Saturday, September 08, 2012

Can one review Naomi Wolf's Vagina without a graphic?

When Vagina is right in the title of the book, very, very difficult to dodge that, eh!

The Economist has this:



The New York Review of Books has this in its home page, and then has a more arty full-nudity in the inner pages.



The Guardian shows that the book can, indeed, be reviewed without using any such props, and the graphics there are photos of Wolf.



Sure, the images that the Economist and the NYRB have used are arty and wonderful, but were they really needed?

In reviewing Jesse Bering's book, Why is the penis shaped like that?, will these magazines then include graphics of the penis?  (Click here for the post I did after reading the article in the Scientific American.) Or, perhaps not using any arty male nudity will be a reflection of that old and tested idea that both men and women find the nude female body to be beautiful to look at, whereas very few among both the genders find the nude male body truly an arresting view!

The Guardian's approach to review is more, for want of a better word, straightforward, while both the Economist and the NYRB want to draw the reader in by resorting to a Fox News-like sensationalism.

The NYRB opens with:
Lady, love your cunt.
The Economist's review begins thus:
FOR Shakespeare it was a “detested, dark, blood-drinking pit”; to Henry Miller, “that bushy twat”. That special place between a woman’s legs has been a “Heavenly Gate” to Chinese Taoists,
Contrast those with the opening sentences in the Guardian piece:
Naomi Wolf has been one of the world's most famous feminists for more than 20 years and she herself admits it is a very odd job. When she wrote The Beauty Myth in 1991, she was 27 years old, enrolled on a PhD course and not intending to make her career in the field of feminist criticism
Oh well.  It is not that I am going to read this book anyway; never been a fan of Wolf's work.  But, I suspect that the Economist and NYRB are intentionally using those images to minimize her book--subliminal slighting!

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