Earlier this afternoon Jenn Hogg, a member of the Feminist Peace Network, brought to our attention a particularly grotesquely misogynist ad promo being run in conjunction with a Robert Greenwald film to promote the impeachment of Dick Cheney. Now we’re all for that, and the film is pretty good, but we neither understand the relevance or find acceptable the accompanying graphic. As I write this, the graphic is still up on the website, although we’ve heard that after a flurry of protests that it will be replaced. If it is no longer there, you can see it on the Womens Space blog.
Deanna Zandt, a media technologist and consultant shared with us this excellent summation of the problem with the graphic,
“The use of a woman as an object of torture is troublesome on a few
levels. As we all know, women are often used as targets in
commercial media imagery, which we call unacceptable when it
happens in both violent and non-violent circumstances. (There was
recently a whole thing about America’s Top Model with the models
posing in various murdered poses, for example.) Using a women to
represent a country that has been ravaged by a heinous war is still
objectifying her, and evokes the feeling of women as easy targets
for violence. I know women are “easy targets” in our culture. I
don’t need to be reminded of it on a site about impeaching Cheney,
quite frankly.
There is also a highly sexual– yet probably somewhat subtle –
component of this picture to me. No, she’s not in a bikini or
anything, but the legs spread and duct-taped open… the first
thing I thought was, “This woman is going to get raped.” It’s
similar to how every woman character that’s a victim of any kind on
Law & Order is also raped. A woman represented in media can’t just
get mugged, or robbed, or whatever– over the last 10-15 years or
so, there has been this additional component of sexual violence.
This is not true of men who are victims in the media. Your picture
evokes that extra sexualized violence, and disturbs me on that
level as well.”
As I said above, rumor has it that the graphic will be removed (although really it should have been done the minute it was pointed out that there was a problem and needless to say shouldn’t have been there in the first place.) But please feel free to write to the folks who put it up and let them know that regardless of the merits of the impeachment campaign (and I’m all for it), the ad hit a sour note. You can reach them at info@bravenewfilms.org.
I also want to make note of the fact that since this matter came up this afternoon, I’ve been hearing from other folks with other disturbing examples of misogyny on left/progressive leaning sites, discussion boards, etc. That is unfortunately precisely why FPN was founded, and I may write more about this later, but it needs to be said that the continuing and frequently very blatant misogyny in these forums makes it all but impossible to have the conversations and communications that we need to go forward.
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