Open Wide

Open Wide

Monday, April 2, 2007

This weekend's NYTimes Fashion & Style Section has a very one-sided article about Lesbian Spring Break (aka The Kraft Nabisco Championship or Dinah Shore Weekend), which is held annually at Lake Drying-Up Nonative Palms, California. The photo and first paragraph shamelessly and pruriently plead for the reader's attention: girls gone wild! Lesbian ;) girls gone wild! Once obtained, this attention is then sqandered on senseless capitalistic jargon and blather about how economic power equals civil rights in the United States [sad but true]. When it was still okay to discriminate openly, the actual golf tournament wanted nothing to do with the racous lesbian parties going on in town and actually changed its name from the Dinah Shore Championship to the Kraft Nabisco Championship. Now that it's not usually okay to discriminate openly, marketers from the golf tournament actually talked to lesbian party promoters about cross-promoting weekend events. Now, the director of the golf tournament claims the name change was intended only to emphasize the event's corporate sponsorship and lesbian golf fans who happen to be attending the near-by party weekend are "more than welcome" at his golf shows. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Times writer then becomes a bit fixated on this idea of corporate sponsorship. The rest of the article devolves into the journalistic equivalent of product placements. Instead of interviewing any of the thousands of non-business-owning, non-marketing, non-party-promoting participants about the state of lesbian civil rights and solidarity [or even the important role of lesbians in womens golf], the Times is happy to give two free screens of raw quotes to people intent on making more money from this annual event next year. For analysis, the reader is offered only that the commercial success of Showtime's L-Word changed everything.

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