4 March 2006 - 9:44pm
So what's wrong with a little objectification, anyway?
I suppose it's cool that the Blogher conference has gotten such high-profile attention from the Austin Chronicle, but I can't quite get over the fact that the editors ran with this cover.
Here Blogher is about empowering women's voices, and the spin they put on it uses cheap sex appeal, while also echoing the really bad movies of the '50s, like, um, Queen of Outer Space....
Three American astronauts are on the first manned mission to Venus, and when they arrive, they find the planet to be inhabited solely by women with high heels and short dresses. Unfortunately, they are immediately imprisoned, for the queen who rules Venus hates men... Suspecting the astronauts to be spies, she now plans to destroy the Earth. So now it's up to the three men (and some friendly Venusians) to overthrow the wicked queen and save the Earth.
Yes, that's right, get a few women together and they automatically hate men and want to take over the world. Those familiar with the genre of the times know that there were many movies like this, drawing on cultural fears of women who don't live to be in the arms of their man, much like the alien invasion movies played off of the red scare.
The final plot point of most of these movies was when the evil women finally succumbed to romantic advances by their male captives, dropped their guns and presumably rushed off to happy lives spending their nights on their backs and their days in the kitchen. Silly, uppity women, they just didn't know their place!
And this is the image the Austin Chronicle decides to run with to position Blogher in the minds of its readers.
The article itself is quite complimentary, introducing the founders of Blogher and the stuff they're talking about in panels at the SXSW festival.
"Women who write about family are 'mommybloggers,' while men who write about family are 'personal bloggers,' incorporating personal elements into their blogs," Des Jardins says. "It's so easy to call someone a 'mommyblogger,' to say that they write 'just' about family."
"As though so much of our great literature and art isn't about family relationships," Camahort points out. "When Arthur Miller wrote All My Sons, nobody said, 'Oh, he's just a 'daddy playwright.' Nobody calls him a 'male playwright.' I think that's why women are rightfully apprehensive."
Fellow BlogHers Stone and Casino – who Stone describes as an "unashamed, unabashed feminist blogger" – will continue the talk about marginalization, identity, and their implications in "Public Square or Private Club: Does Exclusivity Strengthen or Dilute?"
A serious enough take, and it's presented without any snark or sarcasm.
So what's with the overtly sexist cover? I've never been to Austin, but I hear tell it's a liberal town, so maybe they will all "get it." But really, this seems like a rather cheap shot to me. Imagine an African American blogger's conference with a Sambo-like caricature on the cover, or an Anti-Defamation League conference with a caricature of an "evil Jew" with a long hook nose. This cover says that women empowered want to emasculate men (note the three women seemingly doing just that) while lounging around as objects of desire.
If that's the political climate we have in liberal areas, no wonder ERA never passed and forced pregnancy is the political fad du jour.
media girl also blogs at other places.
Similar entries
store
Buy stuff here.
Comments
taking this cover serious is like reading Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" and taking that seriously...
seems to me.
I'm wondering what effect acomplete opposite picture would have..
Imagine a cover with women-hating men who enslave their women...while laughing...
well i suppose we could just use pictures from WWII and the War in Iraq...
and my best guess is that whoever designed that cover had no idea about the symbolism behind it. They probably just thought it looked "cool". It's definitely a liberal town...although I have always thought there was an undercurrent of "women need men" flowing through. I've only been here a year. I work at the Women's Advocacy Project and even at a place like that I am disappointed by the lack of feminism in the building. But regardless, it's a pretty good town. Anyone coming for SXSW should make sure to check out the South Congress area. It's the best part of town (if you ask me).
The cover is an odd and inappropriate choice. The subheading beneath "BLOGHER" is "Our Web Sites, Ourselves" is a reference to an overtly feminist tome, so it leads one to believe that the cover artist thinks "Queens of Outer Space" is a feminist movie. Sigh.
I think its funny and eyecatching and don't read anything serious into it. Except, perhaps, that women bloggers are a force to reckon with? :)
Thanks Sour Duck - your link on Rox Populi lead me here.
Hi mediagirl - I can see and respect your point of view. As for myself, this cover instantly reminded me of Blogger Tild's fantastic She-Blogger posters that many women embraced, promoted and bought last spring when we were all planning BlogHer together. (Hat-tip: I originally saw the link to Tild's art on Shelley Powers' blog here.) One She-Blogger image is of a curvy, sexy vixen in her blue jeans, but the others are relatively unclothed, very campy and pulp-fictiony. Love 'em. I have no idea whether these images were an inspiration for the Austin Chronicle, but their cover is showing less skin than some of the art from the women's community online.
My two lira? I:
- Think that in the fabulous tradition of B--grade sci-fi sexsploitation, it's too bad that a couple of the women on the cover were not black, brown, and/or Andorian;
- Strongly recommend everyone read the terrific, up-front interviews of women speaking at SXSW that are inside this issue. The Chron walked their talk: They gave many women ink and the opportunity speak for themselves, rather than patronizing, snarky write-ups. If you want to read the links, see Roxanne's link to my piece above or the BlogHer write-up;
- I hate giving interviews. Hard for this reporter to trust other reporters. But I'm glad I talked with Marritt Ingman. She spent more time and did a better job of getting to the core of what we were trying to say about women and identity than anyone else who has yet interviewed me, Elisa and Jory.
- Truth be told, I have never worn a red evening gown to conquer a planet. I prefer Starbuck's get-up. When I'm not in my sweats. But BlogHer's omnipartisan -- lipstick, lace, workboots and/or coveralls, all are welcome. Ya'll wear what you want. We'll still listen to you.
Matsu's excellent post on this topic.
It's not so clear cut, I suppose, and these days we're all supposed to be beyond it all, right? Thanks for the response, and pointing out the great stuff in the article itself.
Some further thoughts:
One of the battles in gaining distribution for media content -- movies, books, etc. -- is that you typically cannot control the packaging, the marketing, how the work is positioned. It's very rare indeed for anyone who creates content to control how it's packaged. Blogs are one of the few exceptions these days.
Look at the movie industry, for example. Most important is how the movie is positioned by its marketing. What's the poster like? The trailer? The television spots? What the movie actually is becomes a secondary experience that changes the first impression. Whether the movie overcomes that or not really depends upon how powerful the movie is -- and how pernicious and powerful the marketing itself is.
I have not seen more than one or two of the Oscar nominated films (for all the categories) this year, but I have pretty clear impressions of what each of them is like, is about, and sends as a message. Why? Because of the marketing, the packaging -- how the movies have been presented to the marketplace.
So in this case about the Austin Chronicle cover, my argument is not with Marritt Ingman, but with the editors/publisher who decided to package the article with this imagery. The article becomes the second thing, if not secondary in itself, to the cover and how that artwork positions the BlogHer phenomenon.