Who needs equality when you have legs like these?
Apparently every article I read today is going to be about sex, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the ongoing attempt to subjugate women as much as possible while telling us that we want it (a national past time, apparently). So, onto Campus Exposure, an expose of college sex mags.
The article is actually pretty good, and while I’m kind of tempted to just lather, rinse and repeat, I think that some of these magazines have the potential to be decent. The ones which primarily involve naked chicks simulating intercourse? Not so great, and definitely not so new. But there are a few which are making attempts to normalize conversations about sex and dismantle traditional gender norms. There’s a difference between open conversations about sexuality and pornography. And there’s a difference between sexual imagery and pornography, although the two seem to be blending together more than moving apart. But unfortunately, even the magazines which started out with great intentions and a solid conceptual framework — like Harvard’s H-Bomb — have devolved into standard, uncreative and certainly not feminist stereotypes and ideas.
And then there are the college sex magazines which are entirely uncreative and intellectually lazy, and have been from the beginning — like Boink, the mag that, naturally, gets the most coverage in the article, and is apparently even popular with the Boston University Women’s Center:
What really stood out is that there were male students in it,” Heather Foley, 21, now president of B.U.W.C., which devoted a meeting to discussing the issue, said in a phone interview. “Because there were men in it, and gay men, under the same cover, it was sort of alternative. It kind of equalized it: gay men could look at it, women could look at it, and that was great. Women as objects, men as objects.”
Now we’re all objects! Isn’t equality grand?
On a laptop computer, Vandenberg, 20, showed a few of the pictures she is planning to publish in the next edition of H Bomb, which will be online only for financial reasons. “Quite tame,” she said. In one, female Harvard science majors peered earnestly at test tubes, wearing lab coats opened to expose black lacy bras and panties, as in the old Maidenform advertisements. It was intended, she said, as a comment on the brouhaha that ensued after Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s former president, publicly remarked that genetics might account for why women are still a minority in the sciences. “I really don’t think he said much wrong,” said Vandenberg, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology. “I’m not a feminist. Feminism has this premise that men and women are equal, and I have a more biological view of things. I don’t think men and women are equal at all. I think we’re different, and what’s wrong with that?”
Clearly, absolutely nothing. There is no problem with an assumption of inherent inequality that is biologically fixed. It’s not like biological justifications have been used to keep women out of Harvard or anything. I’d imagine that there’s nothing female scientists want more than to be told that (a) their brains just aren’t wired to be as smart as men, but being different is ok, and (b) men are more than happy to think of the black lacy bras they’re wearing under their lab coats rather than, say, their accomplishments in the lab.
Somewhere in there a few women also mention that they’re proud of their bodies because they don’t have saggy tits or extra weight on them. Astonishing progressivism, no?
I’m disappointed that the supposed best and brightest undergraduates can’t do any better than recycling tired stereotypes and tried-and-true porno standards in their magazines. I’m not surprised, but I still wish that they could do better.