International media reduced a communist student leader to her looks rather than her politics.

Evidence

But Camila Vallejo, the president of the student union at the University of Chile, was a member of Chile’s communist party, the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCh). Vallejo was a talented communicator who had been shaped by the Party’s internal education system. The PCCh had been around since 1912, having survived two right-wing dictatorships. It was tightly structured, and its young members get an education in both Marxism-Leninism and practical activism. Camila Vallejo got special attention from international media for other reasons. The New York Times gave her a big spread, with the slightly confusing headline “The World’s Most Glamorous Revolutionary.” Camila certainly dresses well, but she looked a lot more like a leftist college student than anyone who spent a lot of money on clothes. But the article got to its real point with a quote at the end of the first paragraph: “She’s hot.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 277

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader theme of how movements get delegitimized or trivialized by media framing, echoing the Complaints About Immodesty article’s logic of objectification.