Glee actresses Lea Michele and Dianna Agron cavort in bras, knickers, short skirts, and long socks in a locker room. There are spread legs, lolly-pops, top tugging and come-hither expressions.
Michele and Agron’s co-star, Cory Monteith, is fully clothed. He’s not spreading his legs or sucking on a lolly-pop. He is not posed as sexually inviting or seductive. The girls are exposing their flesh while he’s playing the drums.
Michele and Agron press up against him, his hands on their backsides. One boy, two girls, at the ready to do his bidding.
“Glee gone wild: We show you what happens when the teachers aren’t around,” is the headline on the November issue of GQ, featuring the stars of the popular Fox owned show about a high-school choir.
The actresses may be in their 20s. But the aim is to sexify their school-girl characters, to play into the fantasy that female students are really temptresses, vixens, seducers, who want to perform sex acts for you in the locker room. GQ readers, these naughty school- girl babysitters want to get their uniforms off for you!
Michele and Agron have been exploited in the interests of GQ readers with tissue boxes close by (and not because the images make them cry).
It would be stretching the bounds of believability to say Fox executives didn’t know where this was heading.
GQ employed photographer Terry Richardson for the job. He’s described here:
For more than a decade, he’s been a high-profile pervy Zelig, documenting his sexual exploits… Virtually everyone who knows Richardson’s name can tell you about the brightly lit, porno-like quality of his pictures.
Richardson has been accused of inappropriate advances to young female models. You can read what some of his subjects have claimed about his behaviour here.
This is one model’s account:
He takes girls who are young, manipulates them to take their clothes off and takes pictures of them they will be ashamed of. They are too afraid to say no because their agency booked them on the job and are too young to stand up for themselves.
This is the porn stylist paid to give the GQ shoot – featuring high school lead characters – his special touch.
Michele is quoted in GQ: “I’m proud to be on a positive show and to be a voice for girls and say, ‘You don’t need to look like everybody else. Love who you are.”
That’s nice. But Michele has been pornified like so many other young female celebrities. I’ve written about this before. It’s not taking a different road. It’s the same banal path, the same pre-determined sexualised script. You will bare your flesh. You will be turned into masturbatory material for male readers. You will suck on a lolly-pop in a childish way. You will be styled as barely legal.
The meaning of the Glee shoot is well captured in a piece by Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams:
What do you call a magazine that runs pictures of young women in suggestive poses, dolled up to look like lollipop-sucking, uniform disrobing teens? Barely Legal? Just 18? How about GQ?
For the November issue of the increasingly ironically designated gentleman’s magazine, “Glee’s” so-ubiquitous-they hurt Lea Michele, Dianna Agron and Cory Monteith do what has been done with hot, sexy celebrities since the dawn of periodicals – they cavort around in various stages of undress. Well, the ladies do – Monteith remains demurely covered in rugby shirts and sweaters while his female castmates pull their shirts down, open and off. The shoot was photographed by the notoriously skeevy Terry Richardson and features clothing from American Apparel (neither of which are strangers to sexual misconduct)…
…playing off the setting of the show, it essentially keeps its stars in character, thereby then allowing its readers – median age 33.4 – to ogle them as porny teen fantasy characters – all spread legs and underpants in the locker room… And knowing that it was shot by a man with a long, storied and reputedly unpleasant history involving teenagers makes the whole thing just that much more repugnant.
Here’s what I had to say about the Glee shoot on Channel 7’s Morning Show.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16078800[/vimeo]
13 Responses
The ‘Cyrus Virus’ spot on!
So, so, so sad. And disgusting. Ugh.
That guy who said the actors were posing? The image projected is that the ‘characters’ are posing. The teenage characters, we don’t need any more encouragement for men to prey on teenage girls.
i wont be watching Glee in the same light again knowing that guys could be enjoying themselves having seen these images in a mens mag
Oh no….this is one of my favourite shows. I can’t believe it. So sad…..
As for the guy who justifies it by saying that half the audience who watch Glee are adult, and they’re the people this photo shoot is targeting, I would hazard a guess that most of them are women. Women generally don’t read GQ…..huge whole in his argument.
AM SOOOO DISSAPPOINTED IN THAT PATHETIC GQ PHOTO SHOOT!!
I loved Glee before — admittedly I could see how it was headed down a negative road – and now I’m switching OFF!
It’s disappointing to see a talented individual like Lea Michele transform into the typical Hollywood celebrity. When she refused to get a nose job, I thought, Good for her- having enough belief in herself and her talent that she doesn’t feel the need to change to be accepted into Hollywood. Then she lost all that weight, and now this.
I would really like to see a young female celebrity who has enough self confidence to be a real role model for girls, one who knows that her worth is more than than her body parts and ability to act slutty, and can see past all this stupidity.
Sex sells so this whole thing might just drive up there viewer count. Probably done because they were losing viewers over the course of the show perhaps.
For goodness sake. WHY??!!
Just out of interest, is there any way to let the producers of Glee know that I won’t be watching Glee anymore after this photoshoot?
I just can’t say how sick I am of the “but the actresses are actually in their twenties” and “it’s fantasy, not reality” defences of this. As if there is some invisible, uncrossable line between a man who has sex with a schoolgirl, and a man who just wants to.
The storylines of Glee may be cliched but they’ve avoided the kind of sleaze of alternatives like Gossip Girl – until now.
Surely Glee’s biggest following is teen girls and therefore this is a highly irresponsible thing to do! And the actresses posing maybe above 18 but their characters aren’t and thus it is another message that this is how teen girls are supposed to act.
This extreme ‘sluttificaftion’ of womanhood portrayed here may not be replicated by teen girls but by going extreme they will make teen girls feel like at the very least, a milder version of sluttiness is expected of them!
I don’t even think the storylines are appropriate for teenage girls. One of the girls falls pregnant and tells one of the boys he is the father when the father is actually his best friend. Not the sort of storylines I want my daughter watching. The singing is good and the choreo is mostly fun.
As for the photo shoot… have to agree with Tessa and Nicole J.