Some interesting stuff I’ve been looking at lately….

“Lad mags would be moved to the top shelf if they featured men in similar poses” claim the creators of http://ladsmags.blogspot.com/, who set out to prove their point in a rather hilarious way by mocking up spoof versions of Nuts and Zoo with the genders reversed. It’s not viewing for the faint hearted, it must be said - which kind of proves the point, really doesn’t it? Unfortunately its depressing that so many of the people commenting seem to miss the point of the exercise.

I’ve often thought it would be fascinating if you could reverse the genders in the media and the imagery we see every day and wished someone could do a project on this, because the bizarre nature of how men and women are differently represented would become immediately obvious. The fact that these mock up covers do look so ridiculous simply serves to highlight the fact that we have become so accustomed to women being shown in increasingly bizarre, exploitative ways.

For those who are interested in more anti-Lad Mag / anti-porn acitvism, CharlieGrrl’s blog is a really interesting read, regularly investigating and reporting on the often repulsive nature of the mags http://charliegrrl.blogspot.com/, capturing the day to day reality of the attitudes the mags are perpetrating.

To even up the score somewhat, I didn’t know until recently that Feminists Against Censorship have their own blog, a fact I actually discovered by reading comments on some radical feminist blogs. It’s pretty quiet at the minute, but might be worth keeping an eye on for their take on the whole porn / raunch culture debate.

Finally, whilst browsing Flickr (a photo sharing website) I stumbled across a photoset by MissMollie, which includes two brilliant projects looking at advertising, women, and race. In the first, Body Language, she takes a real advert and then re-creates it, taking the opportunity to make comments about advertising and its portrayal of women. In the second, “We Might As Well Be Made of Plastic”, she looks at how women in advertising are portrayed as objects. Absolutely fantastic. Go see - it’ll make your day.

Posted by Catherine Redfern on 19 September 2006, at 9:20 PM