Let's make people aware of violence against women!

By making it sexy.

But you don't know it was done by another person! Maybe she just walked into a sexy, glittery doorknob or something! So chic!


I'd end this with "shoot me" but that'd be a bit too contrary to my point.
RAGE.

Okay, why are we mad? I can't read Russian, so I don't know what the ad says, buuut rather than glorifying and sexifying the act of violence (see: every horror movie where a hot girl or hot guy gets attacked in the shower or locker room), it instead sort of expands on the idea of beauty? Like, okay, these are obviously models with clavicles that could put your eye out, but they are scarred. Despite that, they are still rather gorgeous.

I mean, the message is a little heavy-handed, but, I dunno, I kinda like it. I understand how you can read it as 'victimized women are hot', but I think it's more an idea of 'these women are beautiful, despite their scars'. If you take it as a metaphor, you can see it as: 'women are beautiful, never mind the fact that they have baggage/a past/etc.' I dunno. Maybe I'm overthinking it.

I would read that message except

1) All of these scars etc are deliberate violent actions. Glascow grin, slit throat, fat lip, none of those could be considered accidents. So we do have violence in there.

I'm all for being proud of scars and flaws. But there's a different between "hey, look, I have stretch marks and they're ok!" or "Man, I hit my thigh on the corner of a table and got a huge bruise, but whatever". These fetishize the violence themselves.

2) This is all make-up. If we're glorifying scars and accepting flaws as beautiful, why go so far to ~delicately recreate them~ out of glittery make-up? Why not find a woman with a real birth mark or who has burn scarring and photograph her all dolled up?

We're not looking at real people with real stories here. We're looking at models who oridinarily don't have these flaws having them applied temporarily to make an attention-grabbing statement. Plus, the whole "body acceptance" falls through the floor when you take off the make-up, these girls just look like models.


My three cents, anyway.

Sakurelf wrote:

I would read that message except

1) All of these scars etc are deliberate violent actions. Glascow grin, slit throat, fat lip, none of those could be considered accidents. So we do have violence in there.

I'm all for being proud of scars and flaws. But there's a different between "hey, look, I have stretch marks and they're ok!" or "Man, I hit my thigh on the corner of a table and got a huge bruise, but whatever". These fetishize the violence themselves.

I can agree with you on the second point -- the only reason I can think of is 'because that's the way the modelling world works' -- but the first point? I'm not sure. I wasn't saying there's no violence in the pictures, but we're looking at the product of it rather than the act of it.

Okay, the modelling world is probably one of the most unhealthy products in our mass-media culture right now, what with the whole tyranny of traditional beauty that has to be this high and this thin, but... I don't know, this is more experimental, I guess? It explores the way in which female victims are looked at. They are victims, sure, but there's more to it than that. In the modelling world, 'something more' naturally translates to conventional beauty, but still. I'd sooner see this pictures as empowering battered women rather than fetishizing the domestic crimes committed against women.

However, I'll grant you that these pictures and their message are ambiguous as hell, and your viewpoint could be equally valid as mine.

Is it wrong that the first thing I thought when I saw this thread title and the name of the link was the Hitman: Absolution trailer?

I've got a friend who knows Russian. I'm going to forward this page to her and see if she can get the gist of what's actually being said. It's hard to tell what their intentions actually without being able to understand what it says.

Here's her answer:

I'm awful at Russian but here's what I can make out:

Test of credentials: something about pictures (snap-shots) not being suitable for those under age 16, or for those with weak nerves.

The pictures in the photo set suggest more general violence, and the play of suffering and beauty. Actually, given the title and the places of the cuts (on the nose, across the lips-- common places for cosmetic surgery) and burns (tanning?) it suggests that violence should not be the route women have to take to make themselves lovely; they already are. Of course, this rings hollow with a bunch of thin pretty white ladies telling you it, but I don't think it's selling domestic violence or violence against women.
This is all just BS conjecture on my part, however. I'm not sure if it's glamorizing violence.

I wish I could still read Cyrillic-I took two years of Russian in high school and was actually pretty good at it, though I've forgotten everything except how to summon a waiter and how to say 'Good Morning' and 'Good-bye.'

That page isn't in Russian, even though it's using the cyrillic alphabet. My guess would be Bulgarian, but I'm not 100% on that.

I think the campaign is trying to do a good thing here; those women look strong and like they're owning their (presumably tragic) pasts, and being lovely despite (or perhaps because of) them. I think that's a pretty positive message overall, though I can definitely see how it could be seen as the objectification of such scars. And how a message about beauty surpassing a physical scar might miss a bit when delivered on models who happen to fit exactly into the societal idea of beauty.

I have to say, that first picture, with the woman in the red dress? Gorgeous and startling. It's great photography even if you don't like the message.