Douchebag Decree

We get it. Selling magazines is tough. As a feminist nonprofit swimming in publishing world, we know how hard it is to keep your head above water. (Completely unrelated: Do you have your Bitch magazine digital subscription yet?) But some magazines feel the need to push their publication with provocative cover photos and headlines in order to compete with the Huffington Post. Here are some recent offenders...

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's sexism is old news at this point, but hey, it's election season and he has to stay in the news, right? Romney doubled down on the misogyny last Thursday by hiring Richard Grenell as his national security and foreign policy adviser. Grenell, formerly of the Bush administration, kicked off his first week on the job by deleting a bunch of sexist shit from his Twitter account.


Sexist tweeters, raise your hands!

It comes as no surprise that when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed over 50 bills last Thursday, several of those bills limited women's reproductive rights. However, Walker took his douchery to a new level by repealing the state's Equal Pay Enforcement Act. Governor Scott Walker you have earned a Douchebag Decree for taking your sexism a step beyond reproductive health issues, limiting women's rights even farther by denying them legal protection from gender-based work discrimination.

Not content to just Photoshop its models to look thinner and younger, megaretailer Forever 21 is now airbrushing out their kneecaps. Kneecaps! Sooo gross right?

In an attempt to protest the Pennsylvania state House's recent designation of 2012 as "The Year of the Bible" (which is admittedly messed up), two atheist groups went the fight-douche-with-douche route last week and erected a slavery-themed billboard in "one of the Harrisburg's most racially diverse neighborhoods." Ostensibly meant to highlight the hypocrisy of the "Year of the Bible," the billboard instead pissed people off because it's racist.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and sexual assault.

Fox News isn't exactly known for its nuanced feminist critiques, but when pundit Liz Trotta aired her views on women in the military earlier this week, stating that—among other things—women working in close quarters with men should expect to be raped, things reached a whole new level of douche.

In the frenzy of cable news chatter that followed Tuesday's State of the Union address, one pundit stood out in the crowd, a beacon on a douchebag hill. The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore out-douched the considerable competition by employing the age-old tactic of saying stuff is like rape when it is not even kind of like rape.

Remember what a douchebag Johnny Depp was last year when he compared his many celebrity photoshoots to instances of rape? You'd think his fellow actors would have learned from his mistake that "rape" is not a word that can be thrown about to describe any mildly uncomfortable situation, but some actors obviously did not get the message. Earlier this week actress Kim Novak, star of the 1958 Hitchcock Classic Vertigo, took out a full-page ad in Variety magazine to blast new film The Artist for ripping off Bernard Hermann's famous love score from Vertigo. While Novak could have expressed her disdain for the film's creative choices with any manner of unoffensive language, she instead used the full-page rant to accuse the film of "raping" her.

What do you get the seven-year-old girl who has everything? Well, if you're Sarah Burge, self-proclaimed "Human Barbie," and the girl in question is your daughter Poppy, you give her a voucher for breast implants for her birthday, and you follow it up with a Christmas voucher for liposuction. Happy Holidays!


The gift that keeps on giving (you a complex about your body).

H&M is taking fashion douchebaggery to the next level this week by using computer-generated models in its holiday lingerie campaign. As if the photo shopping, airbrushing, pushing up, and sucking in that goes on in a typical yuletide bra commercial wasn't enough to make the average shopper want to throw on a snuggie and call it a day, now the models selling us our delicates are actually virtual.


Ahahaha! We're just hanging out, having the exact same body! What, you don't look like this?