Dead Girls Sell (trigger warning?)

[82_28]

I remember one time these parents of this Christian friend of mine were lamenting the fact that there were the "Victoria's Secret Awards" or some shit. This was back in the late 90s. They just couldn't believe it.

I said, so you watch all these DVDs and shows which feature scantily clad women but you can only accept a scantily clad woman when she is dead and some detective is poring over her body after she has been fictitiously murdered? Living women are off limits in the media, but the depiction of sexy dead ones are acceptable in the media? Obviously, no answer.

I had my first full blown panic attack during Silence of the Lambs as a kid. Now every goddamn show on TV features dead women and has for some time and far too long.

Good post and topic, Jack. Dead chicks sell.

[bks]

Excellent observation there, JR.

Dead girls are the logical extreme of the silent girl. The silenced girl/woman (symbolically or literally) is a fixture of advertising and film. (Horrific images redacted)

The re-aestheticization of adolescent death probably also can be read as a twisted rendering of the socioeconomic zeitgeist. Avoid the indignity of failing to reach your potential, and allow the rest of us to avoid the guilt and shame of ruining the world for young people! Die young and beautifully.

[IanEye]

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disco is dead




ethyl is dead



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Mytyl - Tyltyl

id - superego

v

eggo

"Aren't you coming with us?"
"No," said Light.
"The time for that has not arrived. Light cannot yet enter among the Dead.
Besides, there is nothing to fear. I shall not be far away; and those who love me and whom I love always find me again...."

She had not finished speaking, when everything around the Children changed.
The wonderful temple, the dazzling flowers, the splendid gardens vanished to make way for a poor little country cemetery, which lay in the soft moonlight.
Near the Children were a number of graves, grassy mounds, wooden crosses and tombstones.
Tyltyl and Mytyl were seized with terror and hugged each other:

"I am frightened!" said Mytyl.

"I am never frightened," stammered Tyltyl, who was shaking with fear, but did not like to say so.

*



*

[JackRiddler]

Just to add some complications, two observations or reminders.

1) This is about death. Allow me to riff on death for a little bit, okay? It's been around a lot longer than girls. Life's single biggest single fact. The inevitable aim of it, as Freud said. Generally the biggest human fear and source of denial. Also the precondition for all of our lives. We live through the death of whatever we eat. We are here in a sense because all of our forbears died to make room. Billions of people died in reproducing us. They made us, and they're almost all dead. Sometimes we love them, sometimes we worship them. Dressing death up in a pleasurable guise is a big thing in a lot of cultures - Day of the Dead, a holiday. Skulls and eyeblack. Maybe the appeal of zombie marches is as a kind of nerdy post-mod version of that. Not to mention goths and such. Now I think of memento moris and the more recent funeral parlor aesthetics. (Jessica Mitford calling, with her "The American Way of Death," reporting on the funeral industry's concept of the "beautiful memory picture," i.e., the dressed and waxed-up corpse. "He looks so peaceful!" "They did such a good job!" This is the picture you will always have.)

Personifying death as an attractive, sexualized image may rob it of its sting, at least for a moment. But it also works the other way around: invoking death, the death force if you will, calls up a passion. It's serious, intense, sad, shocking, hyper-real, it causes us to be very present and centered in the moment. It isn't simply that death is sexualized but that death or its stylized likeness can make images sexier.

2) What is by far the most common image of a dead person in all history, the most contemplated and frequently reproduced, still today all over the world? It's not Ophelia and it's not a woman. I'm not going to make a riddle of it, we all know the answer. Isn't it often sexualized? Don't tell me it isn't. What's that about? Is the BDG wave a form of response to Him?


Fibreglass Jesus. Apparently made in China?


Just 4 Kids Magazine?!


Tattoo. Sexay.


Yeah well.


Can you believe this idiot?


Entourage


"Superstar"


Pieta

[compared2what?]

I had my first full blown panic attack during Silence of the Lambs as a kid. Now every goddamn show on TV features dead women and has for some time and far too long.

Good post and topic, Jack. Dead chicks sell.

