Newsweek Implies Blowjob, Blogs Fail to Care

You’ve got an issue overflowing with pieces about the 101 best eats around the world. How do you make the cover pop? A totally irrelevant image of a woman practically blowing an asparagus spear, that’s how! If Newsweek‘s editor Tina Brown hoped the image would inspire an avalanche of conversation online to drive meatspace sales, she didn’t take into account how pervasive this form of trolling has become. We’re so continuously pelted with images of women being sexualized for the sake of other concepts that we just can’t muster the righteous indignation any more.

Look, we’re not saying sexy images of women are wrong. We love sexy women. Some of us here are even sexy women ourselves. There is nothing wrong with sexy women or images of sexy women — when used in the appropriate context. You know, to celebrate sexual expression. The difference is subtle but key: when an image represents a woman owning her desire, then that is amazing. When an image depicts a woman with the intention of sexualizing her to sell a completely irrelevant thing, that is … huh? Oh, sorry, we fell asleep.

It’s lazy.

You can feel Dylan Byers at Politico rolling his eyes as he types, “Tina Brown’s shock-and-awe approach to Newsweek covers is so familiar now it hardly warrants mention.”

At the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri says, “They say not to judge a book by its cover. And perhaps, at the rate ebooks are spreading, that will soon be not only gauche but impossible. But magazines? How else can you judge them? And by that standard, I give this one a baffled F.”

Jezebel couldn’t really be bothered to comment on the politics, focusing instead on the prevalence of images of women eating asparagus in stock photo sites (Eater dug up a few for your viewing pleasure, if you care). “A prevailing characteristic of the asparagus-dangling image is that the women in these photos all sport heavy coats of freshly-applied lipstick, because nothing says, ‘Fulfill the least-delicious section of the food pyramid’ quite like putting on make-up,” Doug Barry writes.

Slate was a little less polite: “If you want to stir up controversy, at least be clever about it; don’t insult your readers by treating them like Pavlovian drones who can’t resist a sexy picture,” writes Katy Waldman. “Might Justice Scalia be persuaded to re-enact the asparagus pose with broccoli? I would pay $4.99 for that.”

“We’ve entered into a tired old routine whereby editors like Tina Brown publish crap like this knowing (or at least hoping) that we bloggers will need to meet post counts so we’ll try to muster some feelings about it … Maybe we should just stop responding,” concludes Jessica P. Ogilvie at The Gloss.

Seriously.

Anyway, if you’re into food and women owning their sexuality with food, you should check out our friend Aaliyah. She loves asparagus.

No, we did not get paid to make that recommendation. But we should!

Header image from Newsweek, which got it from some stock site.