The Review Goes Viral (!)

This week, the Stanford Review found itself at the epicenter of a minor internet controversy. The issue? This 2004 image, below,  from archives the Review website.


The image, in all its cheeky, collegiate glory began making the internet rounds in the past week, prompting a mixture of confusion, some mild feminist outrage, and plenty of contemptuous eye-rolling.

The image was first discovered on the website of the Tyler Lab, a psychology lab at NYU. The lab features the image as a seemingly random example of “mulitculturalism” and, um, authority. Whatever.

From there, on September 17th, the blog Bioephemera picked it up as a bemusing example of gender issues (?).

Next,  “Sociological Images,” a blog dedicated to most useless of the social sciences, posted the image with some commentary about the image as an example of the intersection of politics and sexuality.

Finally, the image migrated to the Jezebele, a popular blog in the Gawker blog family, where over 10,000 people have viewed the image and dozens of people have commented on it.

As *Jezebele *points out, the image is not actually a card-carrying conservative women (as the image jokingly claims) but, in fact, some random French model.

How could the *Review *(circa 2004) do such a thing?  What kind of person randomly stumbles upon a a contextless image from some dark corner of the internet and then uses the image for his or her own purposes? Really, who does that?

Update:  The Stanford Daily‘s take on the image came out in 2004.  Also, former Stanford Review editor Stuart Baimel has a post about it here.