Top Irish chef, Neven Maguire, of MacNean's eaterie, stepped up to the plate yesterday to launch the 2009 Food and Wine Magazine Edward Dillion Restaurant of the Year Awards but the tasty treat that really got mouth's watering at the event was dishy model Georgia Salpa
Quoted in Liveline regarding the discussion of the PR decision to photo Neven Maguire with Georgia Salpa in a bikini. Apologies but I can't find the actual photo online.
Joe mentioned the normality of half-naked women used to promote events and I fired off an email,
It's not normal to have half naked women on the front of the paper.
Women are commodified in the media as sex objects and this is linked to anorexia, self harm, sexism, rape and rape apologists.
It's not ironic. It's despicable.
and ended up on the radio. I took umbrage at the blatant objectification of the model and tried to link it to the society at large. She is there as an object, without agency, to look pretty in a bikini. Why a bikini? Is it the sunny summer that we are not having?
I spoke about the male gaze, objectification and the patriarchy without using either of those terms as explanation time was limited. Not sure how I came across but a couple of callers dismissed the whole discussion as petty or said that the people who objected were just jealous of the model. I hate the "you're just jealous" meme. It's a straw argument used to derail and silence. It's classic derailing for dummies!
There were suggestions that one of the unreleased pictures was of one of the chef's eating food off the model's body. If so, they literally treated her as an object - a table. How utterly demeaning and sexist. It put me in mind of this post from Sociological Images.
It was a big pile of sexist privileged fail and it was jarring to go from feminist blogdonia to Irish radio. The podcast does not contain the whole discussion but it gives a good enough idea.
Positive Options is a brand created to promote State-funded crisis pregnancy counselling services and to provide information. But in Ireland, this apparently means positing women as objects rather than adult humans with full agency.
To me, it says "shame on you, you mindless puppet, for not knowing that there are partisan anti-abortion agencies trying to counsel you". How is a poster like that of any use with the woman-as-object, woman-without-agency, woman-as-child imagery? I'm going to write to them to ask why they are using such ads to promote their service?
