It appears now that the trending
fashion fetish is the female corpse.
No, not Miley’s image,
but the
girl lying next to her in a new advertising spread. In it, the models pose on a moonlit beach. Miley sits up, staring into the space,
a woman behind her, while another reposes on the sand, flat on her back, hair partially
obscuring her face, with the look of a stylishly dressed body in the morgue.
This following a recent cover of Entertainment Weekly, displaying the two actors of a soon-to-be released film reposed on a gurney. Ben Affleck
is curled awkwardly around the woman, who is in a
bra and slip, very much dead. (A tag is tied
carefully around her toe).
Upon examination one learns that beautiful
female corpses have become common in fashion shoots, advertising campaigns
and TV shows, all with a theme of sexual and fatal violence against women. Why? To boost declining ratings, audiences, or to create new ones.
For example, here is a publication with a fashion shoot depicting a range of famous authors in
the throes of killing themselves (or attempting to).
Kira Cochrane called out America's NextTop Model for complicity in the trend,with an episode in which those competing were to pose as if they'd just been killed. So here is what amounts to the fashion industry's fetishization of the female
corpse. Apparently sexualizing women's passivity and silence--women posed for the camera, contorted into positions which make them look simultaneously ridiculous, weak, sexually available and highly vulnerable--is highly marketable.
Do people want violence against women to be sexualized? There is a reason why these images are legion. If the sexualized stereotype of a woman in our culture is passive
and vulnerable, the advertising industry has learned that, taken to its
logical conclusion, there is nothing more appealing than a dead girl. I believe it was Pope Montini who once said, “He [Satan] is the malign, clever seducer who knows how to make his way into
us through the senses, the imagination and the libido….”
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