From Feministe, a critique of the current Vanity Fair magazine, their ‘Hollywood Issue’.
I’m not particularly well-versed in Vanity Fair’s usual output – I’ve picked it up in airports before now, only to put it down due to there being nothing in it worth reading, like almost every other magazine out there (if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to turn me into a tree loving tearful EcoMonkey of the most extreme variety, it’s magazine stands in newsagents – trees being chopped down in their millions to publish page after page of unreadable horseshit… but I digress…)
Anyway, the critique of the gender politics at work in the current issue of Vanity Fair is pretty incisive, though oddly enough it only seems to be shocking because Vanity Fair is less crass most of the time, otherwise they’d be critiquing Loaded/FHM/Maxim and all the other porn-lite that peddles the notion that a clothed woman is unworthy of being interviewed or photographed.
It’s not a new problem, it’s indicative of the relationship between women and print media for half a century, but it just seems to be so stark in that particular issue of Vanity Fair, and the critique is particularly clear (as with about half the stuff on Feministe – the other half being patchy…), worth a read.
Soundtrack – Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’.