"After inhabiting Los Angeles for three years, I am alarmingly accustomed to glancing up at billboards towering over Venice Boulevard or Third Street and seeing what look like female corpses staring down at me with blackened eyelids and sunken cheeks. I often wonder how these advertisements could possibly inspire customers to buy these companies’ products; I usually look at them in disgust, shake my head, and avert my eyes until I am well past them. However, these billboards must appeal to many people—mostly women, I assume, since females are typically the ones purchasing what these manufacturers have to sell—because the advertising campaigns featuring “dead models” continue to be created. This fascinating disturbing issue, one that your post focuses on, is fundamental in understanding how modern women perceive beauty. What captures our attention, stimulates, and entertains us about images of male-upon-female violence and deceased women?
One explanation for females’ attraction to images of dead looking peers could be that they have been conditioned to accept the attractiveness of often emaciated women displayed in submissive positions by males’ attraction to these images. For thousands of years, men have been conditioned both by biology and society to be more aggressive and strong than women; as a consequence, men have developed a taste for weak and helpless women whom they could idealize, protect, and, perhaps, dominate—all to increase their feelings of masculinity and self-worth. This socially ingrained tradition of portraying women and soft, gentle, dependent, and weak eventually led to the advertisements and media portrayals utilizing scrawny and dead looking women or displaying violence against women that are seemingly ubiquitous today.
Although I realize the possible origins of this phenomenon, I am continually confused by its appeal, as I mentioned earlier. For example, do men watch fictional footage of other men forcing women to submit to them through rape or sexual assault and find it primarily sexually arousing? And if so, is it simply because some form of sex is being displayed, or is it actually because men desire to dominate helpless women? The description of the TV show that you mentioned in your post is an example of the kind of media that I am talking about:
'Television crime shows are often riddled with clichés -- from the tough-yet-committed cop to the black morally upright commanding officer -- but one cliché in particular stands out for its exposure of society's fascination with and ultimately its tolerance for violence against women. Make that attractive, barely dressed women.
It's the female crime victim you see every night: beautiful, tortured and dead…
…"In the opening minutes of the new Fox crime show 'Killer Instinct' (9 p.m. Friday, Fox), deadly spiders bite a sleeping woman; she wakes up, but is soon immobilized by the spiders' poison. Conscious but terrified, she's powerless to prevent a man from breaking into her apartment and raping her."'
This description reminds me of an episode of the new and popular TV show Dexter I saw recently that depicted a young, attractive woman lying spread eagle in a hotel room bed, her limbs tied to the four bedposts, screaming and bleeding as she was about to be raped by her male captor and torturer. Even though the male character was eventually shown as being arrested for his violence against the female, the fact that the act itself was displayed on national television is problematic.
What kinds of ideas are we giving to potential rapists and batterers? But even more generally, how are all male viewers reacting to this kind of portrayal? I would guess that they are highly stimulated by seeing such an act. Perhaps some merely experience stimulation through suspense because they want to save the helpless woman, but perhaps there are others who feel excited by the prospect of sexually invading a woman’s body, thereby treating her as a piece of meat to be bled and consumed. Understanding why these images pervade our culture and what effects they may have on both men and women is necessary for gender awareness."
