Letters to the Editor
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This is reprehensible
This is totally unacceptable to me -- necro-porn disguised as entertainment, as in the billboards that just got taken down in LA. for a movie I won't dignify by naming. And I speak as the husband of a murder mystery writer! Murder mysteries are at least appeals to morals -- the good guy wins, and murder will out -- and intellectual puzzle-solving; this is trying to make link sexuality with murder in a visual and visceral way for shock value, and then critiquing those who aren't awful enough. This is nothing but reprehensible.
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Yes, it's disgusting
And it's been a staple of high fashion for a very long time to showcase women as victims of violence to sell handbags, shoes and dresses and I'll be sending a letter to Tyra Banks that to showcase women as victims of violence and make jokes out of it is not acceptable or funny. Oooh the girls are so catty they murdered each other!
Hey ladies, want to look sexy even when you're dead, buy these shoes!
But hey, killing young beautiful women has pretty much been the staple visual of the horror movie industry.
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And that's the way the modeling industry is
Okay, this is absolutely disgusting (just looked at some of the pictures and had to give up).
But America's Next Top Model attempts to prepare novices for what the world of modeling actually is, not what it should be.
Now, whether America's Next Top Model should aim higher is another matter.
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rigamortis?
That's "rigor mortis." Are there no copy editors left at Salon?
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more rigamortis
Maybe it's like rigatoni.
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I loved the photos
But who am I to judge art, especially if I'm watching America's Next Top Model to begin with.
Bad girl, bad! I'm a disgrace to all womanhood and don't deserve the breasts and vagina I was so wrongly born with! Next, I'll be boldly claiming I can hold two disparate thoughts in my head, like violence against women is wrong and fictional representations of it are not.
As penance, I'll throw a blue drape over The Rape of the Sabine Women.
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To compare the Rape of the Sabine women to
ANTM is awful. ANTM uses those pictures to glamorize and perpetuate that violence against women is nothing to be shocked at, just another day in the modeling world. The Rape of the Sabine women was painted because that's how people in the past got their history, from painting because most people could not read. It did not glamorize carrying women off as prizes of war and the painting pretty much reflects how horrible it was. That same painter also painted the Raft of the Medusa, depiciting the drowing deaths of sailors.
Those photos are not high art, they are high fashion, meaning overpriced clothing which means they are advertisements which is why at the side bar in fashion mags is listed who made which articles of clothing so you can go out and buy it too.
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Thanks Keith
We've made the correction.
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It gets worse!
Apparently, one of the models-in-training learned just before this shoot that her friend had died from an overdose. And then had to pretend to be dead herself for the camera.
Ah, reality TV.
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These are directly cribbed from the art photography of Melanie Pullen
http://www.highfashioncrimescenes.com/
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Speaking as a former EMT ...
... I'm offended too, but maybe for slightly different reasons than most posters. What offends me is not so much the sexualization of violence (though that's pretty high on the creep factor too) but the simple idea that death looks good.
It doesn't. Modeling is about looking good; death is about the ugliest thing there is.
People whose experience of death's appearance comes from seeing bodies in funeral parlors after the morticians have worked on them simply have no idea what a newly-minted corpse looks like. None of these models look remotely like a murder victim. People who have just been stabbed or shot or strangled:
- Don't strike elegant poses. The body twitches and rolls a lot during (and sometimes just after) violent death. Victims invariably look awkward, no matter how graceful they may have been in life.
- Don't have carefully draped clothing with just a couple of strategically placed holes or tears.
- Are grotesquely discolored; very soon after death, shades of purple and green and blue that just aren't seen on living flesh appear all over the lower parts of the body.
- Almost always are covered in their own bodily waste. That's the way it is, folks: you die, the sphincters let go. I don't see any yellow and brown puddles surrounding these models.
Most likely, if this photo shoot had involved making the models look like real murder victims, everyone involved (models, photographers, and show producers alike) would have bowed out as soon as they realized what was involved. As it is, they're in the same category as the armchair warriors who cheer the TV footage of the war in Iraq -- they love the missiles firing, the planes zooming off carrier decks, the tanks rumbling through the desert, but if they ever saw what goes on at the sharp end, they'd scream and cry and piss their pants.
I would challenge any one of the people involved in "America's Next Top Model" to spend a day volunteering in a trauma center ER to get a better understanding of what the hell they're playing with. But there wouldn't be much point; like the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, they're much happier in fantasy land.
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let's hear it for viewpoint discrimination
as part of my hegemony of being a patriarchal white male, i love watching america's next top model.
but that's probably because i really enjoy farce.
anyone who takes america's next top model seriously is not responding to the evidence.
leaving aside the normative claims about ANTM's treatment of women, the women who are on that show are heifers, by fashion standards.
and just for the sake of pointing it out--claiming that i'm simply ignorant of my own attitudes will be taken as evidence that you don't expect me to take you seriously.
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It's a show about modeling.
The whole point, ostensibly, is to learn how to be in fartsy "couture" photographs. I mean, if they'd actually beaten them, sure. But, and I say this as a female person who actually kind of loves this show, there are about seventeen different appalling things about it in line ahead of this. It's photography, for heaven's sake.
The art director of the shoot wasn't aware of the death of that one contestant's friend. It's not like they arranged it for maximum exploitation.
Teaching girls how to look pretty when they're in weird positions is actually one of the more useful things this show offers. They wear ridiculous makeup in pretty much every shot. Last week the costumes were made entirely of candy - should I clutch my pearls now about women being portrayed as food?
Also, have you seen a couture photograph lately? The only difference between those ANTM shots and an ad for a $1800 bag is a few pounds and some spirit gum. At least these girls were supposed to look dead.