Perhaps you've seen some of the controversy around the December cover of Wired magazine. The cover is a close-up image of a pair of Caucasian breasts, referencing the cover story about a new bio-technology that allows women to grow more of their own breast tissue after mastectomy or for cosmetic reasons. While the technology is currently being used for breasts, it has potential to help repair other kinds of organ damage. The cover is certainly provocative and has garnered some complaints.

My husband and I subscribe to Wired and both really like their articles. In general, we find the magazine interesting and thought-provoking. We haven't been too excited to read this particular issue, though, because the cover is so off-putting; we definitely don't bring it out and about with us to read in waiting rooms or on public transit. It looks like a cover of Playboy. Not exactly the impression I want to make with strangers or colleagues.

Journalism professor and blogger Cindy Royal expands the critique of this cover to Wired's whole history of covers. Wired editor Chris Anderson defends his editorial decisions in the comments section, and I'm sympathetic to his position. I think it's unfair for Royal to dismiss the way Wired celebrates Martha Stewart and Sarah Silverman but count a Will Ferrell cover as celebrating men. I'm also torn about my desire to hold media I consume to a higher standard than the rest of the culture. After all, the tech industry is far from the only industry with a woman problem, and Wired isn't the only magazine that regularly promotes men's achievements more than women's. (Publishers Weekly created a list of the "Best Books of 2009" that didn't include a single female author, and only one man of color.) My point is that Wired, like everything else, is a product of a fallen world, and when you try to make money in a sexist culture, it's easy to compromise or not notice your own privilege. This doesn't mean we shouldn't critique sexism when we find it, but it does mean that well-meaning people frequently participate in a culture of sexism without realizing it.

So I'll leave long-term judgments about the publishing decisions made by Wired aside. Unlike Royal, who said she will cancel her subscription, I'm willing to give its editors a few more chances. I still have a problem with this particular cover, and I agree with others that it's important to make those issues clear. For one thing, it participates in a pattern of presenting images of women's bodies as dismembered and partial. If you haven't seen one of Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly videos, she demonstrates this pattern well. (A relevant section occurs around 6:30, and another at 8:00.)

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Gender scholars like Kilbourne have been critiquing the way advertising and media reduces women visually and verbally to body parts for decades, this has become particularly disturbing in some of the recent discussions of breast cancer. Peggy Orenstein's recent New York Times op-ed makes a similar critique: While breast cancer awareness was once a serious pursuit, it has recently devolved into prurient attention to the breast, erasing the woman. For instance, disclose the color of your bra "for breast cancer," "save the tatas," and so on. These campaigns, as Her.meneutics blogger Gina Dalfonzo highlighted last week, are problematic because they make breast cancer about breasts, not women. This are especially problematic for Christians, who believe bodies are temples for the Holy Spirit and individual people are valuable spiritual beings with souls, not collections of body parts.

I see the Wired cover as another iteration of this reductionism. It's no wonder its editors thought it was okay: the critique of these breast cancer campaigns is not nearly as loud as the enthusiasm for it. After all, Wired's cover story was about a technology that is being used to help breast cancer victims, and the cover was mimicking the tropes in a lot of breast cancer activism. Nonetheless, there is something deeply insulting about purporting to save or support women while focusing (literally) on a sexualized body part and (literally again) excluding or marginalizing the rest of her personhood. Since Christian theology has a deep investment in the value and dignity of humans, this trope should especially bother us.

So what is an appropriate Christian response? I'm not sure. One option would be to opt out. Boycott Wired or cancel your subscription. That's tricky though: If you boycott every media that makes well-meaning but sexist errors, I'm not sure what you'll have left to read or watch or listen to. I'm also not sure cloistering ourselves off from offensive culture is an effective way to be Christians in the world. Is it enough to voice our objection, to perhaps avoid this particular issue of the magazine? That's the path I'm choosing for now.

Further, I think we should be more careful about the words and pictures we ourselves use to discuss issues around women's health, like breast cancer, pregnancy, and nursing. We're affected by a culture that reduces women to their body parts, and as Christians, we shouldn't lose sight of the individual value of all people, no matter what topic we are discussing.

Bethany Keeley-Jonker is an ABD PhD student in speech communication at
the University of Georgia. She regularly blogs for Think Christian and runs the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, which has led to The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks: A Celebration of Creative Punctuation.