Lutz had tried for years to strip Thompson of his personal zoo, but the one animal-cruelty charge the department managed to make stick — concerning the fate of some starved cows and a buffalo — hadn’t had the desired effect. The truth was that Thompson was doing nothing illegal, at least not according to the laws of Ohio. So long as he wasn’t charging admission, he could have all the animals he wanted, virtually unregulated. But Thompson was less fortunate in his handling of another of his hoards, an arsenal of more than one hundred guns. With the assistance of the ATF, Lutz had seen Thompson charged with the possession of illegal firearms after a sting had found some with their serial numbers carefully filed off.

At GQ, Chris Heath goes into more detail on both the regulatory, cultural and ethical issues involved in what I think is a less action-movie-y but more comprehensive piece:

One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs…Just as “good” private owners explain why they should exist and why “bad” private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. I can see a logic in some kind of extreme libertarian position (people should be able to do what they want with animals unless they are clearly shown to be doing harm) and, conversely, in a hard-core animal-rights position (no animals should be used for any human purpose whatsoever), but the arguments for everything in between seem murky. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals’ happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.)

I’m not a wildlife expert, so I’m not the one to lay out a set of standards here. But I’m not clear what the argument should be for why the requirements for both animals’ and humans’ safety and well-being should be different depending on whether the animals’ owners are zoos or private individuals. In both cases, it seems like we should try to guarantee that the animals have adequate room to move around, a steady, healthy food source, and that the humans in proximity to them who are not their owners are guaranteed a level of safety. Such regulations seem like they’d end up imposing reasonable restrictions on the number of wild animals any one person could own and support. It’s one thing to say that someone has the right to take the risk that an animal who lives with them will rip them to pieces: it’s another entirely to say that their friends and neighbors have to accept being exposed to that risk.

Out of curiosity, I went back to 2000 in GQ’s cover archive to confirm the suspicion that I had that Kunis’ shoot is completely typical. In all that time, Angelina Jolie is the only woman who landed a cover and who got to wear an outfit for the shoot that she could have worn out in public to some place other than a beach. Her closest runners-up were Charlize Theron in hot pants and a top that shows she’s clearly not wearing a bra, Anna Kournikova in a crop top, Jamie King in a see-through top, and Eva Mendez in a mesh dress. Jennifer Anniston memorably posed topless in a jeans skirt when she was named the magazine’s first Woman of the Year. And Sacha Baron Cohen reciprocated a little when he posed naked for the comedy issue in 2009. In this context, where men generally wear full outfits and women wear very little, the treatment of Kunis isn’t out of line with GQ’s practices, where the men are role models and the women are objects of worship. It’s a pretty boring decision for a cover shot, but I don’t think it’s sexist. Given that male comedians who get the cover for this issue usually end up looking silly or not particularly attractive on it Kunis may actually be one up on them.

And if the pictures get guys who skipped Tad Friend’s Anna Faris profile to read a piece that touches substantially on sexism and comedy, I’m okay with that. We do not live in a perfect age. I think it’s very smart that Kunis called out Lucille Ball, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey, all women with substantial creative control over their shows (I’ve always loved that Lucille bought out Desilu after her divorce so she could own her own production company outright — this seems like a substantially overlooked issue when we talk about representation in pop culture, period) as role models. And frankly, I really respect her for agreeing with the interviewer that Tina Fey’s ongoing efforts to act as though Liz Lemon isn’t that attractive are getting tired. Kunis apparently told GQ “You want the attention to go to the joke itself rather than be distracted by who’s delivering it…But look at Bridesmaids. That movie’s full of beautiful women who are hysterical. I’m so proud of those ladies.” Comics, be they ladies or dudes, are stronger when they can execute humor on more than one track.

At the end of the day, I would be sort of sad if magazines aimed at heterosexual men weren’t able to acknowledge that women are attractive. That doesn’t feel like any sort of feminist victory to me.

And second, she says if I concede that women write a bunch of different things for the magazine, then my question, “If the only way for women to published in certain kinds of magazines is to take these kinds of cheesecake assignments, should we say yes, and dunk them and then insist on better for the next thing in the hopes that there will be a next thing?” is unfair. I’ve thought about this, and while yes, women may make it into GQ and its ilk in other ways, that doesn’t mean that assignments like these don’t pose a dilemma if a magazine like this comes to you and asks you to write a celebrity profile on the heels of a profile like Jessica Pressler’s camping trip like Channing Tatum.

The importance of magazines like GQ and Esquire to women writers comes in part from the fact that there simply isn’t an equivalent among magazines aimed at women. As I was thinking about this, I looked through the American Society of Magazine Editors’ database of National Magazine Award nominees and winners. If you count Vanity Fair as a general interest magazine rather than a women’s magazine, which I do, a women’s magazine hasn’t published a nominee for a Feature Writing prize in the last twenty years. Unless the interior design magazine Nest counts, no women’s magazine has ever produced a nominee for profile writing in the two categories that have existed to recognize that form. If we count Self, six Public Interest award nominees have come from women’s magazines in the last twenty years: two in that magazine, one in Golf for Women, one in Redbook, one in Glamour, one in Family Circle. Between 1991 and 2001, no women’s magazine has produced a winner or a nominee in the Reporting category.

It’s weird and hugely frustrating that women’s magazines have made such totally different choices. That’s not to say that all women’s magazines should be high-end bastions of literary journalism—certainly all men’s magazines aren’t that way—but certainly we should be able to support one or two publications that tell us about hot accessories and do groundbreaking, beautifully-written reporting. That kind of committment would both make women’s publications better, and provide material support for the kind of empowerment places like Marie Claire are ostensibly supposed to supply along with beauty advice. But they just don’t do it. And because there isn’t a parallel infrastructure for great reporting, profiles, and public service journalism among women’s magazines, access to assignments at the high-end men’s magazines, and to the amazing editing and resources that come with those assignments, and that produce major awards, is incredibly precious.

Sometimes those kinds of assignments don’t come with difficult choices, like deciding what physical risks you’re willing to face especially in circumstances where it might be more dangerous to be a woman, or whether you’re comfortable putting yourself out there in a One Crazy Night profile. But sometimes they do. Acknowledging that those kinds of choices exist and aren’t easy, especially when it seems like prestige magazines are expressing preferences for certain things, needs to be part of the conversation if we want more women writing more kinds of stories for more magazines.