Misogyny In Media and How To Recognise It

The following comment is by CokeTalk and raises an important point about how women are still blatantly degraded and shamed in mass media, in turn educating us to how we should view ourselves as women, other women and how men should view us, whether we know it or not.

This may be a campaign about HIV/AIDS awareness, but that’s no excuse. This is blatant misogyny, really sinister stuff that conveys a much more profound message about the female body.

Take another look at it. She’s got a killer smile, but still, you can’t see her eyes. The model is cropped so that she’s essentially headless. What makes her human is gone. What makes her a woman is on display. That’s a very deliberate creative choice.

She is an object to be fucked without a brain or an identity. Worse still, her vagina is a fully indexed destination on a Google map. The visual metaphor is so potent (and porn is so ubiquitous) that this image is more jarring than one in which she shows us her actual pussy.

It’s not about the fact that she’s had sex with Bill Johnson and 19 others. Who gives a fuck? What’s toxic is the idea that they checked into her vagina on Foursquare. It’s saying that her private parts aren’t private at all. They’re public. That’s the implicit message in this image, and it’s degrading as hell.

It’s not slut-shaming so much as it’s female-shaming, and it reinforces the age-old cultural narrative that women’s bodies aren’t their own.

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One thought on “Misogyny In Media and How To Recognise It

  1. Pingback: If You’re Not A Feminist, You’re Ignorant | The Dame

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