I think you just won my heart forever and ever with the sheer genius of your intuitive association. I would never have thought of that movie in connection with this topic, because although it does have dead girls in water, they're not the right kind -- real dead, not pale and romantic dead. But tonally speaking, you're completely right that all those mermaid-hair neo-suicide nymphs in the OP evoke the same kind of horror and unease as Silence of the Lambs does, except that it does it much more powerfully.

I didn't exactly have a panic attack the first time I saw it, but I definitely left the theater in kind of an altered state. A mildly dissociative state, basically. I remember standing on the sidewalk outside the theater looking at the streetlight hitting the pavement and feeling vaguely confused about what time of day it was. And....Not sure, but IIRC, in one form or another, that was a pretty common response, back when it came out.

Anyway. I've always loved that movie. It's a personal all-time favorite, even. But one of the chief things I love about it is that (imo) what makes it so very frightening and uniquely, persistently disquieting is that it's about the horror of misogyny.*** Which is real. And inescapable. And a blight to the souls of all, whether male or female. So it kind of makes you feel like you're covered with some vile substance that you can't wipe off your skin, or something. Very uncomfortable.
____________________

***In the event that it's not very readily apparent what the hell I mean by that, I mean that the movie is a horrified reflection on misogyny, which it also depicts.

Primarily via (a) her experience (beautiful young woman cynically selected by asshole boss to do something dangerous, maybe lethal, that she's not prepared for who's met everywhere with hostility and sexual aggression -- by not only Miggs but also Chilton, for example); and (b) Jame Gumb's gender pathology (as summarized by Hannibal Lecter: "Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual" -- ie, loosely speaking, "He hates himself and therefore naturally believes he's a woman.")

And in other ways too. But those are the basics.

[compared2what?]

2) What is by far the most common image of a dead person in all history, the most contemplated and frequently reproduced, still today all over the world? It's not Ophelia and it's not a woman. I'm not going to make a riddle of it, we all know the answer. Isn't it often sexualized? Don't tell me it isn't. What's that about? Is the BDG wave a form of response to Him?

I think it's an emulation to some extent. And in a more diffuse kind of a way, I think it's also very much the product of a Christianized cultural worldview, without being, in itself, culturally Christian. That might not be saying much, though. Pretty much all visual imagery originating in the West from the Rennaissance onward is, in one way or another. I mean, that is western culture, more or less. But fwiw, I believe that eroticized passive virgins are a distinctly post-Christian phenomenon of western origin that became universal over time. Sacrificial virgins were a thing, of course. But they weren't an erotic thing. They were basically the same as a lamb or fatted calf, except human and female.

...

I don't know. But as far as I can recall, virgins were strong when they were sexual in the pre-Christian era. Vestal, for example..
_______________________

Anyway. Just wrt Christian religious art, I think the more direct precursor is probably more like this:







That clearly incorporates and is intended to recall the suffering of the Christ, though. So six of one, in a way.

[The Consul]

My brother worked in a Funeral home and I worked in a butcher shop. He had to work on christmas once because some old lady died and they were expecting visitors that day. Mom wanted me to take my brother a plate of food. The dead lady, She was really old. My brother was certain no on would show. Normally you don't get to spend much time with the dead. So I just kind of stood there and looked at her with no emotional entrapment. She had a scar on the back of her hand. I figured out that she was old enough she lived through all kinds of shit. I tried to picture her life, her voice. Tried to imagine what she looked like when she was young. What she thought was cool before anything was cool. Then my brother snuck up behind me and said "you like her, wait till I show you who's downstairs." There had been an accident of a car coming over the divide. There was a dead girl downstairs "they just did her last night". My waves of revulsion met with a curiosity that wouldn't back down, not unless I smashed it. So you want to see her - she's hot. All the dead people I had seen wore clothes. I hadn't yet seen any dead my age. She was coming home from college and hit a patch of ice. My brother had become pretty jaded about it all because once he got trapped under a dead fat lady who died in a fire and her bubbly flesh oozed out of the bag and pressed him up against the bannister of the old rooming house. He kept at it, though, for a while - longer than I could stomach the butcher shop. Come on, he said, come on downstairs. No way. I ain't going down there. No, he said, you got to see it, it's really something. Hey, I won't even lift up the sheet. But I couldn't do it. Anyway I figured he was just yanking my chain. Back home I looked at the girl's picture on the front page of the paper. I felt this strange connection to her, it definitely swept away the normal christmas hohos. I did see a dead woman years later who was not in a casket. She was in a car in the parking spaces where I lived. Speculation settled on pills. I did not know she was dead at the time, though. I just thought she was sitting there, thinking, like people do in cars sometimes, just sitting there, thinking, trying to figure out what she was going to do next. The seat leaned back. I had seen her plenty of times. She lived above us and was pretty quite except for the occasional squeeky bed. Laughter, moans, music, running water, foot steps. Until recently where there was a long quite stretched followed by screaming and the night she threw all her potted plants off of her terrace. Still, even though I didn't know her other than a half dozen hellos, I felt kind of guilty. She might have been alive. Was it some kind of perversion that I wanted her to be alive as I caught her in the corner of my eye - So I might have been able to save her? I might have been able to make a difference? That guilt seemed so necessary and it glowed like a dimming phosphorescent crucifix in the darkness of my mind. You can only notice it after you have stayed perfectly still in that darkness for a while, a long while. Wait and wait for that barely visible light to float up to you out of the darkness.

