The premise:

The participants will be brought to a remote, primitive location where the women will have the opportunity to “rule” as they build a newly formed society – one where there is no glass ceiling and no dressing to impress. For the men, their worlds of power and prestige are turned inside-out and upside-down. And for these women, turnabout is fair play!

In order to win, the men must accede to the women’s every demand, 24/7. Here, women command and men obey. Over the series’ duration, the men will be eliminated by the women until one last man is standing.

How will the men react? How will the women treat the men? Can women effectively rule society? Will the men learn what life is like for some women in today’s world? Will this new society be a Utopia or a hell on earth? And in the end, who will be man enough to succeed in the new social order?

As I asked in “The Question of Female Power“: Is there such a thing as ‘female power’? Is power always ‘power’?

Anyway, more on the show from Reality Blurred and a pretty solid take by Echidne of the Snakes. Here’s a taste:

I’m the polite blogger, yanno. Well, I’ve just had my fill about politeness today. Fuck those Fox assholes. Fuck them for making fun of the real injustices and troubles the majority of women have to endure in this world. Fuck them for making it into a game to prop up their own petty feelings of threatened masculinity. Fuck them for their disgusting slimy bias and their silly little commercial brains. Fuck them for having the empathy of a toe cheese.

And most of all, fuck them to the deepest hell for suggesting that the only alternative to the current system is some perverse upside version of more of the same.

Echidne also links to an excellent post by Jennifer Pozner, “Oh, hell no. Fox wonders if women with “axes to grind” can “effectively rule society”

It includes a dictionary of women and reality-speak!

Sigh, between this and Fox’s other big show featuring women, Anchorwoman (see two stories below)…

Well, it’s good to know entertainment in bad faith is equally opportunistic when it comes to race and gender…

It would be like Miss USA wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. [...] A beauty contest is very far from being the right place to vent political and religious ideologies.

Oh my! Let’s have a look at this dress…

According to msnbc, this well-accessoried ensemble features a “billowing, hoop skirt adorned with sketches of Catholic rebels hanging from posts. Rosaries and scapulars hung from the bullet-studded, bandolier belt; a large crucifix necklace, black halter top and wide-brimmed sombrero completed the outfit.”

(I really like it when ladies remember their hats. Bullets, however, are often that one thing too much that bogs down the look.)

The msnbc and BBC articles each do a good job pointing out some of what is at stake in this choice for representing Mexico to the world. There is also an article in La Jornada* that is particularly good at reading the dress as a signifier of contemporary Mexico’s political moment, which Melissa has also pointed out to us to in her response to JL’s post on the new abortion laws in Mexico City.

Further, as all of the articles point out, there is something troubling about this fetishization of the violent Cristero War, which hinged on Catholic rebellion against the secularization of the Mexican state. And for some, the images, which include Roman Catholic rebels hanging from posts and a man facing a firing squad (maybe Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ.?) also have an uncomfortable resonance with the pervasive public violence brought on by the escalating drug war in Mexico.

Hey Princess Propaganda and Princess Production, what do you think of this sticky uber-princess situation?

[*By the way, the Jornada article is in Spanish though, since it is a newspaper, you might only need to dredge up your sixth-grade Spanish! I suggest taking a look. If you get stuck, feed the article's URL into Babel Fish.]

CNN.com has this article on Ugly Betty’s America Ferrera, about her feelings on her own body image.

It’s a little bit of a non-story, which is why I find it interesting.

I’m sure Measuring Beauty, Beauty as Power, Celebodies, and Celebrities and Paprazzi might have more context on this, but it seems to me that, as stories on every pound gained and lost by celebrities grow more ridiculously ubiquitous every day, there is also this impulse to publish these little tiny non-stories– let’s call them “weight statements.”

On the one hand, weight statements make opportunities for celebrities to assure us that everything is all right, despite what you might have heard about other girls and women. On the other, something about them also speaks in uncomfortable ways to the intensity of our looking at these women. There’s a weird touch of “Be Yourself and Be Perfect Too” in this–or maybe it is the other way around?

And of course we should ask, what does it mean that Ferrera has to say anything at all?

Bonus: It’s also about ANTM and NOW in The NY Daily News! Interestingly, there are no references to the episode on any ANTM site. I put some of the images after the jump, in case you don’t want to see it. Dorothy Snarker at After Ellen has more pix, and some commentary thereon.

Also, WPIX, The CW’s NY affiliate has this poll (if you vote you can see the results).

Finally, because once one is in the CW it’s hard to get out, I can’t resist this gallery of pix from the top model’s “political issues” shoot.