Zoo Weekly publishes most misogynistic article yet (probably)

And I’m back, just in time to ruin your day! (triggering stuff after cut)

Look, I ignored Zoo for a whole year and it didn’t go away, so I reserve the right to attack it in public without being told I’m actually a chump who’s been duped by them savvy editor-types into getting it more publicity. Therefore, for the betterment of the inevitable slew of anonymous morons who I don’t publish anyway, I would like to point out that increasing the circulation by one copy and then showing some scans to people who wouldn’t have bought it anyway doesn’t qualify as a coup, and I’d be concerned for all involved if it did. Not that concerned, obviously.

Are they actually trying to get publicity through this stuff, though…? If they are, it really isn’t working, since the only place I’ve ever read about Zoo Weekly causing any kind of furor is, um, Zoo Weekly. It’s not as if they’re shy about engaging their opponents, either; When Queensland Rail banned its employees from taking Zoo to work with them, the editor became incensed and - with no apparent irony -  said it was “The worst form of censorship” and compared the move to Nazi book burning (as it was part of a move to “create work environments that show respect for people”, I’m guessing Mein Kampf was banned as well, but never mind). But even if fails as a publicity exercise, material like this at least looks like it might offend people, which is ultimately more important.

It looks like it might offend people. The attraction comes from the simple act of crossing an imaginary line into taboo territory, and this is powerful enough to obscure that question of what the line is being crossed in the service of. In this case, as in most cases, the ideology behind it is so reactionary as to predate recorded history, and this is exactly what they want: It makes the audience feel special and radical without risking actually challenging them. Blood-death-heels-murder-sex-firearms-bitches, here we come.

Yes, “in the line of duty”, the implication being that they were willingly risking their lives to provide the boys back home with wank-fodder, rather than victims of sexualised violence. Doing so might also have raised the point that a great many non-model women are killed in exactly the same way, which might in turn have raised the point that Zoo doesn’t actually care about women at all.

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“Every year, dozens of catwalk cuties meet a grisly end at the hands of obsessed sickos”, and what better way to confront this than print some half-naked pictures of them covered in cartoon blood? And because real corpses tend not to be sexy, they’ve thoughtfully made up an anonymous model to look sort-of-dead and stuck her at the top of the page. To help turn on the readers. With a corpse. And photographs of dead women. To anybody who thinks otherwise, I present Page 2:

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Ayup, more dead hotties that-a-way.

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“Dixie admitted to having sex with Sally Anne as she lay dead. But he denied being her killer, claiming instead that he had ‘taken advantage of the situation’ after stumbling across her bloodied corpse”. I’m not saying they’re deliberately playing up the necrophilia angle, but… well, they did deliberately make up a model to look like a sexy corpse on page one.

When turning murder into wank material ceases to be edgy, the next step is, of course, suicide.

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“Her face, which once graced the cover of French Elle and Russian Vogue, sadly graced the pavement”. Har.

To summarise: Models get raped and murdered by their partners and obsessed stalkers. This is not an occupational hazard, it’s the fault of men who feel entitled to their bodies. We’re therefore going to reaffirm your entitlement by printing semi-nude pictures of them, then talk about their deaths in lurid detail. They also kill themselves sometimes, what a waste of boobs! We’ll ignore the epidemic of violence faced by non-model women, because they don’t meet our masturbatory aide standard. Anybody who has any problem with this is just being PC.

Cheers, Zoo. You’re something special.