From Richard Scudamore to Chi magazine, it's a tacky sexism epidemic
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Version 0 of 1. I had terrible hay fever this past weekend, casting something of a spectre over the glorious May weather. As with all things bright and beautiful, there are downsides, but these bothersome sneezing fits have been manifesting themselves in the strangest of ways. On Saturday, as I strolled along Talacre beach in north Wales, I was unable to stop myself from loudly commenting on the appearance of several gentlemen in the vicinity, much to the embarrassment of my companions. "Man boobs!" I hollered, as a rather portly gentleman jogged by, shirtless. "Back fat!" I followed up several minutes later, as a young man reclined beneath a parasol. "Disgusting builder's bum! Excess body hair! Tiny willy!" My words echoed across the bay. In my defence, I was very tired and just wanted to go home to bed. It's not just John Inverdale – who in the Radio Times puts the remarks he made about Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli down to hay fever – and myself who are feeling this way, however. The whole of Europe, nay, the world, seems to be in the grips of a pollen-related crisis at the moment. We're just sneezing out objectifying statements about other human beings all over the shop. It's a veritable epidemic from which no one, certainly not Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive is safe. (One wonders, on reading his messages, whether Edna had actually ever expressed an interest in anyone's "shaft", or it was simply a matter of her having been a "big-titted broad"?) But then we move several decades back from the 1940s New York detective noir that Scudamore partially inhabits (if only he had stuck to "there were three types of blonde and she was all of them" and "she gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket") to Italy. Ah, Italy: quite possibly the female objectification capital of the universe, and the only place where I can say that I've been sexually harassed by two undertakers in command of a hearse, complete with coffin. It seems Italy's attitude to women is finally being scrutinised internationally, albeit some 30 years too late. This is a country where game shows have naked women as furniture, and where women advertise artichokes in the buff. It is also the place that invented the paparazzi. And thus it follows that under scrutiny this week is a bit of mass media body shaming, courtesy of the magazine Chi (which, two summers ago, lest we forget, went where angels fear to tread and published pictures of a topless royal). The complainant, one Veronica Lario, ex-wife of the involuntary dementia care worker and sometime prostitute befriender Silvio Berlusconi, has reason to be cross. Not only did Chi publish a spread of paparazzi photos claiming that Lario had put on weight and asking a variety of "experts" what cosmetic surgery she could use to reverse the ageing process, but also the magazine is owned by her ex-husband. Nice. My Guardian colleague Holly Baxter and I have long argued that women's magazines are just as sexist, if not more so, than men's magazines. How can one lambast and ridicule Zoo for having a section of their website dedicated to "50 unbelievably sexy underboobs'" when Now magazine is publishing "Bum-ology: what does your bum reveal about you?", and Best is telling you to "look at your fat photo" while you eat? But there is hope: falling circulation rates and conversations with those outside the industry prove that the public are fed up with the media behaving so tackily when it comes to women. Of course, you can't blame all the sexism in women's magazines on hordes of hay-fevery female journalists. Men are involved too. Take away the paparazzi's cameras, and you're basically being chased down the street by a bunch of men asking you whether or not your breasts are real. And, as the Lario affair demonstrates, so often it's the old men at the top who are pulling the strings. |