[Sepka]

[quote="JackRiddler"] sepka, notice that in your Victorian example of death on Penny Dreadful covers males are the majority. That is no longer the case. If a body is fronted to attract attention, it's almost always female. (Again, we're talking about frontispiece and promotional images, not inside the book or script where it's usually males dying in the highest numbers, depending on genre and work.)
[quote]

That looks a fascinating book. I'll see if I can't find that!

With the evidence I have at hand, though, I'm finding myself tending toward the opposite conclusion of the book blurb - I think that the cover corpses represent 'self', not 'other', to the reader.

The overwhelming majority of the penny dreadfuls were written by men, and designed to be read by boys, and most of the dead people on the covers were male. By contrast, it's remarkably hard to find any information from publishers breaking down the modern YA market by gender. The studies have been done, I'm sure, but the data isn't shared for one or another reason.

That being said, I think that modern YA books seem to be read more by girls than boys. A librarian friend confirms that teenage boys check out a great deal less YA fiction than do girls. That's anecotal, of course, but it lines up well with what I understand from younger friends and acquaintances, that most YA books (with occasional exceptions such as 'Harry Potter' or 'The Hunger Games') are seen as being meant for girls. Certainly, most of the prominent and successful YA authors are female.

What strikes me here is that we've gone from a male-dominated genre that often featured pictures of dead men on the covers, to a female-dominated genre that often features pictures of dead women on the covers. The portrayals of death are never horrible - the dead are nicely posed, and could be asleep but for the situational elements. I don't think there are any gender differences on display here. What's being seen across the years is that young people's literature tends to favour book covers with dead people on the cover, and those dead people tend to be the same gender as the intended reader.

[compared2what?]

What strikes me here is that we've gone from a male-dominated genre that often featured pictures of dead men on the covers, to a female-dominated genre that often features pictures of dead women on the covers. The portrayals of death are never horrible - the dead are nicely posed, and could be asleep but for the situational elements. I don't think there are any gender differences on display here. What's being seen across the years is that young people's literature tends to favour book covers with dead people on the cover, and those dead people tend to be the same gender as the intended reader.

Only if the only thing you see across the ages is contemporary YA literature featuring images of dead females on the cover and Victorian-era penny dreadfuls featuring dead males on the cover, while perceiving nothing about the iconography of either except the gender and unalive-ness of the central figures.

Because otherwise, there are some pretty difficult-to-miss gender differences on display.

[JackRiddler]

Also, Y.A. is only one of several genres and media displaying forms of this phenomenon. Above I did a rough survey: fashion shoots, covers of detective novels, posters for horror and other movie genres, comic book covers, soft necroporn sequences in the CSI-type shows, etc.

[compared2what?]

Also. juvenile literature and YA aren't really the same thing. But never mind.

[compared2what?]

Also, Y.A. is only one of several genres and media displaying forms of this phenomenon.

