(By the way, you’re supposed to click through the picture.)
We never expected the outcry that ensued after Monday’s post regarding, uh, a certain Photoshopped, country-singing, women’s magazine cover-subject. Maybe it’s because many of us have worked for women’s magazines, where the daily parade of malnourished Estonian fourteen-year-olds and full-color glossy page-proofs of airbrushed actresses sort of inured us to the bad business that is selling ‘femininity’. Sort of, that is, because if you’re the kind of woman who cares about other women — or, you know, we guess you could be a man caring about women, that’s allowed here — it’s hard to escape the fact that women, if you believe the media, are increasingly expected to look like female avatars. (Unless they are young girls, in which case, they are supposed to look like hookers).