A lot of the pictures just looked like oddities–women pretending to be marionettes or with ropes attached in ways that don’t affect how they’re standing.

A lot of what it says to me is that no one expects the clothes to be interesting enough to grab attention if they were shown in normal or attractive contexts.

This link has photos and names of the Board:

http://www.pg.com/news/management/bios_photos.jhtml

Looks like Susan E. Arnold is the Vice-chair of P&G Beauty & Health

Also this link:

http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/19/195341/pdf/media_contact.pdf

which shows that Anitra Marsh - NA Cosmetics (Cover Girl) with a phone number, fax number and email address.

What I mean is that I have no problem with the parts of the show that are: “This week, let’s dress up like colors! This week, let’s dress up like food! This week, let’s dress up like dead people!”, because, good grief, I’m a strange performance-artist type, I think it’s a lot of fun dressing up in any costume someone gives me to put on and playing the part — and the photos they take are definitely artistically sound, if sometimes disturbing — but when they told one very skinny girl to get thinner, some months back, I about threw something at the screen.

It took me a while to figure out that high fashion photography is quite literally about arranging people in still life, which is asking them to participate in a thing, not as voices but as objects. The still life can be naturalistic or absurd, but is not usually supposed to be a medium for messages. Nonetheless, subconscious messages from the creators sometimes slip in by accident.

I was an extra in a movie recently and it was much the same way. Any hint of character from me that did not blend into the background would have gotten me thrown out, or simply edited from the scene.

I’m going to be doing data entry next week and it’s going to be much the same way, except that I’ll be a brain-and-fingers object, not a visual object.

Rarely do any circumstances occur that ask me to participate in a thing with all of myself at once. In employment, especially.

But anyway: I’d like to get together with some people and make that kind of art OUR way.

To show it can be done.

To play with some high-fashion shots and replicate their aesthetic sensibilities with models in front of the camera who are either not conventionally considered “beautiful”, or are people who could walk out their door and be thought of as beautiful but would never fall within the ridiculous standards of a modeling competition.

My partner’s got a great digital camera, and we have space, and I bet I can scrounge together lighting, and really cool clothes for pretty much *anyone.* Probably got to find someone to do makeup, though. I’m only so-so at it.

Actually, in context, I have no problem with the photos: they’re high camp of the “every day is halloween” variety, and that show has a history of doing very, very over-the-top campy things with their photo shoots. It’s surrealism, essentially. Sure it objectifies, but objectification is found at every level of Western culture and probably non-Western culture as well, and we desperately need to reappropriate it.

What I have a problem with is the cultural nonsense that says only people of a certain gender/body type can participate in this sort of thing.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m becoming very interested in taking high-fashion-modeling-style photos of real people — done up in similarly outlandish garb, makeup, and poses, similarly aestheticized… I’ll have to do a lot of research for this project, but I think it could be greatly worth the trouble.

But as regards BDSM in an actual, personal context… which has as little to do with imagery in mass culture as, say, two actual women having sex with each other has to do with a “lesbian” porno… the most basic feature of the experience is trust.

I am not talking about the use of coercion or force. Again, forced bondage is as different from consensual BDSM as rape is from sex. It is possible to be very, very anti-rape without saying that no consensual sex is possible. It is possible even to agree that a situation in which a person agrees to sex without actually wanting it is a rape or coercion situation without saying that there is no way for a person to want sex. Why is this so very different?

If someone lies on top of another person, that person is, by the laws of physics, somewhat restrained. We can use this as a basic example from which other examples follow. If one of my partners lies on top of me or vice versa, and the person underneath doesn’t want it, we’ll say “Good grief, can you get up? I need to go to the bathroom,” or whatever, and … yeah. Same principle applies to bondage.

We had some light bondage play early in our relationship and might again, but these days when someone is feeling dominant or submissive we usually do something simpler: “I want you to close your eyes and lie on your hands.” It works wonders, when the trust is there.

Quite a juxtaposition of time and images; I suppose whoever put this together fancies themselves very edgy and all but why not take it a step futher and use real photos of murdered women. Hell, you wouldn’t even have to photoshop the rope in Tate’s case–it’s already wrapped around her neck.

Let’s celebrate the horror!

Meh. It’s a pretty murky derail.

There’s a difference between arguing that these photos are portraying women’s bodies in misogynistic ways–that they’re symbolically damaging and brutalizing those bodies using imagery typical of bondage erotica and present in BDSM–and arguing that they’re the ultimate expression of BDSM. We don’t need to resolve the nature of BDSM–and the extent to which it might incorporate either unregenerate symbols of bondage and coercion or unchallenged messages of bondage and coercion–in order to evaluate the way in which these pictures are attempting to be erotica or advertisement, either.

We are being told to view these women as sexy. We are also being shown that they are unconscious and/or dead. Furthermore, they seem to have been hung like meat in a shop or sheets on a line. Therefore, this picture carries really disturbing implications wrt to the humanity of women. And–like you’re saying–really disturbing implications wrt what we’re supposed to want to wear, fuck, and be.

