Digital Culture Studies

They are called Couture Pops; bedazzled lollipop sticks, upon which you screw in a flavoured ball of candy. Pretty young women, who have found a way to create a dubious pastiche of a career out of showing up at events, are paid as promoters, dutifully carrying their candy to events and being photographed sucking on them while walking the red carpet.

I am not even sure where to start, unpacking that photo. Male gaze, sexual objectification of women,  sexualizing the accoutrements of children? Or maybe it is enough to state the obvious: we live in a culture where a young woman’s paid job can be giving a simulated blowjob to a piece of candy while walking the red carpet in order to be photograhed by the media.

“Morning commute” radio in Chicago is a piss-poor assortment that sounds something like this: all-male crew spewing misogyny, all-male crew spewing misogyny, and Eric and Kathy, a male-female crew, spewing (slightly less) misogyny than the rest of their cohort. Never heard them? Let me summarize. Every day, their conversation goes like this: Eric says something awful about women, or makes fun of gay people,  or comments on Kathy’s breasts, or calls their traffic reporter a spinster, or talks about how he is a caveman who doesn’t understand his wife’s need to use hair conditioner (essentially, he is completely ripping off Tim Allen’s entire ’80s stand-up routine), and then Kathy squeals. That’s it. Their whole schtick.

I don’t know why I listen, except I keep hoping that one day, Eric will grunt out one of his misogynist conversation openers, and then the air will go dead for a moment, and then Kathy will say, very quietly, “Eric, stop being such an asshole.” It never happens, and reading this interview gives a pretty good indicator why.

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This won’t be the final design, and there is a lot of behind the scenes stuff to be done on the server, including installing new dBase software, along with a few new tricks and goodies. But … after a year’s absence, the site is back. I still need to put together a header graphic, and tweak the css, to appease my inner font-snobbery, but at least it is a start.

The archives though, may be lost. They were backed up onto a drive that corrupted due to fire damage (its been an exciting year!), and may be unrecoverable, which is a shame, because they go back for years, and include such gems as my prediction that blogs were a passing fad.

Watch this space: the relaunch is January 2010. And thank you in advance for your patience as I muck around with the template, etc.