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So check out this page out of the current issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, posted by Alessia of Relationship Underarm Stick. Specifically, compare and contrast the feature title, “Fun Fearless Female” with the photo of feature profilee Anna Paquin.

Cosmo is the magazine of choice for critics of gender construction sites because it’s just an OSHA inspector’s enforcement nightmare. Everywhere you look there’s a serious health or safety violation. In her post Alessia ably dismantles the text of Cosmo’s perpetual gender enforcement, click here to see her take on that. I see a much simpler problem though.

In a standard magazine photo shoot hundreds of photos are typically taken using dozens of poses and, often, multiple settings, outfits, and lighting designs. From that photographic bounty a single image is selected that in the eyes of the editor best represents not only the individual being photographed but also the message of the accompanying article and, of course, the editorial stance of the entire publication.

So compare Paqun’s wary, tentative body language and facial expression to the title “Fun Fearless Female.” I’m not sure what the image communicates to Cosmo readers but if it showed up in, say, Details magazine I don’t think the caption would be about her having fun.

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I dunno. I probably would have passed it by if Paquin wasn’t the lead character, Sookie Stackhouse, in the HBO series True Blood, which is based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series of novels I’ve been reading lately. I like the books because the character is so much the opposite of protagonists in other, outwardly similar books such as Twilight: capable, respected, sexual, and most importantly integratedly adult.

But as Punkass blogger Lisa KS said in comments on my earlier post

Yep, Twilight sucks butt and Charlaine Harris’s series is tons of fun. Whatever you do, don’t watch TrueBlood on HBO — all the things you listed that are great about the books, plus a few more, get completely annihilated in the series, to be replaced with a mixture of high-school romanticism and pointless titillation.

One of the nicest things about the Stackhouse character in the books is that while she’s female, and fearless considering her circumstances, and even occasionally fun (again considering her circumstances) she probably wouldn’t read Cosmo.

Oh yeah, and for the record I’m just starting book four, Dead to the World. The rest of the series so far, (#2 – Living Dead in Dallas, #3 – Club Dead) hasn’t been as consistent or thought-provoking as the original Dead Until Dark. But hey, they’re not that bad and besides I’ve got a cold. Plus a habit of compulsively reading book series to their bitter ends… which is just one more reason I tend to stick with non-fiction. :-)