Oh, Entertainment News: How You Do So Love the Misogyny!

Under the subject line "Why do I read the daily mail?‏" Shaker InfamousQBert emails (which I am publishing with her permission):

the brilliant irony of this set of stories, all being listed under the "Femail" section is just amazing, and, i'm sure, lost on the editors of the paper.

• kirstie alley continues the yo-yo

• Susan Boyle, younger, slimmer, and less hairy

• Liz Hurley, skinnier than she used to be

AND, for the grand finale:

• 7 year old obsessed with weight

Meanwhile, I just saw the headline and sub-head: "Nicole Kidman attacks Tom Cruise: Nicole Kidman has launched a strange and rather bitter attack against ex-husband Tom Cruise, accusing him of wanting her to be 'seen and not heard'," a story based entirely on this (emphasis original):

"I felt I became a star only by association," she complained to Easy Living magazine. "We would go to the Oscars and I would think, 'I'm here to support him.' I felt it was my job to put on a beautiful dress and be seen and not heard."

First of all, interesting that's categorized as a "complaint," as opposed to, say, an "observation." Secondly, is that really an attack on her ex-husband (no less a "strange and rather bitter attack"), or is it a legitimate commentary on how she was treated by a demonstrably sexist industry? Tom Cruise was already a huge star when he and Kidman got married, and the press treated her like the newest accessory he'd acquired, i.e. not there in her own right but there "to support him…[to] be seen and not heard." (Recall Hugh Jackman talking about how his "less famous (in America)" wife Deborra-Lee Furness is "literally … knocked out of the way" by people trying to get to him.)

Gee, maybe the reason the "attack" seems so strange is because it wasn't an "attack" at all, but a perfectly valid observation about a cultural impulse to treat women as their husband's props.

Note the irony that framing Kidman's feminist observation as a "strange, bitter, complaining" attack on her ex-husband is, in effect, an anti-feminist attack on her.

lolsob