We’ve yet to be truly disappointed in an issue of Muse Magazine, an art and style inspiration source that keeps on giving. The December 2011 edition of Muse escalates the magazine’s embrace of women’s identity with two very opposite covers featuring a super modern Alessandra Ambrosio captured by Chad Pitman and traditional girl Lindsay Wixson captured by Will Davidson.

This preview including Ambrosio, Wixson, Anna Selezneva by Steven Pan, Emily Baker by Tom Allen, Kendra Spears by Mariano Vivanco, and Maryna Linchuk by Matt Irwin resonates to an older woman like myself because we’ve been there before — not only stylistically but intellectually.

It isn’t just the photography — especially Alessandra in Future Shock — that stirs memories of the years when American Vogue put tasteful nudity in its pages and women were headed for the moon. Alessandra’s editorial and Maryna’s too reminds me of what hasn’t changed for most women in the world — the Scandinavians and New Zealand women excepted. 

Living in a country where our right to birth control is under assault in some states, the visuals remind us that women may be muses, but our emancipation is so threatening to social systems, power structures and masculinity in general, that massive forces both political and religious are mobilized to insure that we remain more like Lindsay.

The NYTimes notes this morning that movies are exploring the notion of American masculinity in the past and today. Men are in an existential crises, writes Melena Ryzik. At least one American woman is in an existential crisis of her own about masculinity — and that would be me.

There are moments when I feel my own existential angst living in a country where one is anti-American for rejecting creationism. Yesterday a FB friend from Australia responded to by commentary about American women and anti-depressants with a discussion on transhumanism.

What an intelligent word and a concept I believe in, a discussion of evolution that thrived ‘back in the day’.  And also what a threatening word — more so than I ever imagined as a student of intellect and science.

Gender relations are on the move again … and where we’re going this time, nobody knows. It’s truly amazing what a deep reflection a Muse magazine cover can prompt while drinking my morning French Roast. But then images — especially ones the caliber of Muse — always trigger psychological and emotional responses, that sometimes nasty visceral reflex, that repulses us while others inspire and motivate. Anne

Alessandra Ambrosio by Chad Pitman