I read lots of magazines, because I love fashion and pop culture. Both fashion magazines and pop culture outlets are not feminist (unless you actively seek them out like magazines like Bust and Bitch etc.)
Glamour magazine sometimes tries to be feminist and does stories on third world countries and the activist in them and they have the pictures of the villages and the poverty etc. I usually find them to be puff pieces that rarely truly have any substance to them.
I was reading the September Issue of
Glamour and I came across a paragraph with a picture of a thong underneath and it read:
Newly Cool: The Va-Jay-Jay!
"Don't let the door hit you in the vagina on the way out." How hard did you laugh at that line in Knocked Up? Yes indeed, when it comes to humor, vaginas are in vogue. Thanks Oprah, whose "va-jay-jay" talk seems to have inspired joking on Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs. Then there was Alec Baldwin's pickup line in a Saturday Night Live sketch: "You know what part of a woman I like best, and I'm not kidding? The vagina." Seems we've all gotten so comfortable saying the V word we can't stop.
There are so many things that are wrong with this paragraph I am not sure where to begin. First, let's think about how hard people like Eve Ensler worked to get the word vagina to be able to muttered in mainstream America. (Ensler is also featured in this issue of
Glamour but that is another post all together.) And that feminists have tried to empower themselves and gain ownership over their bodies only to have a magazine highlight the comedic value of a body part?
I think that the mainstream use of the word vagina is another subversive way that media (which is primarily patriarchal) is selling women a version of what they are supposed to be. It is not an empowering message like, "Own your body and sexuality!" , it is the message that your body (again) is going to be cut into pieces and used by men for what they would like.
The comfort level that comes with women like Oprah using child-like slang for her grown up woman parts shows that there is still that Madonna/Whore syndrome going on. It is fine for women to have sexual parts and to use them as long as they are deemed funny and nonthreatening, or child like so that the masculine sexual power can prevail.
Comments?