Celebrity: The Arthur Kade Project

We start the night at Del Frisco’s, the trendy steakhouse chain inside the old Packard Building. It’s Kade and his good friend Anthony “Church” Chirchirillo, a financial planner with whom Kade worked years ago, as well as Chad Boonswang, a catastrophic-personal-injury attorney. As the staff flutters around our table — everyone seems to know the three men, including several gorgeous waitresses who come over and hug them — I’m surprised when Church and Chad offer serious criticisms of Kade’s journey. “Frankly, a lot of Arthur’s friends don’t agree with the way he’s going about this,” Chad says. “A lot of people — maybe most people — would view his method as being a little arrogant and ostentatious and no-holds-barred — particularly in terms of women.”

Of all the things Kade addresses on his blog, it’s his discussions of the fairer sex that have generated the most controversy. While being shot in background scenes in New York a few months ago, Kade was positioned close to Angelina Jolie, after someone noticed his “look, the way I’m dressed, the energy I send off.” Blogging about it, he said he’d “dated much hotter women” than Jolie and probably wouldn’t initiate a conversation with her in a club, as she came across as “‘mother hot,’ rather than ‘stripper hot.’” At least as offensive, though, was a post about a female phlebotomist who recently took his blood and whose “visible mustache” so sickened him that he contemplated demanding a replacement. It led to these ruminations:

If you are a hot girl, then it is imperative that everything is shaved, or clean to the point that there is minimal hair. One of the many things I notice on a girl while talking to them, and figuring out whether I am going to have them is their: nails, hair, makeup, and skin, and this will many times separate girls who are hot (8’s and 9’s) from girls who I want to take it to the next level with that night (10’s).

The popular women’s website Jezebel.com linked to this post, driving so much traffic to Kade’s site that it temporarily shut down. Jezebel bemoaned that “no matter how far we have come … there will always be shallow, narcissistic dudes who think that porn stars and Victoria’s Secret models are illustrative examples of what it means to be a woman.”

But the way Kade sees it, it’s all reverse discrimination. He invokes the HBO series Sex and the City — regarding which he appears to be quite knowledgeable — and the character Samantha Jones, who “slept with half the city and talked about men and dildos, and it was no problem; nobody cared.” He’s doing the same thing, only from the male perspective: “The difference is I’m putting it on a public forum. Women have trouble because no woman wants to be a 6. Every woman wants to be an 8 or a 10 or a 9. But they’re a 6 in my eyes. And I’m saying it.”

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