There’s no shortage of material documenting the mind numbing levels of violence against women and girls in the world. This blog is in many ways a testament to that, documenting the treatment of women and girls in the 21st century, lest we forget the scale of human rights violations against them.
But some corporations don’t seem particularly troubled by this reality. In fact, they’ve appropriated violence against women as a hot new source of creative advertising possibilities. We’ve seen a growth in eroticised violence in advertising and celebrity fashion and promotional shoots, which I’ve written about here before in a piece called ‘You look so good in blood’.
U.S blogger Shelby Knox has written this week about the latest manifestation of this trend, this time by Gucci. She’s given me permission to reprint her blog here. Most of my readers probably can’t afford to buy Gucci anyway, but for those who can, please….don’t.
Here we go again with the high fashion obsession with beautiful, dead women. Gucci’s fall ad campaign was shot in the Marrakech desert but the photos look like something from an episode of CSI.
Hell, if I wore an ostrich motorcycle jacket and velvet pants into the middle of the Moroccan desert, and brought along a $2400 bag instead of a canteen, I’d probably drop dead too. But “dead in the dirt” is creepy and unsettling, no matter how high the heels. In this photo, Raquel Zimmerman and Joan Smalls lie prone and limp while a man circles them like a vulture, taking in the grotesque view.
Same models, same prone poses. Is that their car in the background? Did the expressionless man highjack and kill them? What’s he going to do with them now that they’re sprawled on his hood?
Of course, you can’t do a beautiful corpse ad campaign without at least one picture that expressly hints at violence and rape. In this shot, Nikola Jovanovic is perched upon his golden throne leering down at Raquel Zimmerman, whose skirt is hiked up to her thigh, legs askew. His foot positioned strategically over her throat makes it disgustingly clear he can do, perhaps already has done, whatever he likes to the motionless model.
Gucci certainly isn’t the first to use female dead bodies in their ads. Beautiful corpses are an extension of the almost universal objectification of women in advertising combined with the trope that says helpless, silent women are the best kind. Rendering women dead, or at least disturbingly unconscious, strips them of their agency and sexualizes violence against them. Gucci’s glorification of violence normalizes something that’s already far too prevalent – in the United States, 3 women per day are murdered by their intimate partners. Something tells me those crime scenes are decidedly less picture perfect.
3 Responses
This is a disturbing trend. Violence as ‘sexy’ is a dangerous concept to promote.
This disturbing trend is nothing new. Bram Stoker’s Dracula sucked the blood out of defenceless women. Sharon Stone hasn’t won any friends either with her bloodthirsty and ‘sexy’ portrayal in ‘Basic Instinct’. Female corpses have appeared in such shockers as ‘Corpse Bride’ by Tim Burton, that portray the dead as having more fun than the living.
Not to mention so many movies and sitcoms that portray at least the suggestion of necrophilia by the ‘male’ attendant in a mortuary. It seems to be a theme that is open for grabs in hollywood.
For this trend to come into high fashion deserves a response from every thinking person. This is just hideous, and should be actively pulled down. Of course, we also realise that a lot of models are so anorexic they look like walking corpses anyway. Sicko. If I could ‘not’ buy Gucci I would. But it is way out of my league anyway.
Melinda is right there is no shortage of material. It was interesting to see The Movie Show discussion this week about a film they agreed shows particularly shocking violence against a woman, but they seemed to feel obliged to try to justify the violence and both give it three stars.
David comments “‘… the very eclectic British director, Michael Winterbottom, has tackled the material and just as he went all the way with sex in 9 SONGS, he handles the violence in this very violent story with unflinching, upsetting realism – even more upsetting because the violence is directed at women. Seeing JESSICA ALBA beaten, almost literally, to a pulp is pretty unedifying, and though the scene is there in the original book, it’s very confronting on screen. Still, Winterbottom is a good director …”.
Margaret goes on to speculate “maybe the only explanation for the two ultra violent scenes of violence towards women were that he wants to say, “Hey, everyone, this is what it looks like.” DAVID: Yes. MARGARET: “It is truly ugly.” And the fact is that I don’t know that I want to be confronted with that ugliness, but that can be his only motivation, because it’s not titillating at all.”
I find the argument that the shocking realism of this film has some justification because it shows reality to be a very weak one. The comment that implies it might be more understandable if the violence was titillating was also telling.