The Weekly Whims Of HatManJim: For Those Who Prefer Their Women To Be A Little Bit Two-Dimensional

A weather-beaten eye cast over the media: HatManJim looks at a story in the headlines and as a feminist with a penis (Menimist? Femi-meni-mist? I just believe i n women’s rights, I’m not having gender-reassignment. OK?), attempts to map the sexism inherent in the press, without inadvertently saying anything lecherous about breasts.

It’s the typical Hollywood Babylon story. Young girl comes to Tinseltown, has a hit movie, gets used to the limelight and then… Finds there’s nowhere else to go. So, what does she do? Ends up a few years down the line playing an “adult” version of her one-hit wonder character in some sleazy Australian beer ad’.

Or in this case, 72 years down the line. That’s how long it’s taken Snow White to move on after her 1937 debut movie, “Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs”, to re-appear down under, re-styled “Ho White” for a series of billboards and bar coasters.

Unsurprisingly, Disney took a rather dim view of the iconic, purer than the driven..well, you know, heroine of its first feature coming across as kind of dirty. The ad’ campaign’s website now seems to have been taken offline after Disney had “a little bit of contact” with the beer manufacturer.

Cartoon sexuality seems to be popular at the moment (there’s a sentence I thought I’d never type).

A lot of press attention has recently been devoted, including on this site, to Marge Simpson posing for Playboy. Magazine founder, and icon of guy-culture, Hugh Hefner told CNN: “We were delighted to learn she wanted to grace the pages of our magazine. Her pictorial is truly stunning”.

She’s not real, Hef’. Get a grip man.

She’s also no stranger to saucy magazine articles as this Maxim cover from 2004 shows:

Maxim introduced Marge by saying “though we’ve never figured out how Homer bagged this blue-haired babe, we applaud his taste” and describing her as “Springfield’s sexiest MILF”.

As popular as Bart Simpson lunch boxes are for the kids it’s widely accepted that “The Simpsons” is not a cartoon aimed squarely at children. Homer and Marge’s sex life is frequently referred to in the programme, as are those of other characters. Appearing in men’s magazines and being referred to as “a MILF” simply extends the joke of the characters’ “real lives”.

Less so Snow/Ho White. It’s not titillation but it is a type of crude humor that taps into the concept of taboo. Cartoons are what we watched when we were kids, therefore cartoons and sex automatically invoke something funny and naughty.

It’s why a club full of men dribbling over the amply endowed Jessica in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” is amusing, or the transformation of the sexy woman in an advert cliche to be the husky voiced, slinky Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny is comfortingly familiar. Both characters came high in a poll of the 100 sexiest animated characters earlier this year.

A key point here is that, even if it’s a joke, you never seem to see so deliberately sexualised cartoon men. You could argue that by using caricatured stereotypes of female sexuality this deconstructs unrealistic male fantasies and holds them up to ridicule. Or, at the very least, less harm is done by objectifying cartoons rather than real-life women. But surely when female sexuality can be reproduced in a flick book, completely at the whims of its creator, it represents the ultimate form of objectification?

HatManJim’s column will appear every Saturday.