andwhenithappens:

I’m having trouble articulating exactly why the three teasers on top of The Sunday Age’s masthead are troubling me. 

Like, Sunday Life is the ~women’s interest~ supplement, more or less. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but I don’t think it always does a great job. Great people write great things for it - like Clem Bastow - but I find the content repetitive and often sort of dull and limp. Antonia Kidman having six children is a pretty huge feat - like, six humans you have to look after in a variety of ways! - and I hope I never ever disparage a woman for ~being a mother~ because I would like three babies, please - but “On baby number six”? What a weird, banal, simplistic little phrase. Like she’s just rolling them out and it just happens by accident and has taken her by surprise while she holds a tray of cupcakes with a tea towel over her shoulder because she has time to ice things with six dependents. 

EDIT: OMG IT’S JUST AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE MELBOURNE FRINGE’S 30TH BIRTHDAY, I’M A MORON. 

And finally, the one I hate the very most. By naming Caitlin Moran “The funny feminist”, The Sunday Age subeditor, you are maintaining the ~humourless harpy feminist~ trope/stereotype, by asserting that she is somehow the only one. Forgetting, at the very least, the dozens of feminist women who exist in the mainstream media landscape, and even the funny, informative feminist women who write for Fairfax! Helen Razer, Clem Bastow, Clem Ford, Annabel Crabbe to name a couple off the top of my head without even thinking c’mon everyone let’s be better at this. 

When I read the paper yesterday morning I looked at those three pictures, wrinkled my brow and thought “What?” before turning my attention to the article about the Sydney riots in response to that stupid anti-Muslim video, in the hopes that The Age’s coverage would be a bit more balanced than the five page spread of violent images and hate in the Herald Scum that work had just forced me to look at (it was).

My point is that I’m glad andwhenithappens paid enough attention to articulate the basis of that initial discomfort.