feminists
 
         
   

Back at the Raunch: Feminists Revenge

Finally, an MP has noticed that ‘lad’s mags’ contain breasts and bottoms. She has called for them to be elevated to the top shelf of the newsagents, to take their appointed place at the right hand of porn.  They could harm children.

It is an unpleasant duty, but one no less important for that, to point out to people that the list of things that could harm children is often drawn up more in panic than in anger. For a child to see something titillating and be titillated by it presupposes that they are capable of being titillated. There is a famous picture in a gallery in Keswick which either looks like a school of fish or a girl being pleasured from behind. The point is – explained quite simply underneath – young children only ever see the fish. If you can see the sex, it’s because you know about sex. Needless to say, it took me a while to see the fish.

‘Drivel. Oppression is the look-like-this-believe-that-act-this-way dicta laid down in glossy weeklies.’

But this is immaterial. Open season had been declared on Zoo, Nuts et al. The BBC produced an online ‘lad’s mag written by women’. Oh, the laughs. It featured an article on how to avoid seeming a Neanderthal, how to impress women with your knowledge of feminist history– the high point – a cartoon entitled ’top shelf humour’. A harassed looking shop manager was explaining how material degrading to women was to be moved to the top shop, so children wouldn’t see it. A woman with snide stoat-like cunning asked ‘Oh, and how old should they be before it’s alright to degrade women?’ Please. My. Sides.

At the same time, Ariel Levy is promoting her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, which charts the rise of ‘raunch culture.’ Raunch, for those of you unaffected, is much like normal soft porn, except the women enjoy it. FHM, GQ and the like encourage it. The Pussycat Dolls have attracted particular opprobrium for being pretty and not wearing very much, which oppresses women.  As has Christina Aguilera, women who take up pole dancing for fun, and anyone not conforming to the strict rules laid down by the feminist autocracy concerning exactly how and when it is permitted to celebrate sexuality. God forbid, natch, that you should not celebrate sexuality; in their Jesuitical way you must worship, but only how they tell you.

‘Long-range stolen photos more invasive than a Sport upskirter to catch wobbling thighs. HD digitals exposing the tiniest trace of sebum, or a collective sneer at a courageous style decision gone tragically awry.’

This may be a new phenomenon, but it’s far from being a new idea. If you want to see the wholehearted and vicious oppressing of the female sex, don’t bother looking at male-oriented publications. The male market for magazines expresses, across a gamut of sophistication, nothing more than puppyish excitability. The women they feature may be a conjunction of airhead and airbrush, but oppression? Drivel.  Oppression is the look-like-this-believe-that-act-this-way dicta laid down in glossy weeklies. The sort of magazine that carries a diet on page 4, a feature on how women are too thin on page 5, a spread on how to look like Angelina on 6 and a think-piece on how lad’s mags only  promote 2D fantasies and men are ‘scared of real women’ somewhere to towards the rear.

Most of these show what would happen if you gave the school bully at an all-girls an editorship. Unsurprising then that attractive and sexually aware women are kicking against the pricks, so to speak. Just as it should not surprise most blokes that women are actually dressing to impress (and compete with) other girls so it is concerning that no-one seems to have realised that raunch culture is not ‘selling out’ to male desire. Of course such women are branded traitors. Easier to accuse them of collaboration than face the uncomfortable truth which is that some people might want to be desirable. Especially since desirability, ask anyone in marketing, is power.

Not every man who reads a tit-n-bum rag is a brain-dead sexist. Nor is the bump and grind of a music video the ultimate expression of subjugation to the patriarchy. It just so happens that an awful lot of people have got awfully sick of being asked to apologise for their instinctual behaviour. The joyless catechism that runs through all the misandrist criticism is nothing more than the last frustrated scream of old feminism realising that no one cares any more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   
Who are the real oppressors?