Rolling 'this is sexist' thread

To market clothes you mean?

a woman pointing a gun into her own mouth, yeah so sexy

to market authenticity

http://img1.etsystatic.com/009/0/6786151/il_570xN.432714737_8jqu.jpg

fashion editorials aren't really 'marketing'

its not really supposed to be sexy? i think its mostly sort of lazily 'commenting' on like vogue photo shoots where tobey maguire and carloyn murphy pretend to have been in 'rear window' and then some empty gesturing towards meaning that doesnt work the minute you start thinking about it, so its sort of lol if you look at other fashion photo spreads and sad if you think about someone saying 'art editorial' out loud at any point. but also it just seems kinda sad to care about this at all really, unless you are a blogger that gets paid to care about stupid stuff like this

I think "people in the process of killing themselves" is a problem, and "women, and only women, in the process of killing themselves" is a problem in an even bigger and probably blinking font. Women's bodies: again just a prop to sell clothes, a look, a magazine, now with 100% more violence and in fact the violence is being done to them by themselves, and that's before even going to the terrible well of these being real people with living children and relatives.

its not really supposed to be sexy? i think its mostly sort of lazily 'commenting' on like vogue photo shoots where tobey maguire and carloyn murphy pretend to have been in 'rear window' and then some empty gesturing towards meaning that doesnt work the minute you start thinking about it

uh it's a commentary of the medium of fashion editorials? lol gtfo

nothing like being above it all

and in true jezebel fashion every image is saved without warning for posterity and page clicks

I really need to see these objectionable, depressing images to get my ire going.

but also it just seems kinda sad to care about this at all really, unless you are a blogger that gets paid to care about stupid stuff like this

― Lamp, Tuesday, June 18, 2013 1:17 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Or if you, I dunno, had had family members or close friends who killed themselves, or tried to, that might be a reason to care about it.

or if you're suicidal

noisey or w/e the music commentary part of vice puts up good stuff sometimes

or if you think the destruction of women is horrifying (xpost)

feel like "suicidal female artist is a trope in this society, everybody can point to a few immediate examples if they were asked to. [the corollary 'suicidal male artists' are allowed to be an exception rather than the rule.] it's definitely not something worth glamorizing, and that draws i think from the larger subject of suicide itself, unless you're gonna dress up in a frocked petticoat and call yourself werther.

"

(sorry)

MODS .... PLEASE close my quotation

vice does lots of good stuff, but since the company itself is totally unstructured and disorganized and theres no real editorial vision there will always be dumb sub-mcinnes horseshit

i feel like yall are reading them like they're autopsy photos, though.

no, we're reading them like they are photos recreating the look/method of suicide for women writers who committed suicide and are making it look visually appealing

I started paging through the rest of the issue (on the web), and I like some of the articles and fiction. Like max said, there's such a mixed bag due to a lack of editorial.

maybe... i feel like visual representations of women are already so... complicated, and, to be imprecise but only because it feels precise, problematic. speaking as a photography buff. also this kind of stuff gets tied women in a way it doesn't for men, maybe because it seems like a fossilized or vestigial (or maybe the opposite: evolved, dynamic and modern) take of the notion of female hysteria, that just by virtue of being a women one was subject to emotional excesses that might ultimately lead to suicide or worse if not curbed. i dunno.

i get why it's kinda fucked up but portraying the suicide of artistic figures in a sexy way is a grand tradition!

― dylannn, Tuesday, June 18, 2013 5:10 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imagining the ILVictorianX reaction to Millais' Ophelia rn

there is already a troubling relationship between female suicide and the word "fashionable", especially with women writers; a fashion spread based on female writer suicides is (not only passe but) about as heavy a contributor to that nastiness as possible

and yeah as 乒乓 said, also a cruddy relationship with photography itself. visual art in general. piling these factors on top of each other is either sensationalist or highly ignorant or probably both

women are more likely to attempt suicide, men are more likely to die from suicide

if this was women dying of old age or disease it'd be a much different photo feature. suicide is, by its nature, highly likely to cause a copycat effect when publicized. I'm more troubled by that aspect than anything.

