Time's Person of the Year: Another Dude

image of Time's cover featuring President Barack Obama in profile, in shadow

Time's 2012 Person of the Year is President Barack Obama. That is a very weird picture to choose. Also: It is his second time being Time's Person of Year; he was their choice in 2008, too. Which I think makes him only the second person of color to be chosen twice (Deng Xiaoping was featured twice).

Congratulations to President Barack Obama, whom I'm sure couldn't care less. I mean, would you care? They picked George W. Bush twice, so.

Anyway. Since Time is recycling their Person of the Year, I'm going to recycle part of my post from 2010:
Time has not selected an individual woman as its "X of the Year" since then-president of the Philippines Corazon Aquino was named Woman of the Year in 1986. In 1999, Time changed the annual year-end honorific, which had almost exclusively been a "Man of the Year" since its inception, to "Person of the Year," but it merely created an illusion of parity. Still no individual women.

This year, no different.

..."Person of the Year," my ass. If Time doesn't believe there's been a single individual woman deserving of the title in 24 26 years, then the least they could do is be honest and go back to calling it what it really is: "Man of the Year."

Because the message being sent by having not found a single woman deserving of the cover in longer than a girl child could be born, attend grammar school and junior high, graduate from high school, graduate from college, get her Master's degree, and settle in at her first job, is not that she could be their "Person of the Year" someday.

It's that she shouldn't waste a dime of her 79-cent-on-the-dollar salary on their garbage magazine.
Oh well, ladies. I guess if we want to see ourselves represented on the cover of Time's Person of the Year issue, one of us had better get busy getting reelected to the US presidency! Good thing being marginalized by the media doesn't make that EVEN HARDER!

[See also: Kate, last year.]

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