Last Word

Keeping abreast of the news media
The bimbo count on the front pages of our newspapers and magazines keeps climbing

By Barbara Freeman  

What are all those photos of breasts doing back in our newspapers and magazines? They seem to be hanging out everywhere.

In a recent photo in The Ottawa Citizen, flower petals barely concealed the mammary and other charms of a lovely model who was going to be Queen of some flower and fashion mega-exhibit in Ottawa. Queen of a flower and fashion show? How 1950s! How 1950s Playboy!

Then there was the Citizen's front-page picture of half-naked women in fur bikinis on International Women's Day, coupled with a patronizing editorial that proclaimed that Canadian women have won most of their equality rights — except the right to be considered serious news consumers.

Obviously, breasts in the news have something to do with marketing newspapers and magazines to men, not women.

Obviously, breasts in the news have something to do with marketing newspapers and magazines to men, not women. A Citizen editor told one of my students as much a couple of years back when she went to interview him about her research findings for an essay she was doing for class. Through painstaking quantitative analysis, she had discovered that the "bimbo" count in that newspaper's photos had increased 20 per cent during the first year since the Hollinger takeover of Southam's Citizen. These photos were mostly imports of Hollywood stars and the like. Photos of local female worthies, fully clothed, had correspondingly decreased over the same period.

When I hear the argument that these photos really sell newspapers, I have visions not unlike the earliest cartoons in Playboy. I see befuddled male readers picking up their Citizens from the front-door mat, becoming glued, bug-eyed to the latest generous breast, only to trip over the cat and do themselves serious injury on the way to the kitchen, the coffee and The Little Wife. Or I see the readers smacking into each other, briefcases and dignity flying, every time they passed a newsstand, distracted and derailed by the latest busty cutie on the front cover of — well, Maclean's, for example.

In early March, the Maclean's cover flashed a young woman working at home in the buff, flirtatiously leaning out from behind her laptop, exposing the better part of her left breast, not to speak of her real moonlighting intentions. I read the article inside, which was all about balancing work life and home life, but did not mention anyone doing anything while naked.

I ponder the possibility that the Peter Pans in the media marketing world are somehow projecting their own gasping teenage fantasies onto their more sexually sophisticated male readers. Or perhaps this is just their way of boyishly and defiantly giving the finger to the feminist girlfriends who dumped them (and there must have been at least one of those). More seriously, I can't help but wonder how equitably they really treat the women who work beside them as colleagues — and particularly how they regard the young women they hire out of journalism school.

It's enough to give a feminist like me flashbacks, and I've been having a lot of those lately. I've just finished writing a book about the media coverage of women's issues in the late 1960s, a time when most women depicted in Canada's newspapers and magazines were almost invariably under 35 and gorgeous, and women journalists had to work like the devil to be taken seriously. During that same era, we women were barred from becoming members of the National Press Club in Ottawa simply because we were females and therefore not "real" reporters. We were, of course, welcomed as "hot dates" in the same club any night of the week. Was there a connection between the curt male dismissal of our journalistic abilities and their patronizing and sometimes overbearing enthusiasm for our youthful charms? Yes.

Discrimination against women who work in the media may never be that blatant again. But sexism, especially under the guise of sexual liberation/affirmation, is nothing new to us swinging graduates of the 1960s and 1970s. That today's female editors and writers are sometimes complicit in producing overtly sexist content for the express purpose of selling the news does not justify it, but raises questions about their own secret vulnerabilities in a conservative and male dominated news hierarchy.

Now, how's that for a feminist line? How often have we seen such sentiments expressed freely in our press since, well, the spring of 1996? That's when Hollinger v.p. Barbara Amiel walked into the CAJ's Women in the Media conference in Ottawa saying she has never been much concerned with gender as an issue in journalism.

The Peter Pans of the news media have known all along, of course, that gender does matter. Or, at least, that breasts do.

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Barbara M. Freeman is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, and the author of The Satellite Sex: The Media and Women's Issues in English-Canada, 1966-1971, forthcoming this spring from Wilfrid Laurier University Press.