cliterature

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.