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May 17, 2008

The sexiest woman (barely) alive

Stephen Marche in the Toronto Star:

Screenhunter_01_may_17_1821For Him Magazine, and the other lad mags like Maxim and Umm, occupy a strange, liminal place in the territory of contemporary male desire. They exist to allow men to look at women's bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they're all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn't pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They're all white. They all have long hair and they're almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 12:22 PM | Permalink

Comments

And how about the women themselves?

As I once remarked: "Pornography and eating disorders have a lot in common"

Killing us softly redux...

Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | May 17, 2008 3:12:38 PM

At least photo-retouching requires little of the models themselves. I suppose one could almost support the phenomenon, if at the end of it, anyone could be a full-page photo spread, rendered "perfect" and as unlike your actual appearance as humanly (technologically?) possible.

Posted by: reader | May 19, 2008 5:42:10 PM

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