I've got to say, though....The YA thing is the most disturbing part of it, to me. And I also thing it's a relatively recent trend. Last thirty years or so, maybe. As such, eroticized images of prone, lifeless and/or helpless women have been very big sellers in gazillion genres to a wide variety of male, female and mixed demos for quite a while. It's not all that unusual to see them being used purely for their commercial value, even when they don't particularly signify anything death-y about the female, as for example:



The still-pure-apparently-dead subgenre seems to me to be a slightly different thing, because it virtually always signifies some kind of first-order loss and sorrow, if not literal death. And because it suggests martyrdom, sacrifice and suicide. (The first two via imagery derived from Christ crucified, as you noted.)

So, you know. It's extra-horrible to see adolescent girls flocking to it.

I mean, just by itself, the aura of silence/voicelessness in those YA book covers is a very distressing thing to think of young girls routinely finding highly relatable.

Know what I mean?

[battleshipkropotkin]

Lady in the Water
Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida, 1947. Photo by Toni Frissell.


Photographed by Toni Frissell for Harper's Bazaar; colorized by Michael Catanachapodaca, 2012.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/teenag ... ect,31061/

Teenage Girl Blossoming Into Beautiful Object
News • Local • ISSUE 49•05 • Jan 29, 2013

ARLINGTON, TX—Calling the transformation both delightful and stunning, friends and family members confirmed Tuesday that 17-year-old Ashley Parker was blossoming into an absolutely gorgeous object.

According to Parker’s relatives, in the span of 14 months, the high school junior underwent a staggering metamorphosis from a young girl with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations into a truly stunning commodity.

“Ashley has really developed into quite a striking assemblage of physical attributes that are found to be sexually attractive in our culture,” said Parker’s uncle Keith Hayes, expressing astonishment at how his niece had steadily matured from a precocious youth into a shapely, ravishing thing devoid of intellect and personality. “It’s hard to believe that she used to be that little girl [capable of subjective experiences] that I remember. Now look at her—she’s such a lovely vessel for displaced sexual frustration and voyeuristic lust, just like her mother.”

“Seems like just yesterday she was this creative 7-year-old kid, pretending her Barbie was the first woman president,” Hayes added. “My, they grow into little more than consumer goods so quickly.”

Marveling at the rite of passage that all females make from girlhood into entirely disempowered objecthood, Hayes expressed confidence that the 17-year-old would one day become a highly prized physical possession for “one lucky guy.”

Parker’s classmates at Wakefield High School were also reportedly captivated by the adolescent’s transition from a young woman into an eye-catching repository for male gratification. High school senior Kevin Turner said that Parker had become a particularly alluring instrument of purely physical pleasure in the months since she was a young, conscious, independent preteen girl.

“I grew up with Ashley and never thought much of her before, but over the last year or so, I really started to see her for the beautiful little piece of equipment she is,” said Turner, expressing enthusiasm for how the teen had evolved into a dazzling sexual apparatus. “I’m thinking of asking that mere receptacle to prom.”

“Take a look at it,” added Turner of the former human being. “I can think of a lot of things I’d like to do with that.”

Edmund Powell, Parker’s history teacher, echoed the sentiment of many pupils, claiming that he was impressed by the junior’s transformation from an honor roll student and sentient human being into a lovely piece of meat.

“Ashley used to be one of the brightest and best students in my class,” said Powell, recalling the former girl who once consisted of more than a single, surface-deep dimension. “But, wow, now you’d have to say that she’s something very special. Something very special indeed.”

While Parker’s mother Stacey was reportedly certain that her daughter would make a beautiful and unthinkingly gracious trophy someday, the 38-year-old cautioned Ashley not to get her hopes up about finding the perfect money bags right away.

The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age. ©Copyright 2012 Onion Inc. All rights reserved

[Nordic]

There is a whole genre of this on Instagram, produced by the girls themselves. It seems to be all the rage in a 12-14 year old demographic, and seems wrapped up with what they see in Free People catalogs combined with sime kind of highly romanticized ideas of suicide and death, wrapped up in a nearly latent budding sexuality. I don't really understand it. There seem to be a couple of "stars" of this autoportiature, with thousands of breathless and adoring fans.

So the girls are producing this stuff themselves now, and swooning over each other for it.

I can only speculate on the psychology behind it.