My reader list gets shorter

Maybe I’m coming in a little late to the game and there’s already a whole bunch of incisive commentary about Pandagon’s ads.  I’m new to that site, having just discovered the Google Reader iPhone app and gone batshit crazy on adding every femblog I could think of to it,  so pardon my ignorance to the backlash,  if one indeed exists.

So what the fuck?  When did popular feminist blogs start being okay with ads using the faux-frightened,  finger chewing women wearing only t-shirts to sell clothes and a naked Pamela Anderson to promote PETA, one of the most mysogonistic organizations to ever curse the planet?   “Watch as this sexy icon lays it all out in this very graphic video.”   Clever bait and switch, except not.  Vile and disturbing and profoundly disappointing.

That’s the kind of shit I expect to see on just about every other kind of website in the universe – liberal and conservative and ecommerce and catholic and movie review and cooking tips and music downloading and nutrition and world news, whatever.  It’s everywhere.  But on a feminist blog? Are you freaking kidding me?  Is nothing sacred? Nothing at all?  Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing the writers at Pandagon are trying to change about the world?

I actively avoid sites/blogs that use this kind of imagery to sell or promote.  It ain’t easy, I tell you what, but I do it because seeing that stuff a thousand and one times per day makes my hands shake and puts me in a funk that’s getting harder and harder to shake off.  Of course I realize that I can’t entirely avoid provocotivey positioned ladies on the porn-addled,  man-is-the-default-user innerwebs, and I’m more than adept at clicking away when I see it, but I honestly expect that the sites that I’ve designated in my little reader as Feminist will not actually contribute to the woman-hating horseshit I presume they’re rallying against.

For heck’s sake, Pandagon. I hope you get your priorities straight.