It’s safe to say that media publications drop the ball from time to time, if not daily. We’ll never forget that incredibly ill-advised and racist review that New Zealand’s Rip It Up published some months back.
But the latest to gallop over the line of bad taste is LA Weekly. As Pedestrian.tv note, the long-running Los Angeles tastemaker has been forced to issue an apology after publishing perhaps the creepiest, most sexist op-ed ever written about a musician.
The piece was titled ‘Sky Ferreira’s Sex Appeal Is What Pop Music Needs Right Now‘ and you can take pretty much any excerpt as an example of why everyone is calling it a grossly inappropriate masturbatory fantasy that should never have been published.
Art Tavana penned the piece, in which he goes to great lengths to dissect singer Sky Ferreira’s sex appeal in ways that make us think he may have been writing with only one hand on his keyboard.
“To see how Ferreira fits into this elite group, simply look over her Instagram,” Tavana writes, comparing Ferreira to the likes of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. In the piece, Tavana also compares Ferreira to Madonna, Nico, and “a Sex Pistols groupie”.
“There isn’t a single photo of her that isn’t flawlessly, almost offensively cool. Even in the candid photo of her nude in the shower, soaking wet, she looks natural, like she’s shooting a home video, rather than being photographed by a creeper,” he continues.
“She looks like a more cherubic Sharon Stone, icy but also sweet, like a freshly licked lollipop.” A what now? Yeah, no wonder Ferreira herself has come out against the piece, branding it as part of a whole canon of op-eds that “took a toll on me in a personal level”.
[include_post id=”461020″]
Elsewhere in the piece, Tavana compares Ferreira’s breasts to Madonna’s, noting that they have “similar breasts in both cup size and ability to cause a shitstorm”. Long story short, Tavana’s editor has apologised for the piece, which he edited.
“Tavana’s piece did cross the line. It was offensive, and on behalf of him and L.A. Weekly, I apologize for it,” he wrote. “You’re probably wondering why I’m saying this now to all of you, instead of to my computer screen on Thursday night before I scheduled Tavana’s article to publish the next morning.”
“I am not here to make excuses; instead, I will say that, in this line of work, we make judgment calls on what to say and how to say it all the time, and sometimes we get it wrong. This time, Tavana and I got it wrong.”
You can say that again. Ferreira, meanwhile, has refused to officially condemn the piece and has instead issued a criticism of the media machine as a whole, writing on Twitter, “95 percent of articles & interviews about me have had something offensive,false or (sometimes extremely) sexist.”
