A Scottish women’s charity said Carpenter’s new album cover evokes “tired tropes” of women being “possessions,” while fans have defended her cover as satirical commentary on sexism.
what I find lame about this “satire”, as someone who has jokes, is that it is obviously banking heavy on the controversy and titillation of the audience that enjoys overt misogynistic expression anyway. it’s lazily doing the thing while claiming it is against the thing. that’s not clever. might as well blast the N-word to get everyone’s immediate attention and then expect them to recognize the subtext of one’s far-less-obvious body of work in anti-racism and begin applauding.
good satire makes the thing it satirized unpalatable to the people it lampoons with shame. it scorns them such that they would not want it shared or seen.
good satire makes the thing it satirized unpalatable to the people it lampoons with shame
that’s a very good point, but then I think it begs the question: shameful to whom?
I say that because I think Starship Troopers (the discourse, I know) for example is great satire, but a fascist wouldn’t be ashamed of liking it unironically among other fascists who also don’t get that they’re being made fun of
in the case of this album cover, is it successful satire if horny guys who sexualize women look at it and share it with other horny guys who do the same thing? she’s an attractive woman in a very sexual scenario, so it would absolutely be very palatable to this audience
I’m not really arguing any points, just thinking out loud here because I think that’s legit an interesting debate and I don’t really have a solid take on it
I think it’s hard to find satire in commercial products, because it needs to be sold to make back it’s investment… so it veers into parody and entertainment, because those are more pleasant to experience.
I respect verhoeven’s politics, and I have no doubt he set out to make a movie that would revolt anyone with a critical eye. even as a dumbass teenager I felt upset by Starship Troopers’ for reasons I couldn’t articulate. and, at the time, I felt like I must be weird, because while it revolted me but made my chuddy friends very excited and happy. so, unfortunately for art, but fortunately for the studios, the cinema-attending masses are incurious and uncritical in the US. that’s the needle verhoeven threaded, erring on the side of careerism. no shade, we all gotta eat.
I think good satire, as I define it, is something fringe and often dismissed as preachy or too “dark” for the general public… because the public perhaps has limited interest in transgressive art/expression except in times of crisis.
maybe something that complicates our experience is that so much of the creative expressions we are invited to engage in the US are explicitly commercial, rather than actual public art.
so when we comb the landscape of our culture, looking for something authentic and truly revealing of our social problems, we are only ever searching through the garbage can of ideology. we think of entertainment products by default, instead of preachy street graffiti or other cracks in the facade where subversive thoughts make their home.
good satire makes the thing it satirized unpalatable to the people it lampoons with shame. it scorns them such that they would not want it shared or seen.
what I find lame about this “satire”, as someone who has jokes, is that it is obviously banking heavy on the controversy and titillation of the audience that enjoys overt misogynistic expression anyway. it’s lazily doing the thing while claiming it is against the thing. that’s not clever. might as well blast the N-word to get everyone’s immediate attention and then expect them to recognize the subtext of one’s far-less-obvious body of work in anti-racism and begin applauding.
good satire makes the thing it satirized unpalatable to the people it lampoons with shame. it scorns them such that they would not want it shared or seen.
that’s a very good point, but then I think it begs the question: shameful to whom?
I say that because I think Starship Troopers (the discourse, I know) for example is great satire, but a fascist wouldn’t be ashamed of liking it unironically among other fascists who also don’t get that they’re being made fun of
in the case of this album cover, is it successful satire if horny guys who sexualize women look at it and share it with other horny guys who do the same thing? she’s an attractive woman in a very sexual scenario, so it would absolutely be very palatable to this audience
I’m not really arguing any points, just thinking out loud here because I think that’s legit an interesting debate and I don’t really have a solid take on it
I think it’s hard to find satire in commercial products, because it needs to be sold to make back it’s investment… so it veers into parody and entertainment, because those are more pleasant to experience.
I respect verhoeven’s politics, and I have no doubt he set out to make a movie that would revolt anyone with a critical eye. even as a dumbass teenager I felt upset by Starship Troopers’ for reasons I couldn’t articulate. and, at the time, I felt like I must be weird, because while it revolted me but made my chuddy friends very excited and happy. so, unfortunately for art, but fortunately for the studios, the cinema-attending masses are incurious and uncritical in the US. that’s the needle verhoeven threaded, erring on the side of careerism. no shade, we all gotta eat.
I think good satire, as I define it, is something fringe and often dismissed as preachy or too “dark” for the general public… because the public perhaps has limited interest in transgressive art/expression except in times of crisis.
maybe something that complicates our experience is that so much of the creative expressions we are invited to engage in the US are explicitly commercial, rather than actual public art.
so when we comb the landscape of our culture, looking for something authentic and truly revealing of our social problems, we are only ever searching through the garbage can of ideology. we think of entertainment products by default, instead of preachy street graffiti or other cracks in the facade where subversive thoughts make their home.
I have never seen good satire.
Shrek?
See, I haven’t seen that since I was a kid and have no clue what it is supposed to be satirizing.
It was a prank bro