When did risqué become objectification?

Here we go, once again the peace of a Saturday morning is shattered as I reach the opinion pages of the Saturday Age and start hissing and spitting like well fried bacon.

No, not Catherine Devney this time (I had a horrifying moment a few weeks back when a girlfriend sent me the article Cath wrote about the blatant venality of politicians who encourage gambling as a means of taxing the troubled and weak, I read through it, put down my Catherine Deveny voodoo doll and started yelling about how the article should be nailed to the forehead of every state premier in the country…then had to go pour myself a drink and take a minute to absorb the idea that I read a Deveny article and wholeheartedly agreed with it. Phwoar!! However… I digress…back to the beaver story).

Tracee (TracEEE for God’s sake??? Sister of Bylyndar and Symyon by any chance??) Hutchison wrote an opinion piece in last Saturday’s Age about “an ad that demeans women and men” in which she expressed disingenuous surprise that many women have euphemisms for their genitals and then launched into a bitter complaint about how a recent tampon ad (featuring a girl having a fun day out with her CGI beaver) was demeaning to both women and men. This, apparently, because the ad is predicated on the fact that all women are nothing but “vaginas on legs”.

I saw the ad the night it came out and had the same double take reaction that most people did, then, after the second viewing, I took a deep breath and roared with laughter. An independent poll (ie I asked all my girlfriends) says that 100% of women did the same thing.

Now my peaceful Saturday morning is ruined as I have to read about how TracEE is all shocked and offended by this ad reducing women to nothing but genitals with animal namesakes.

Sometimes I love the weekend papers, sometimes they make me want to pick the NW in hope of finding some real journalism.

And by they way, what is more demeaning to women? An ad making a tongue in cheek reference the fact that we have vaginas (and it’s not like it’s a secret, I’m fairly certain that most men know about this) or the assumption that women aren’t allowed to have a sense of humour about their bodies?

The girl in the ad was young and pretty and not dressed like a lap dancer. She looked happy, healthy and appeared to be enjoying a slightly naughty giggle at herself and was clearly expecting the rest of us to join in. Is that really all the feministas have left to complain about? Because if it is then I think we are all pretty much ok now.

When TracEE et al bleat about such trivialities don’t they realise how much they diminish the plight of those who really are suffering honest to god oppression? The migrant woman who speaks no English and is told she has to blow the boss or lose her job; the Thai teenagers sold into slavery and smuggled to Australia or America to work as prostitutes; even the so called “beer bitches” at the Grand Prix; these are actual incidences of oppression and objectification, well and truly worthy of outrage and a place in the opinion pages, but how can we ask anyone to take them seriously when they are so weakened by po-faced puritans waving placards saying don’t make jokes about vaginas??

Objectification is not defined by humourless squinty eyed wowsers covering their disapproval of risqué jokes with a thin veneer of censorious political correctness and it’s well past time we stopped thinking that women be are so special and precious that we need to be protected from a bit of gentle piss-taking.

As long as we are a part of the joke not the witless butt of it, then I say we should all wave our middle fingers at the dog’s bum mouth brigade and enjoy a big belly laugh wherever we can find it!

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