Saturday, July 17, 2010
Montreal’s Beef with Pamela Anderson
Sometimes the difference between sexy and sexist is all in the labeling.
It’s not like Montreal, the internationally renowned city of strippers and all things naughty, is a stranger to the female form. It’s not like the world in general is a stranger to Pamela Anderson’s form. But labeling the individual parts of that form — that’s where Montreal draws the line.
So when Pamela Anderson — whose new ad for Peta features her posing like a mudflap girl but with her body marked and labeled like a butcher’s diagram — sought to launch the campaign in a public square in front of Montreal’s city hall, her petition was rejected not for being too sexy, but too sexist.
“It is not so much controversial,” the municipal film and television office in charge of permits wrote, ”as it goes against all principles public organisations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women.”
Sexy
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Sexist
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Pam’s counter-critique focused on the city’s hypocrisy: “In a city that is known for its exotic dancing and for being progressive and edgy, how sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest.”
A valid point, but for my money, I would have focused on the city’s reading comprehension and cultural literacy:
- The ad obviously presupposes that reducing Pam to cuts of meat is sexist and wrong; its conclusion that reducing animals to cuts of meat is similarly wrong depends on that supposition. The ad can’t be accused of being sexist for depicting sexism any more than Schindler’s List can be accused of being pro-Nazi for depicting Nazis.
- The ad’s visual strategy — the woman-as-meat motif — is essentially a variation of the famous Hustler magazine cover from 1978. And while the image was considered abominable by many feminists, enough people finally read the accompanying text that the cover eventually lost its shock value. The municipal authorities of Montreal seem to have missed that the Peta ad is a re-edit of an image already parsed and pardoned over thirty years ago.
Not that there’s any real setback here, mind you — Pam’s campaign launch was simply re-scheduled to coincide with another event, where Pam will be promoting her hosting of the Just for Laughs comedy festival.
Which brings up the real mystery of this story: Why the hell is Pam Anderson hosting a comedy show? (Seriously, how much comedy cred could she have racked up from V.I.P. and Stacked?)
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