Saw this on Yahoo! today: Photographer Tyler Shields does a photo shoot of Glee star, Heather Morris, in a classic 1950s get-up, complete with iron cord wrapped wrists and a black eye. What??
Of course, there was a violent uproar about these not-so-subtle illustrations of domestic violence. Shields had something to say to that: "'In no way were we promoting domestic violence,' Shields tells E! News. 'We wanted to do a bruised-up Barbie shoot and that's exactly what we did!'" (yahoo.com).
Oh, okay, that explains it.
Yahoo!'s, Piper Weiss responds to Shield's comment: "Isn't turning a young actress into a doll enough of a talker without also beating her up? At this point, it's not even worth a debate to add more fuel to the fire. What needs to happen is an internal snub from the fashion industry to assert that that kind of attention-baiting is unacceptable. It's become an industry-standard publicity measure, and one that wouldn't fly in any other field. Fashion thrives on controversy, but abuse against women isn't even controversial, it's just off limits" (yahoo.com).
I agree with Weiss. As if the fashion industry doesn't objectify women enough.
A point made in Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" relates to this very idea. Millett talks about the psychological impression that patriarchal society has made on women. Like minority groups, she says, the psychological traits of "group self-hatred and self-rejection" (36) have been found to be present in women, as well. She says these are "the result of that continual, however, subtle, reiteration of her inferiority which she eventually accepts as a fact" (37). Can looking at these photos of a "bruised up Barbie" contribute to this internalized sexism? Not only is a woman compared to an impossible doll (as someone pointed out earlier in this blog), but her bruises are glamorized in an ad campaign. How do these types of campaigns that are circulating through our society affect woman's view of herself?
To read the full article and see more of Shields' photos, click here.
Last week I tried to respond to this post but something happened and my comment got erased before I could post it. And while that was really upsetting at the time, it's given me some time to think about what I wrote and what I was trying to say. The result is that this new comment is not at all what I wanted to say initially.
ReplyDeleteThe ORIGINAL original comment that I set out to write said something about "the glamorization violence towards women in the fashion industry" which I had the immediate urge to change to, "the EXPLICIT violence toward women in the fashion industry." It annoyed me that I had to add the qualifier, but instead of thinking much about it, I went on my merry way cataloguing instances of glamorized domestic abuse in recent fashion media and getting angry about it. But then, as I mentioned, chaos ensued and the comment vanished.
Since then, I've thought a lot about the pesky qualifier and what I meant by "explicit violence toward women" as opposed to just the regular old kind of "violence toward women." That is to say, why did I not just feel compelled, but obligated, to qualify the violence as "explicit"? One must conclude that it is because I believe that there is an implicit violence towards women in the fashion industry. And I do, it turns out.
We hear a lot about "what women used to have to go through to be beautiful." Corsets get mentioned a lot. We all know that corsets were bad and women who wore them often caused irreparable damage to their internal organs in the name of living up to an impossible standard of beauty. This conversation is usually followed by a sigh of relief at how far we've come. But have we really? A whole array of garments - from control-top pantyhose to "shapers" - are widely available (and encouraged) throughout the U.S.. Although these garments are probably less physically harmful, they still send the message that women's bodies need to be "controlled." Instead of "controlling" and "shaping" with corsets, women today are taking new avenues to subdue their bodies.
Typing "diet" into Google yields 110 million results. From weight-loss programs to supplements to pro-anorexia blogs ("anorexia tips" yields almost six million results), it's not hard for women to find confirmation about their negative body image, or develop an eating disorder. And then there's cosmetic surgery to "shape" the areas that have already been "controlled." All of the above are not just mentally harmful, but they are oftentimes physically harmful and even life threatening.
And so, even though I think it is important to discourage and even publicly decry the glamorization of domestic violence in the fashion industry, I think that it's equally important to realize that shoots like "bruised-up Barbie" are caricatures of real problems that exist in the fashion industry, false black eyes or not. I think it’s important for women to take a stand for their bodies and for their mental well-being. To be upset about “bruised-up Barbie” but not about the larger, subtler issues at hand sends a mixed message, which cannot resolve itself.