I don't usually pay much mind to the more mainstreamed feminist bloggers...

I've come up against a few of them over the course of my blogging career and have often found them to be fairly conservative in regards to feminist issues, much too liberal for my liking, much too interested in upholding fairly traditional values for me to even want to position alongside most of them as ally.

That being said, an article in feministing came to my attention via a face friend on facebook and I just wanted to say a couple of words...

It's about the article in feministing on time's "courageous" cover. I just had to comment.

I wouldn't call Time's use of that pic courageous. Maybe it was courageous for that woman to allow it...if she even had a choice.
Did...she...have...a choice?
sigh...and what would having a choice mean given the racist, imperialist, classist power relations between her, her country and Time's executives, the photographer and amerikkka?

What is consent in the face of the disgusting levels of poverty that woman probably lives with? Maybe they offered her money but most likely not enough to be able to afford to get on a plane and pay doctors to have her nose reconstructed and...feed and cloth her family.

What does consent look like with the above mentioned power relations that are at work?

Adequately contextualized what is presented to us as "consent" ends up looking a whole lot more like coercion.

From where I'm standing Time, as a corporate media outlet, running the pic would more be considered sensationalist, masturbatory, attention grabbing. Definitely fiscally savvy.

I think that showing proxy evidence of a whole country's physical, economic, geographical, psychological mutilation...of its complete subjugation is very different than showing evidence of its defiance in the face of crushing adversity.

Now a pic of an Afghan woman not constructed as passive victim, not viewed as recipient of the combined force of male, white, imperialist, classist, corporate domination, not needing to be "liberated"...
but instead
liberating herself, her sisters, her people and her nation, holding a fist or the uber threatening phallic stand-in - the gun - aloft
her eyes holding the viewers' with disdain and rebellion
complicating the picture most westerners and western feminists have of Afghan wimmin that allows so many of us to understand the invasion of their lands not as a collective mutilation, a rape, or as a violation on a massive scale
not as a self serving operation that has nothing to do with liberating afghan wimmin whatsoever
but instead as a greed-based, power hungry war conveniently sold as a "humanitarian" operation to magazine, newspaper readers and television viewers of "news" and current affairs around the world,
would have been courageous, most likely infuriating and terrifying for Time's amerikkkan readers.

That I would have loved to have seen...