about it.

But that’s exactly what happened over the weekend when the NYPpublished 20-year-old nude pictures of Trump’s wife Melania and caught hell from all over the political spectrum, condemned for displaying the kind of crass sensationalism you might expect from (gasp) a British tabloid.

The photos of Trump’s wife, including one in which she is nude with one hand strategically positioned over her midsection and another where she is lying on a bed embracing another nude woman, were taken in 1995 when she was a 25-year-old model. They were published a year later in a French magazine, Max, which is no longer in business.

(Melania met Donald Trump in 1998 and they were married in 2005).

The decision to publish the photos is puzzling. Setting aside the fact that the NYP, with its well-known conservative leanings, endorsed Trump for president back in April, there’s really not much to justify the decision, even by a tabloid’s editorial standards.

First, most people almost certainly already knew that Melania Trump worked as a model and had a number of nude photographs taken in her younger years, many of which are widely available online. (One revealing pic was tweeted during the Republican primary, setting off a tiff between Trump and then-rival Senator Ted Cruz).

In other words, the shock value of the mere existence of these nude photos is just about zero.

Further, as one might expect for a French periodical, the photos are quite artsy and tasteful – not to say pretentious – and therefore not really embarrassing or somehow incriminating. That is, except perhaps by the standards of the outdated Puritanism which Trump’s nomination has effectively jettisoned. (It says a lot that nude pictures of the candidate’s wife are far and away the least of the GOP’s worries this election year.)

Indeed, public nudity has gradually become less of a taboo over the last decade.

From Kim Kardashian “breaking the Internet” to Justin Bieber’s dad complimenting his endowment after paparazzi snapped him in the buff, people just don’t seem as entangled in the inherent shame of our corporeal being as once they were. Which is all to the good, not to mention pleasantly ironic, as feminist anti-body-shamers are the ones taking the NYP to task here.

Finally, from the purely prurient standpoint, the ubiquitous and immediate accessibility of literally every kind of pornography that anyone could ever imagine, and more besides, pretty much removes any value the photos had for purposes of titillation.

The average 12-year-old boy can find something far more interesting on his smartphone in half the time it takes to plunk down two quarters for the Sunday print edition — and without having to get his hands all smudgy with newsprint either.