socialmedian: The Tab's sex object culture is mundane

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The Tab's sex object culture is mundane | Natalie Szarek

Source: The Guardian

Nov 04, 2009

Summary

Far more daring than the casual sexism of semi-nude photos in the Cambridge Tab is the fight against its normalisation

Last week's international headlines were stormed by so-called "sexy pics" of Cambridge University students. Somehow this was deemed to be newsworthy from the Hindustan Times to the Sun to Cosmopolitan, with the coverage focusing on the double-titillation of semi-nudity and scandal.

Every day we sludge through the banal sexism of billboards, lads' mags, internet ads, tabloids. Objectification of women as found in the Cambridge Tab is boring. It's more orthodox than it is scandalous, and it slips past the majority of the population without raising brows or tempers. Yet the sheer redundancy of sex object culture does not entail innocuousness: rather, it is the normalisation of sexism and the silencing of dissent that characterise modern sexism.

Sexism is a form of censorship that breeds silence; a silence that stifles the right of response, aligns the language of sexism with the status quo and masks the absence of women's voices. Cambridge's partic

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