We’re surrounded by images very like the one at the link above on a daily basis. If women aren’t actively inviting objectification, “deflowerment” or merely “ravishment” (ie forced sex, rape), then they’re looking pained and frightened and hungry and vulnerable. I’ve seen so many images like this one that I just sort of shrugged and went, “Yeah, another oh-boy-she-likes-it fuck fest circle jerk.”
Whatever.
Then I read the script underneath it. About how the “reason” fashion designers are putting out ads like this because they want to remain “cutting edge.” Though I’m sure this particular writer was just making an educated guess with that wording, I’d suspect the designers themselves would say something really similiar.
After all, if we’re not beating up women in new and interesting ways in fashion ads, how are we going to remain new and interesting and cutting edge? If we don’t beat up women, nobody will even pay attention! They won’t want to buy these sexy clothes that invite men to beat them up. And what man doesn’t want to beat up a woman wearing these clothes!
What gets me about so many -isms running rampant in mass media isn’t even that it’s just fucking wrong. It’s that it’s fucking lazy. You put a bunch of fresh young people in a room and we come out with the same sexist, racist, classist bullshit we’ve been churning out for the last fifty years.
Dear producers of mass media and writers writing about mass media,
Stylized rape isn’t cutting edge. I could link to about a bazillion other ads just like this one.
Gory shots of female crime victims? Not cutting edge.
Raping women to show just how bad your bad guys are? Not cutting edge. (yes, even if the person allowing it to continue is female)
Women doing laundry dressed in thongs and pearls? Not cutting edge (yes, even if she’s doing a superhero’s laundry).
What frustrates me so much, reading and writing SF, is to see just how much we all keep rehashing the same old shit. I’ve come to expect it from the fashion industry, you know? But there’s this assumption that the brutal treatment of women is a universally human thing. That we’ll just always do this. That it’s always been this way and will always be this way.
In a genre that’s supposed to show us how things can be really different, that should challenge us to think beyond our assumptions, seeing even the stuff that gets high praise relying on the same sad assumptions of race and class (the way things are now is the way they will always be) is fucking depressing.
We can sit around and putz with SF gadgets and teleporters and FTL all day, but plugging in a new technology, a people on a new planet, and making everybody think and act in exactly the way they would today, without said technologies, here on this planet, is fucking lazy, and it takes all the gosh-wow-how-cool feeling from it. I just can’t take your gadgetry seriously when your blond secondary female love interest only shows up to flirt with and fuck the geeky, misunderstood protagonist(for example – I am picking on BSG with the links, but I’m thinking primarily of Heinlein).
Obviously, SF isn’t the only place where this happens, as seen in the fashion links above, but these are the sorts of things that influence us on a level we don’t think about and aren’t often aware of until after the fact, when we realize the only reason we included our heroine getting raped was to give her sufficient motivation to severely injure a guy. Because unless she was raped, you know, hurting a guy like that just wouldn’t be OK (yes, I did this in GW. I have since taken out the rape backstory).
We all do this stuff. We put shit in there without thinking about it. These assumptions become so invisible – like het privledge, male privledge, white priviledge – that you just don’t see them anymore. You take them for granted. And so you just keep on perpetuating them.
I want to see something really fucking cutting edge, all right. I want to see a fashion ad with powerful women who don’t get beat up or shit on or hung by the neck, women who don’t look starved and frightened. I want to see somebody thinking outside of the fucking box. And it’s sad that even something as simple as that would be so fucking different that people would sit up and take notice. So. Fucking. Simple.
Sure I’d love to see something cutting edge.
But this isn’t it.
