(Note: this is just me shooting trolls in a barrel. MsJane says some fucked-up things, so scroll past if you’re feeling irritable. The parody is worth seeing, though.)
Do any of you remember the commenter who showed up on the Mommy Drive-By post at A Little Pregnant to offer a particularly vituperative mommy drive-by? About how, well, they should know that apple juice is basically just sugar water, and you might as well stick the rubber nipple on a bottle of Grey Goose, and that, well, babies need hats to protect them from carcinogens like sunlight, but she sees babies! without hats! all the time! and that some mothers really are just stupid neglectful bitches who should be shot? Well, she’s got a sister, and her name is MsJane.
Blackademic posted Gwyneth Paltrow’s cri de coeur over at her blog, along with a brilliant parody that I’d heard about but been unable to find. Gwyneth Paltrow’s stab at–maybe more of a fumble towards–philanthropy is celebrity overidentification taken just a wee bit too far. The picture is a black-and-white close-up portrait photograph of Gwyn. She’s wearing some sort of African or pseudo-African jewelry; the effect is like a whitewashed spoof version of an Edward S. Curtis photograph, or any of the anthropological pictures that so fascinated Westerners in the era of the human display. She’s wearing face paint that looks patently inauthentic. It’s like a decal an eight-year-old would get at a county fair. She has a sensitive, soulful, humanitarian expression on her face, like when Jack Black told her he loved her for her.
The parody is, well, I’m not even gonna try to do it justice. Just go look.
See, this is objectification at its purest: when the people you’re objectifying have been remade so completely in the image of your own desires and fears that you can no longer distinguish their selfhood from your own. It’s when questions of their independence and dignity disappear from your worldview. It’s when promoting their interests and promoting yourself are the same thing, as far as you’re concerned. It’s when you assume that giving a damn is the same as knowing sweet fuck-all. It’s All About You.
I just hope this picture gives a few hungry grad students material for their dissertations.
Anyway, the real unintentional hilarity was in comments. I give you A Defense of Gwyneth Paltrow, or How Dare You Accuse a Celebrity of Shameless Self-Promotion?
Excuse me, “intellectuall outrage?” You have to spell it first before you can claim it. Paltrow isn’t the poser here.
This whole thread is revolting and racist. The whole point of the campaign is to make a point that even if you’re not “african” in the racial or national sense, you can get off your ass and step up to the plate. You can claim “I am African” the same way John Kennedy said “I am a Berliner.” The Germans didn’t throw shit at him and say get the hell out of our country. They had some functioning brain cells in their head.
I think it’s a great ad, it makes a great point, and if it didn’t have a beautiful white woman in it you’d all be loving it.
Yes, but there are a lot of ways to do that without appropriating things like, oh, the identity and specific problems of an entire continent’s worth of people. Take the, “If one of us has AIDS, we all do,” campaign: solidarity and compassion without creepy narcissistic publicity stunts.
Then she tells blackademic she’s just jealous ‘cuz she’s ugly and fat and she’s not even white and also MsJane is totally gonna kick her ass:
You wish you could look as good at GP. And have half of her dignity, morals, looks, and everything else. I assume from your crude and racist post that you are not a skinny gringa. Hmmm…what’s the opposite of that image. Scary.
I give up. What is the opposite of Gwyneth Paltrow, and how would that be a bad thing to be?
Oh, and it’s not the Paltrow version of the ad that’s offensive or objectifying, it’s the parody:
By the way, and besides all the other offensive things you have all said, just stop and think a minute what that African woman in the photograph thinks of your graffiti on her face and ugly words which somehow are supposed to be her words. What makes you think she would like you doing that, because she’s black? What a stereotypical judgment.
No matter how you present it, you slapped your hateful words on her picture. Paltrow at least is representing the words on her ad voluntarily with full knowledge and agreement. And none of her words are hateful.