Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Hot Chicks (manipulate the oppresive constraints of gender)

I love hot women as much as the next person, but what is up with this Chickipedia website?!

According to its About page, this website is "the first female-only encyclopedia of the people, by the people, and for the people," whatever the heck that means. While I think it's great to have a space to celebrate women's achievements and have no problem admiring their hotness at the same time, this is somehow not what I had in mind.

Let's start with the focus on women's measurements, which they've got right there on top, along with an outline of what those measurements roughly look like. It's also what comes up when you search for somebody... which I find rather strange because I don't see how knowing measurements will help you find who you're looking for, but whatever. It's also owned by Break Media which is apparently "the Internet’s premier entertainment community for men." Um-kay.


Then we move to the gray area... The list of assets includes the standard perky breasts, long legs, nice ass. But it also includes some really awesome stuff like "black belt in Tae Kwan Do" (apparently, Evan Rachel Wood kicks ass) and "ability to manipulate the oppressive constraints of gender" (Hilary Swank kicks ass in a completely different way).

Also, the information on the pages I checked out actually seem to not be gross or terribly degrading! I expected to find disgusting sexual innuendos or more vulgarity and grossness, but it seems to actually just have normal information. They have bio info, lists of what the women have been in and who they've worked with, and even give props where it's due.

They also include women who I suppose would not conventionally make hot lists, like Jeanne Tripplehorn, Amy Holmes and Rachel Maddow. (Ok, anybody who wouldn't put Rachel Maddow on their "hot" list is freaking crazy, but I think you know what I'm trying to say here.)

Maybe these unexpected pluses (if one can call them that) is what confused the crap out of me. If it'd been as sleazy as I expected, I would've just kept it moving like I usually do when I find sites like these. But these people seem confused about what exactly they're going for here...

I realize I shouldn't have expected much, but I'd never heard of this site and was intrigued. But I guess I can go ahead and file this under "what else is new?"

(Cross-posted at Jump off the Bridge.)

3 comments:

habladora said...

Hummm... I don't like that they include measurements. Odd that a site like this celebrates breaking out of gender norms. What do you think, a step forward or an appropriation of feminist language on an anti-feminist site?

sally said...

Even reflecting on it today, I'm still not sure what to make of this site. It is a user-generated site, so perhaps some rad feminists are trying to take it over. That's my hope, anyway.

Brianna J said...

It's supposed to be an anti-feministish site. According to the whois db, it's owned by break.com. It does look like it has a number of rad-feminist and lesbian contributers, though!