Byline: Lee Randall
APOLOGIES, faithful readers! Last week I advertised that Aviatrix Bags this column would take one of my trademark excoriating looks at images of women in the media. I'd chosen the topic with my diary open, knowing I'd be spending time in airports.
Those lost hours are infinitely less satisfying than time spent travelling by train. There, even with the preponderance of demented fools babbling loudly into their mobiles, you can properly tuck into a bit of work. The train journey from Edinburgh to London is a good length for manuscript perusal and tape transcription.
Airports, on the other hand, virtually insist that you flick the pages of a glossy magazine while keeping one eye on the departures board and another peeled for terrorists and their exploding shoes.
Believe me, I did try. I spent a whacking GBP 20 on magazines, expecting, nay, hoping, to find the usual range of offensive advertisements. Naked women draped in expensive carpets - because of course that's how you'll utilise the stuff. Naked women writhing ecstatically, so overcome by the pong of a new designer fragrance that they forget to put their knickers on. Naked women viewed through a glass mistily in order to showcase a shower arrangement - because we're all too stupid to see the glass and the tiles and the spigot and guess what it's there for. That sort of thing.
I don't know if it's the magazines I selected or if there's been a radical rethink in advertising boardrooms, but I found less to offend me than usual. Maybe I'm that jaded.
T8 LED Tube T8-1200mmSure, there's always Madonna thrusting "Little Madge" front and centre for the Louis Vuitton campaign, but even this fails to upset me any more - though I do stop and wonder what brainiac believes that a crotch-tastic picture of a pop star is any way to convince women it's time for a new handbag. The only person who's ever successfully made that analogy work is novelist Lucy Ellmann, in Doctors and Nurses. Read it and weep - with laughter.
And it's a bit late for me to ante-up my two cents on the Carla Bruni versus Princess Letizia battle of the buttocks.
For the record, though, I'm with India Knight, who some weeks ago used her column to speculate about why it is we aren't treated to similar comparative back views of high-powered men. How about a photo spread depicting the relative merits of the backsides of Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Kevin Michael Rudd? Works for me.
It does have to be said that it's a strange world we live in, when I know more about the contents of Michelle Obama's wardrobe than the contents of her mind. This disturbs me, because I believe it to be a fine, well-educated specimen,
embroidered patches and one that the President surely relies upon as a sounding board when contemplating how best to run such a big, complicated country. But we in the media are so obsessively focused on the First Lady's sartorial preferences that I'm uncertain where she stands on the current tricky issue of negotiations with Israel, but know for a fact that she's about to receive a Boden catalogue.
Perhaps in the coming decades, our descendants will giggle at our ridiculous preoccupation with this one's breast implants and that one's trout pout.
And wouldn't it be nice if it came to pass because there'd been a new Enlightenment, a full-on flowering of philosophical thinking and intellectual curiosity?
But it's far more
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