Thursday, June 7, 2012

Cover Snark: I See You Heroine, Shakin' that Ass.

Many covers show an engaged heroine on the front. She’s stood in an action pose (or crouched in one anyway) but there’s another trend which bemuses me - the heroine apparently losing interest and walking away. 

  It makes them highly anonymous, very impersonal and pretty hard to engage them as characters. It also means that we’re basically focussing on her ass. Yes, let’s be honest here, these covers are all about the ass.



 I don’t know why it’s such a trend, but it seems a lot of our protagonists would rather we speak to their buttocks. And to take this to an  extreme - especially with the habit of protagonists being disembodied - we get to speak only to their buttocks. Yes, these covers are ass. One big ass. Extraneous body parts are clipped away so we can focus on the ass.





These women are beyond disembodied. All they are is one roving ass after another. They are there specifically to be objectified. There can be no doubt that the only thing that you need to know about them is that they have nice asses.  No matter how empowered the protagonist in the book maybe, these covers undo all the work that the author has done because they treat women as body parts to be consumed.