GLEEd Again

Wow... I'm actually amazed at the level of defense the GLEE shoot is getting from people who are the usually the first moral warriors into any race or gender FAIL that crops up. And the sheer level of strawmen arguments, delivered in haughty tones of scorn, almost runs into the realm of parody. The funniest thing is that the excuses offered in many cases to justify the decisions of the shoot are almost direct mirrors of the arguments they normally attack.

Yes, we know the women are all in the twenties. We know it's a men's magazine designed to appeal to horny guys. We are well aware that they may have been nude in other productions in their career. We know they have the right to decide how they wish to be seen and photographed, and even though I am a right wing sexual prude, according to teh_tigerlex@xxxxx.com*, I have no problem with the school girl fetishization in the general sense.

All of these things have nothing to do with the fact that it's in poor taste to uber-sexualize yourself as the underage character you play on television in a show that trades on the idea that one of the core messages is about the empowerment of all teenagers. The shoot is designed to link the images of the actress in her hot pink heels, legs spread and white underwear over a thrust out crotch showing with, well, whatever her fictional character does on the show as a sixteen or seventeen year old student. The message is 'her high school character is totally hot and fuckable'.

It's not all that hard. Trading hard on the school girl fantasy with characters in a show about school girls is in poor taste. Next time, just shoot them wearing nothing but chocolate sauce so all the people defending this shoot can go back to arguing about it being offensive by objectifying women and I can enjoy it in my proper role as a degenerate.

*actual email received, just with the return addy blanked out. I kept the name in, though, because I kind of knew what it was going to say before I even opened it thanks to that handle.