I'm imagining an old age photo spread inspiring copycats now

the fact that it includes a dorothy-park-a-like slicing her wrists in a sink -- referenced in the shoot, but who did not successfully take her own life -- for me, it uncovers the conceit: these pictures aren't memorial in nature, as the apology claims. a string of pearls is juxtaposed with arterial blood? oh yes, how very glamorous, how very droll.

i don't think it's reprehensible to depict suicide or self-harm-- a lot of female readers check for sylvia plath or woolf because they're interested in, i dunno, the particularly female experience of wanting to hurt yourself, and lots of female writers have covered the same material... and not all of that writing makes suicide or self-harm look like a horrible, disgusting path to take but it's valid and important because feelings about suicide are not often unconflicted.

i feel like it's fair game for a female photographer to reappropriate this imagery... to comment on whatever it is she might be commenting on.

out of the context of this being in an issue of Vice dedicated to women in fiction I have no idea how I'd take it, but their juxtaposition of this art against work and interviews with contemporary writers is gross in a way that Vice tries to pull off when they feel like they might be taken seriously

noisey seems okay to me?

the particularly female experience of wanting to hurt yourself, and lots of female writers have covered the same material

see, while this statistically seems to ring true in some ways, this is actually the sexist bit. that women are into self-harm and suicide in a way men somehow are not.

it's the idea that self-harm is a _choice_ and somehow fundamentally a _"female choice"_ that's getting to me.

if this was a pictorial of men dressed as writers who were known to be violent (or specifically, violent toward women) with scraped knuckles and blood on their hands, would it be ok?

(a bridge too far there, maybe, but...)

yeah, i felt uncomfortable making that statement. i think that statement was based on the amount of women writers that address selfharm vs. male writers on the same topic.

part of what makes the women in the series important is that they wrote about selfharm/suicide in a way that hadn't been done before, right? so it seems unfair to shut down this little college project vice thing for going the same places.

idk -- it's only "part of", and by making the series focus only on the depression/self-harm/suicide issue these writers are once again being reduced only to that aspect.

Hard not to see any statement about female writers & self-harm as some kind of confirmation bias, a bias really promoted by this photo spread.

Wld have been really daring to have some fashion dingdong photo spread based on Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing.

xp to self: like, i wouldn't argue with the idea that one of the most important things in charlotte perkins gilman's writing is how she deals with the question of a woman's mental health -- but placing her in a suicidal-depression pantheon doesn't do anything to highlight that, and in fact obscures our sense of how she described and contextualised the problem of female "madness".

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/talking-female-suicide-right-wrong-vice-way.html

Talking Famous Female Suicide Blues

this is such an unbelievably boring controversy, though i didn't know before that there was a female suicide stereotype so i guess thanks for that

I think "people in the process of killing themselves" is a problem, and "women, and only women, in the process of killing themselves" is a problem in an even bigger and probably blinking font.

out of the context of this being in an issue of Vice dedicated to women in fiction I have no idea how I'd take it, but their juxtaposition of this art against work and interviews with contemporary writers is gross in a way that Vice tries to pull off when they feel like they might be taken seriously

all of this, basically

The styling of the shoot is no big deal, not special, not all that artistic. It's hard to duck fast enough to avoid the message that the only good female writer is a dead female writer, though.

I like that NYMag piece by Michelle Dean.

'female writers suicides' is such a zoolander theme i cant even tho

i was thinking more bruno, but yeah

The styling of the shoot is no big deal, not special, not all that artistic. It's hard to duck fast enough to avoid the message that the only good female writer is a dead female writer, though.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, June 18, 2013 11:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's quite a number of things one can hold against this photoshoot, but 'the only good female writer is a dead female writer'? Not picking up that vibe tbh.

Can't call this a sexist thing either. Mysoginist, appalling, a generally terrible idea? Certainly. But sexist?

wait how can something be misogynist but not sexist i dont understand

it's not true that the only good female writer is a dead one, but in order to be a GREAT writer she's gotta kill herself.

i'm sorry if that's a bit flippant but there's the fallacy of genius as madness and then there's the notion (cited in the article zavhlyon posted) that the only violence a woman can commit is against herself so... here we are, i guess

Rob Delaney Tweeted this: I just saw the VICE female author suicide fashion show and had a hearty LOL. I say this as a mentally ill person under a doctor's care.

...but seems to have removed it. He goes into more detail here, and it's interesting even if I disagree with some/most/a lot/all-ish of it:

http://robdelaney.tumblr.com/post/53302764977/hi-rob-im-a-huge-fan-i-love-all-your-writings-on