Friday 4 December 2009

Mail columnist complains about cynically exploiting girls' bodies for commercial gains

A few days ago, the Daily Quail wrote a Super sexy misogyny special which looked at several recent news-free articles from the Mail which were published mainly to get lots of celebrity flesh on the website.

Missing from the list was the Serena Williams 'swimsuit malfunction' article, which went so far as to show the actual moment the tennis player's nipple was exposed. All in the name of quality journalism, as Mail Online Editor Martin 'news is far more important to us than showbiz' Clarke would undoubtedly claim.

The infamous Daily Mail Reporter tried to link the Williams picture to the £50,000 fine handed out for her outburst at the US Open, in a desperate attempt to give it a news angle. But as they had already covered that story, they were fooling no-one.

Still, the Mail's been a bit undecided about what to do with nipples this week (although a few weeks ago they were gutted they didn't see one). It happily showed Serena's but in Bel Mooney's article about the sexual revolution, a stock photo of naked hippies was censored. Well, sort of - the picture on the article contained pixellated nipples, apparently to spare us this dreadful, corrupting image:


Yet on the Mail's homepage, the trail for the article contained no such censorship:

And if you search for the article, it's not censored on the results page either.

Mooney's article was very strange and more than a little hypocritical. She criticises Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes for being bad role models for letting Suri wear heels, but doesn't criticise media outlets such as the Mail who disseminate dozens of pictures of her in heels and say she is 'growing up fast'.

She talks - in the Mail - of:

girls feeling abused and full of hate for their bodies - the very bodies so cynically exploited for commercial gains throughout a sexualised media.

Something the Mail would never, ever do, of course.

They wouldn't use four pictures of 19-year old Taylor Swift in her bikini and call her 'slender' and a 'bikini babe', would they? They wouldn't write in bold near the top of the article that you can scroll down to watch a video of her in said bikini?

And then, deciding Swift is perhaps too old, surely they wouldn't dream of printing five pictures of the 17-year old Miley Cyrus looking 'pretty' as she 'paraded around' in a 'skimpy neon pink two-piece'?

That wouldn't be cynically exploiting girls' bodies for commercial gains, would it?

Incidentally, that Miley Cyrus article was written by a Georgina Littlejohn, who has been busily churning out 15 articles for the Mail website in the last four day, all in the worthless celebrity gossip genre.

It appears that Georgina is indeed Richard's daughter.

Who said 'nepotism' at the back? The Mail has taken a stand against nepotism and people 'giving plum jobs to their friends' children' on many occasions, so obviously she got the job solely on merit. Obviously...

Going on the evidence so far, she's not much better at being a journalist than her father.

1 comment:

  1. Hur hur bewbs are way cool innit nice picz lolz etc.

    P.S. I especially like the Mail's embedded videos, most of which have embedding disabled by request of the publisher (see Taylor Swift article). Mail, you fail hard at the internets.

    ReplyDelete

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