Rhode Frog: The Naked and the Dead: SheHulk and the Pin-Up

The female body is no longer real. At least we're starting to recognize that.

Latoya Peterson is fed up with the female image in comic books. The recent death of SheHulk - not the fact of her death but the image - has pushed her over the edge:

…looking at the image, all I can see are two distinct visual roles for women in comics: one is a sexy red girl, the other is a sexy dead girl. That's why the Hulk looks huge, muscular and mean, while She-Hulk looks like a centerfold. And I still can't figure out why most other superheroes get to have a death scenes that showcase their dignity and the somberness of their death but the most prominent feature in the panel above are the women's chests.

Peggy Wilkins is also disappointed. This heterosexual Chicago woman had to rent another apartment to house her Playboy collection. She still subscribes, but she longs for the days of good old fashioned, unapologetic, unairbrushed pin-ups:

Her beloved centerfold, photographed on large-format film for decades, has changed to medium format and then digital photography over the past decade. Wilkins seethes when she looks at the first digital centerfold (March 2006, Monica Leigh). "Look at this!" she cries. "It's grainy. Her skin tone is all off. It's just a technically bad picture."

What I find most ironic about that article - the cheeky pink photo at the top of the page includes in the credits, alongside who took the photo and who did the hair and make-up, "Retouching: Jamie Bayer."

To be continued...

(I've chosen not to use photos for this post not for puritanical reasons, but because I can't, and probably won't, find anything food enough to satisfy my particular, perfectionist nature.
Also, if this is the classic case where you could less about the article and just want the pictures, go to What Cheer Antiques on Angell St. in Providence. The first time I visited, the owner had just aquired an impressive collection of vintage Playboys from an estate sale. I thought that was awesome).

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

The Naked and the Dead: SheHulk and the Pin-Up

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