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[Putnam]

It's a 4-panel strip in which only the last panel is this:

Harley sitting naked in a bathtub with toasters, blow dryers, blenders, appliances all dangling above the bathtub and she has a cord that will release them all. We are watching the moment before the inevitable death. Her expression is one of “oh well, guess that’s it for me” and she has resigned herself to the moment that is going to happen.

The other 3 aren't of her attempting suicide naked.

Not that much better, but it kind of bothers me that we now have two links in a row with editorialized, out-of-context, blatantly incorrect descriptions.

[SalmonGod]

Well... a bikini made of chicken isn't much better than naked.

[Vector]

I am so tired of this shit.

On the other hand, here's a discussion of an attempted "sexism deprogramming" program at Harvard Business School.  I have it as a personal goal to some day do something that would make Harvard interested in me just so that I can say no, but I think this was good of them to try and provides a pretty cogent argument that women have less skill in some areas because sexism, rather than because suck.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. That's pretty grotesque, but Harley Quinn is not exactly portrayed as a bastion of mental stability.

[Vector]

It's okay if she's sexualized because she's mentally unstable?

I know what you're getting at, but given that sexy does not imply unstable most of the time in the DC universe--it just implies woman--I don't really think that it's an appropriate argument.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Well, kind of. Harley is generally portrayed as fine when outside the Joker's influence. It is her hopeless and one-sided love of him that makes her both tragic and a villain. So yes, the sexual component is indeed kind of vital.

[Vector]

Okay.

I've got to admit, at this point, that this frankly just squicks me out and I don't think that any in-universe justification would make me go "oh, okay!"  I usually don't feel quite this way about things, but this is at the level where I'm just not going to feel fine.  Harley was already sort of on the border of what I felt I could deal with, and using this as an industry break-in opportunity really, really, really sets it over the line.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

As I said, I am not exactly jumping in support either, but I can see where it is coming from.

[Putnam]

Okay.

I've got to admit, at this point, that this frankly just squicks me out and I don't think that any in-universe justification would make me go "oh, okay!"  I usually don't feel quite this way about things, but this is at the level where I'm just not going to feel fine.  Harley was already sort of on the border of what I felt I could deal with, and using this as an industry break-in opportunity really, really, really sets it over the line.

Yeah, I mostly agree with that. It's already indicative of larger problems, but making it an opportunity to get into the industry suggests that they're embracing the issue rather than trying to solve it.

[Descan]

To me the implication is "You're gonna be drawing this -a lot-, fuck if we're gonna change. So we wanna make sure you can do this properly!", which is why I have more of an issue with this than the normal run-of-the-mill comic-book sexism. :U

[GlyphGryph]

Of all the possible complaints about this they could have really dug into, of all the things that are wrong with it, Jezebel has to make something up to be the core of the article?

W.T.F.

Oh wait it's Jezebel why am I expecting anything other than sensationalist clickbait that sets back the very cause it ?

So yeah, the whole thing is terrible in lots and lots of ways, but since there isn't actually any requirement she be naked, being naked in a bathtub isn't inherently sexualizing, especially in this circumstance. Nudity, if the artists do decide to go with nudity, is a common theme in depictions of suicide in fiction meant to carry emotional wait for legitimately good reasons (symbolic of vulnerability and the discarding the mask they wear to shield themselves from a harsh world etc. and so on), and there's a reason it's a common motiff for both male and female characters.

I'm not saying the competition isn't terrible (Meat bikini? Really?), that the winning strip isn't likely to be terrible (they don't require sexualized imagery but by current DC standards I've no doubt they'll jump for it), but personally I'm more raging that Jezebel consistently does this... hack job of reporting on terrible things, where they feel the need to add layers of bullshit on top of it and (often enough) end up being outright sexist themselves.

I'd like to rage at DC but honestly after all the stuff they've done recently I've exhausted that particular font.

Edit:
I've been spending a good bit of time upset with Doctorow on BoingBoing lately too for the same reason. It infuriates me when people are right about the ultimate point and then undermine themselves by building their argument out of bullshit instead of the obvious stuff right in front of them that is obviously wrong. Rrrrrrgh.

[freeformschooler]

Jezebel is just a single baby step ahead of Daily Mail. We need, like, a chart.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, I'm really not familiar with Jezebel at all.

[GlyphGryph]

"Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing."

It's a "news and gossip" site - Gawker's feminist-targeted equivalent to Gizmodo or Kotaku.

[Mrhappyface]

Ha Gawker. 90% of any of their magazines read like Tumblr rants.