Pen-Elayne on the Web

The Master's House

I read on the Friends of Lulu mailing list how FoL founding member Deni Loubert's ex-husband Dave Sim is once again mocking the organization in his self-published comic Cerebus. Fortunately, the general membership response this time seems to be a mixture of "what's this bitter man's problem already?" and "just ignore him," but I remember a time, not so long ago, when individuals strove to craft the best possible comeback on the organization's letterhead to make Sim, or whoever the Detractor of the Day was, somehow see the light. I said then and I've since repeated a number of times: You can't win when you play their game. They make the rules, they set the goalposts, it's rigged from the start to put you on the defensive and to create a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Not that much different from US politics, actually. :) The late great Audre Lorde put it best when she observed, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Which brings me in an extremely roundabout way to the cover of the May 2 Entertainment Weekly, featuring the Dixie Chicks naked with their naughty bits strategically covered by hands, camera angles, etc. and various epithets (both positive and negative) written on their non-naughty bits. Atrios repros it here (if the link is bloggered just scroll down). As I hinted at in the comments section yesterday, many people actually regard taking off your clothes for a magazine cover to be liberating and even feminist! Not, I opine, as long as you have such a blatant disparity between men doing it and women doing it. And not as long the rules of our current societal game dictate that, no matter what your intent in displaying tasteful nudity on mainstream magazine covers, the result is that you're still going to be ogled by men. I mean, just check Atrios' comments section. And these panting wolves are probably really nice guys and on "our side" politically! Until such time as major shifts occur in this kind of thinking and the rules of the game are no longer made by the oglers, any women who play into it (again, no matter what they intend to say by the act of posing nude) are willing parties to their own objectification. And that doesn't seem terribly feminist to me.