The images below are from a slide show to accompany the cover of a British magazine, Bizarre. You can see the slide show and the article accompanying her cover here. Thanks to Jason S. for the link!

What makes Viktoria “bizarre”? Is it her amputated leg? Is it the fact that she has an amputated leg and is still incredibly sexy? Or is it that she has an amputated leg and still considers herself a sexual person?

Is this empowering? And to who? Surely the disabled are desexualized in this country, so it’s nice to see that challenged even, I suppose, in a magazine about weirdos. And yet, I suspect her sexuality is acceptable, fetishizable, only because she conforms to expectations of feminine beauty. In the big scheme of things, does she reproduce the standard of beauty, unattainable for most women, that crushes women’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth? And will disabled women, most of whom (like most non-disabled women) could never dream of being so beautiful, actually look at her and be able to identify? Or will this just draw attention to another way in which they don’t match up?

Also, are these images really about her sexual-ness, her desire? Or are they about how sexy she is, the extent to which she can inspire desire in others? That is, is she just an object like any other pin-up girl? How are her images any different than those in mainstream pornography and men’s magazines? She speaks in the article about her own sexual curiosity and openness, but this is standard porn star talk and it’s very difficult to know whether it is genuine or performance. Would it matter if we knew?

This photo shoot of Viktoria for Bizarre magazine actually seems incredibly ordinary to me.

UPDATE: Comments on this post have been closed.

Rap is fascinating in that, in the short history of the art form, it represents both the power of resistance by marginalized and disempowered groups and the power of appropriation by mainstream culture and capitalist commodification.  With this in mind, I bring your attention to the cover of Nas‘ new album cover (tentatively set to release on July 1st) (found here):

The image immediately brings to mind (I can only imagine deliberately) the famous photograph of the back of a whipped slave from 1863 (found here).  I’ll go ahead and put it after the jump, as it’s a very real and troubling historical photograph:

Considering rap’s contradictory past and present, how do you feel about this appropriation of this famous image for an album cover?  And does it matter that, as far as I can tell by the (admittedly totally non-representative) comments on Perez Hilton, very few people seem to notice the historical reference?

In case you hadn’t seen it already, this is the ad that is causing all the hullabaloo about Rachel Ray and Dunkin’ Donuts being in bed with Muslim terrorists (via lawgeek):

The incident might be useful in illustrating the social construction of social problems, moral panic, and racial politics after 911.

The trouble is… people will answer them.

Found here thanks to commenter Phili-Chan! From an Australian show featuring Charles Firth.

The “MANtage”:

The comedy troupe goes by “Barats and Bereta.” Enjoy their youtube site.

Thanks Kyle S.!

I really like these commercials and the way they, rather humorously and lightheartedly, play on what it feels like to be the object of stereotyping.

My favorite:

A montage:

It’s too bad the show didn’t take. They managed to use the plight of cavemen to illustrate the plight of all the different marginalized groups in our society, from Native Americans, to women, to gays and lesbians. I liked it, despite the bad writing and poor production quality.

The propaganda below, from World War II, was distributed by the U.S. government.  In the posters, venereal disease (later known as sexually transmitted disease, and even later as sexually transmitted infections) is personified as a woman. Remember, venereal disease is NOT a woman. It’s bacteria or virus that passes between women and men. Women do not give it to men. Women and men pass it to each other. When venereal disease is personified as a woman, it makes women the diseased, guilty party and men the vulnerable, innocent party.

In this ad, the soldier is made innocent with the label “The Young, The Brave, The Strong.” The first girl is labeled “prostitution.” She says to the soldier: “Two girls I know want to meet you in the worst way.” The two women on the stairs, with the faces of skeletons, are labelled “syphilis” and “gonnorhea.”

Text: “Warning: These enemies are still lurking around.” The women are labeled “syphillis” and “gonnorhea.”

This one is my favorite. A female skeleton in an evening gown walks with her arms around Hitler and Hirohito. The text reads: “V.D. Worst of the Three.”

Here are three more:

At least some of these can be found here. Thanks to the unbeatablekid pointing out a source in our comments.

NEW: Marc sent us a link to these images (all found here):

A matchbook:

A pamphlet distributed to soldiers:

Thanks, Marc!

It is a norm for women in the U.S. to shave their armpits, but this is not the norm elsewhere, even in countries that have relatively a lot in common with the U.S. (like France I’ve been corrected). How did armpit shaving become the norm in the U.S.? And who benefited from this?

Vee the Monsoon sent us the following commentary and ad. It turns out, women shave in the U.S. today, in part, because of a concerted marketing effort on the part of companies that stood to profit from the creation of such a norm with the creation of anxiety about “objectionable hair.”

From The Straight Dope:

…U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of… the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn’t know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair. To be sure, women had been concerned about the appearance of their hair since time immemorial, but (sensibly) only the stuff you could see. Prior to World War I this meant scalp and, for an unlucky few, facial hair. Around 1915, however, sleeveless dresses became popular, opening up a whole new field of female vulnerability for marketers to exploit…. the underarm campaign began in May, 1915, in Harper’s Bazaar, a magazine aimed at the upper crust. The first ad ‘featured a waist-up photograph of a young woman who appears to be dressed in a slip with a toga-like outfit covering one shoulder. Her arms are arched over her head revealing perfectly clear armpits. The first part of the ad read “Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable
hair.

From the May 1915 issue of Harper’s Bazaar:

Thanks Vee!

NEW!  Another example from the U.K., 1934 (found here).  This one encourages the dissolving of armpit hair as a way to fight armpit odor: