Renee at Womanist Musings alerted me to this post she’s written about this year’s Pirelli calendar. Pirelli is a tire manufacturer, and this calendar is a VIP exclusive, sent out to the elite in the auto industry. Men’s Vogue describes it as such:
Since 1964, the luxurious Pirelli Calendar, sent out only to an exclusive group of VIPs, has celebrated beauty while pushing the boundaries of photography.
I always draw a blank when I hear anyone try to dress up pin-ups as “celebrating beauty”, and this despite the fact that I don’t object to sexualized pictures per se. I think it’s because it’s an inherently sexist phrase insofar as it completely excludes anyone who is not a straight man from the category of people who celebrate beauty, and of course, it has all these folded-in assumptions that “beauty” can only refer to very young, very thin women, and that older people and men can’t be beautiful. Beauty is a lot of things, sexual and not, and there’s an unpleasant whiff of the euphemism to this phrase “celebrating beauty”.
The calendar is famous for its limited availability because it is not sold and is only given as a corporate gift to a restricted number of important Pirelli customers and celebrity VIPs. The Pirelli Calendar is perhaps the world’s only prestigious and exclusive “girly” calendar, featuring pictures generally considered glamour photography including artistic nudes.
The other thing that makes it a sexist tradition, regardless of content, is the implicit assumption that the category “VIP” is male-only, and that if women dare enter the world of VIPs, they only do so at the cost of constantly micromanaging their femininity, suppressing it when it’s convenient for men who run things and exaggerating when the men want to see that. But I’ll tell you what, none of this even holds a candle to how horrible and offensive the images in the Pirelli calendar are this year. I have to warn you that these are upsetting, if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing.