Oct 11 2008
Palin Newsweek Cover: Part 1 of 2–VP half-cocked?
Below is a recent cover of Newsweek featuring Sarah Palin. As one blogger commented: “Wow. Kind of sexy, and just kind of weird at the same time.” I think it could, at best, be considered a questionable choice. What, I wonder, is the point being made by showing Palin with a shotgun over her shoulder? It is a file photo from 2002, robbed of its original context as a hunting snapshot. My take on it is that it hopes to gain gratuitous attention by combining Palin as a topical personality with a strange deep seated sex-fear weirdness embedded in our culture and apparent in other ‘chicks with guns’ photographs.
Take, for example, two more pictures from my Irving Klaw pinup collection. Is this what flits through the mind in finding a rather ordinary, fully dressed picture of a hunter with a gun ”sexy”? Here we have a girl was no pockets but a big pistol–who certainly seems happy to see you. And another with a nice rifle and a serious lack of buttons (poor girl). Neither is terribly explicit and the gun is clearly there for a fetishistic reason that only a Freudian could truly appreciate.
Not that I think the essential element is any kind of penis envy, at least not directly. I think the interesting element is a tension between ‘feminine’ helplessness and the sheer lethality of firepower. The message, as with the movie still below, is pure noir. It is this woman is dangerous, maybe even fem-fatal [sic].
And that, ultimately, may be what the Newsweek cover was saying. And although, Lord knows, I am no Palin supporter I think there is a strand of misogyny mixed in here. If Cheney actually shooting someone is widely seen as just funny, why is Palin just holding a gun so provocative? Sometimes a gun is, after all, just a gun.
I know exactly what to think of Sarah Palin. But out of respect to the readers, I won’t elaborate that here.
Cheers,
www.therelevantrhino.today.com
Very interesting!
I think Palin herself has been actively creating her image of the moose-hunting (hockey mom) in red high heels, long before Newsweek came along.
I actually thought it was a powerful combination, when she first burst onto the scene. The guns to signify mastery of a male domain, the heels to make the guns sexy, not emasculating, and the hockey momism to tone it down enough to make it all safe.
Too bad she turned out to be so ignorant and mean.
I just stumbled on your blog from a post in the foum. I’ll have to remember to look at it more often!
– Eeek from AW
Hi Eeek. I didn’t know you had a today blog!
You know, I sometimes forget that Shelley Winters was considered a sex symbol at one time. And damn, she looks fine in that photo. A black-dressed dame with six shooter and a walk I could feel in my left pocket.
Sorry. Dozed off into pulp detective land.