I think that these photos are disturbing, although I’m not sure the photographer really meant for them to be as creepy as they seem to me. (That’s probably naive.) It looks as though people here are reading different levels of constraint, discomfort, and animation into the models, so maybe these photographs are the result of internalization rather than conscious manipulation of putative feelings towards women’s bodies. I don’t know.

because there’s no real agency. The women in that picture look, for lack of a better term, like something was done to them. And you can’t see their faces. All in all, a disturbing photo. the only other one that bothers me for similar reasons is the chair photo, because she looks unhappy.

All of the other ones have more of a “participatory’ feel to them. At least to me. And that makes them much, much less offensive, at least to me. Some of them seem completely non problematic to me (the swing photo, the ‘finger hooked on rope’ photo, and the ‘flying’ photo) The rest are a bit more questionable IMO but overall not at all something that I think crosses the line into “violence” or “troubling”.

Ditto, actually. I was looking through the pictures rather blithely until I hit the one on the chair, at which point I said to my partner, “I don’t LIKE that and I don’t know why.”

It’s absolutely the agency, and the unhappiness. (I wasn’t particularly fond of the one with the woman with the rope wound around her legs, either, but I assume that was an attempt to mimic a kind of skirt which is often seen with the type of dress she was wearing.)

I sort of adore the photograph of the woman (descended from Mellon, I think) with the sun embroidery on her chest. Of course, it’s also the photo in which the noose imagery doesn’t really appear.

I don’t know what to make of the NYT photos. I think the analyses of race and money are deeply interesting. There was clearly SOMETHING strange going on in the concept for the photo shoot, but I have no idea what it was, really. Utterly confusing, to me.

And creepy. Of course, I’m not inherently opposed to creepy. I really just don’t know what to think about it, but I think that this kind of critique is necessary. This is certainly one of a set of valid reactions to the photo shoot. It’s inherent in what they did, whatever they were trying to do.

I’m rambling, a bit. The ANTM photos were fascinating, also… the first few werent’ so bad, particularly the poisoning. The stab victim on the red couch who they criticized for still “dying” looked like a glam 1950s shot. I mean, with that camp, it’s hard to take seriously. A few of the others really wrenched me. I would agree with most of what’s been said about their misogyny.

However, I think that both the NYT photo shoot and the ANTM shoot are primarily interesting, as Rachel S. says, within their context. It’s not so much that the NYT shoot is itself completely horrible — though there’s an argument to be made for that — it’s that it exists in part of a dehumanizing context where womens’ bodies are treated violently for titilation. The ANTM shoot is not just part of a camp tradition, but seems to be playing on other, repeated themes, particularly as evidenced by the creepy commentary.

Now, the argument that these misogynistic photos contain the language of BDSM is something that nobody is denying.

But it seems folks see rope and they want the rest of us to believe it’s just a little BDSM scene being portrayed and we just need to chill out so as to see the light.

But nobody here said anything of the sort. Nobody, as far as I can remember - in response to you, claimed that there were no elements - no language - of BDSM in these photos. We have all disputed ONLY that misogyny is inherent in BDSM and that DEATH OF WOMEN is the logical conclusion of the ultimate BDSM fantasy.

*If* they are pictoral representations of BDSM, for which the general public did not give consent, and which only portray bound or dead *women*, then that is nothing buy misogyny using the hip linguistics of BDSM to get its message across.

Nobody is denying the truth of this statement. However, incorporating the “hip linguistics” of BDSM into misogyny doesn’t make misogyny inherent in BDSM. Nor does the depiction of faux murdered women that has incorporated the aforesaid hip linguistics make objectified dead women the logical conclusion of the ultimate BDSM fantasy. That’s a logical fallacy

So, to try to make myself clearer (since I serious doubts about my clarity today):

Nobody denies that there are elements of BDSM in these images.
Several people deny that misogyny is inherent in BDSM.
Several people deny that dead women are the logical conclusion of the ultimate BDSM fanasy.

So, if what you’re saying is that there isn’t misogyny in BDSM, or certainly not misogyny in BDSM as displayed in these photos, then you very well have to admit that you can’t cop a BDSM plea that these photos are acceptable and non-misogynistic. Which isn’t a very clear sentence, I realize. But it seems folks see rope and they want the rest of us to believe it’s just a little BDSM scene being portrayed and we just need to chill out so as to see the light. Tying a woman up, with noose or without, without also depicting the person who tied her up makes me, the viewer, complicit in interpreting this as BDSM - which is pretty fucked up because really the only way these photos become BDSM is if I, the viewer, have internalized the language and meme of BDSM.

FUCK.THAT.NOISE.

Q Grrl, you may have many well thought out reasons for why you find BDSM to be inherently misogynistic, but this isn’t one of them. This simply displays ignorance. Either that or you are equating BDSM with porn, for which I find this argument to be somewhat more compelling, though I don’t buy that either.

In any case, the ANTM photos are something I expect to find in a serial killer’s collection, not something mainstream.

And, dammit, when we ask you to look dead, we want to see some life in you!

Maybe not lynching, but nooses certainly generally imply death. In this context, the implication might be more of the sacrifice of the virgin than lynching, but there’s still an implication of violence.