Showing posts with label Sexism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sexism. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Is This Just Purely Ridiculous or is This SEXISM?


Is this is just my poor taste or am I just another big fan of catheters? Hmm....

I found this little article on a fanciful website called Feministing. It is a joyful read for all of us post feminists to the post post feminists to the I hate feminists blog aficionados.

For whatever, it's worth, I wanted to show my dear readers the latest in stereo equipment.

I was amazed at the immense number of irate comments from Feministy readers. Indeed, the object maligns the female figure but at the same time, I couldn't stop placing the fem torso stereo sitting on top of a dusty receiver in some pimply teenage boys hideaway bedroom in the basement with walls dressed in glow in the dark decal stars. It felt hard to have a serious feminist opinion about something so ridiculous, pathetic and strangely nostalgic of decorative motifs from the seventies....

The Object Remix evokes a period in feminist history when Andrea Dworkin railed against imagery like the famous Larry Flynt Hustler cover where a woman's legs are dangling out of the top of a meat grinder while her upper half has already been ground into steak tartare.





Today even though these images are still anti-women, they seem to have taken on another meaning with the passing of time. They seem to have lost their power over women(or at least the young woman I once was who once went to Hampshire College and was immersed in Feminist Culture). We are now dealt with a new hand of more noxious and subversively sophisticated sexist imagery. Some are simply simple. These days it seems to reach even a much younger audience of adolescent girls who have not had the chance to form their own identities before being bombarded with the shows like the ones from the CW.

In all it's bad taste, the stereo reminds me of a mod figurine from Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" or something with bit of panache which David Hemmings might have added to his photo studio in Antonioni's "Blow Up". Two famous British films where the characters like to call women, "Birds". Both men trapped in a voyeuristic realm of violence and objectification of women.

So, what's to make of this? We would love to know....