When a Magazine Only Wants You If You're Willing to Pose Nude
LatestI’ve been an actress since age 13. You might be familiar with me from the TV show Neighbours, or from my current role on the CW’s Reign. But after a recent run-in with a crooked magazine editor, you might be familiar with me instead as an attention-seeking, hysterical lady human who endlessly cheapens feminism by having the lunatic opinions that our bodies are beautiful and worth celebrating—and also, simultaneously, believing that my body is my own.
Earlier this year, I launched a website called Herself.com. Herself is a safe space for women of varying backgrounds, body types and belief systems to amplify their concerns, wishes, dreams, complaints and woes—a platform dedicated to expanding the scope of visible female experience and of visible female bodies. The courageous, luminescent women you will find there are nude, shot by female photographers. In showing us their bodies on mutually-agreed-upon terms, they have given all of us an immense gift; as they appear there, they are both impossibly vulnerable and utterly indestructible. Even, I, myself, appear on the website too, completely naked. (Burn her!)
Given these facts, it may or may not surprise you to hear that, when an Australian magazine called The Good Weekend asked me to appear in lingerie to accompany a piece on me, I declined.
It wasn’t the nature of the shoot that bothered me, but the pairing of the shoot with the story I was hoping to tell, which was specifically that women, and only women, are in charge of their bodies, their image and their sexuality. This commodification of my body had nothing to do with me. My input and my consent had never been sought. Simply, my body was going to be used as a prop to sell a magazine. And I, as the human occupying this prop, was not a part of the conversation.
(And, let me stress: sexualized photography is fine with me. But this business teaches you a lot about the nature of consent. You know when you’re being reduced to an object—which happens endlessly—and the valuable instances when you’re not.)
I was aware that The Good Weekend lacked a certain amount of feminist credibility. Before the red flag of the photo shoot, their senior editor Ben Naparstek (or, Ben NaparI-hope-you-get-cataracts-you-absolute-lying-piece-of-shit, as he is known lovingly amongst friends) had become notorious for exhibiting some fairly jaw-dropping conduct. John Van Tiggelen, editor at The Monthly, recently called him out for blatantly refusing to pay female writers as much as their male counterparts. In an open letter, Tiggelen wrote:
Contributors to the Monthly were letting me know you were offering them $1.50 a word. I kept a list; within a month there were eight on it. Interestingly, they were all male. Yet you denied this, both to me and publicly (to the Australian).
You were lying, but you had to, as you were simultaneously insisting to other writers (who, interestingly, were all female) that 80 cents a word was as high as you could go.
Slow clap for this man’s commitment to gender disparity!
But anyway, back to the photo shoot: here’s a rundown of the events.
Herself.com launched in January of this year. The Good Weekend requested a feature. They flew out a journalist to Toronto, where I was living and working at the time, and we spent several hours airing out and exploring all of my deepest and sexiest secrets. They then scheduled a photo shoot for the coming Saturday, and along with the specifics of the location and time, they sent along a mood board representing what they were aiming to shoot: lots of ladies in panties, big hair, big makeup. Panties, panties, panties.