Really Socking It to Women

The two friends, both recently jilted, wanted some revenge on women. So Advertising Executive Loren Miles, 21, and Photographer Todd Gray, 22, produced a spectacularly successful ad last fall for a Los Angeles pants company named Cheeks--a picture of a woman shrieking while a man paddles her Cheeks. Says Miles: "We decided to develop a campaign men could really identify with. We really wanted to give it to women."

However befuddled by misogyny, Miles and Gray are not alone. Despite the rise of feminism--or perhaps because of it--images of women being physically abused are becoming increasingly common. In record-album photos, fashion and men's magazine layouts, and even a few department-store windows and billboards, women are shown bound, gagged, beaten, whipped, chained or as victims of murder or gang rape. Says Zox, a Los Angeles photographer who has shot photos of women mutilating themselves: "S and M has been a trend in the arts for a while. It is just becoming a commercial trend."

Why the kinky images? Some think it is nothing more than a scream for attention from photographers and editors who find their audiences increasingly difficult to shock. Alex Liberman, editorial director of Conde Nast publications, considers it "just an experiment with something new, a trend, a moment of spice." Feminists take a darker view. "Men are feeling guilty and sexually threatened," says Cambridge, Mass., Teacher Jean Kilbourne, who lectures on the influence of the communications industry. "The image of the abused woman is a logical extension of putting the uppity woman in her place." Many psychiatrists agree that the trend reflects the emotional problems of males. Says Manhattan Psychoanalyst Lawrence Hatterer: "Men's angry and hostile and impotent feelings are surfacing in all these ways because men don't know where to go with these feelings."

In June, Atlantic Records put up a billboard on Sunset Strip to push the Rolling Stones album Black and Blue; it showed a bound woman saying, "I'm 'Black and Blue' from the Rolling Stones --and I love it!" A new organization, called Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), protested to Atlantic, which took down the billboard. Now WAVAW is demanding that Atlantic, Warner Brothers and Elektra clean up their album covers, but the companies are stonewalling. Says Warner Bros. Publicity Director Bob Merlis: "If a group wants a gorilla on the cover, they get a gorilla on the cover, unless it's illegal or there's a marketing reason why gorillas aren't a good idea."

Kings of Kink. WAVAW has asked record-buyers to boycott the three companies. But so far the tactic has had little impact. In fact, record shops may be on the way toward luring browsers away from dirty-book shops. Some current albums: Wild Angel by Nelson Slater (girl wearing a chain gag); Bloodstone's Do You Wanna Do a Thing? (gang-rape scene); Pure Food and Drug Act's Choice Cuts (woman's bare buttocks stamped with the album title). A group called the Ohio Players has illustrated a series of albums with sadistic photos. Among them: a woman chained, a woman being hanged, and a woman hugging a man with one hand while stabbing him to death with the other.

Fashion magazines are not far behind the recording world. Now that nudity, sexual fondling and lesbianism are frequently shown in illustrating fashions, photographers have turned to themes of sexual violence. Says German-born Chris von Wangenheim, 34, a New York City fashion photographer: "The violence is in the culture, so why shouldn't it be in our pictures?"

The big breakthrough in fashion misogyny displays was Photographer Helmut Newton's spread in the May 1975 Vogue ("The Story of Ohhh ..."), which included shots of a woman wincing in pain as a man bit her left ear, and another of a man ramming a hand into a woman's breast. Newton, who is regarded as one of the fashion world's most elegant photographers--and also one of its kings of kink--has since turned out a series of pictures showing women as killers and victims. Perhaps the most shocking showed a woman's head being forced into a toilet bowl.

Newton's forays into S and M have been matched by some of Photographer Guy Bourdin's recent editorial layouts in French Vogue. His pictures have shown a woman being assaulted in a bathtub, a young girl shooting a man, and a man in a dinner jacket caressing the hand of a nude woman who has just been strangled with a telephone cord. Somewhat more subtle is Chris von Wangenheim's cover photo for Italian Vogue: an elegant shot of a woman wearing a stylized S and M harness.

A year ago American Vogue published a mysterious twelve-page spread of photographs by Richard Avedon showing a man alternately caressing and menacing a female model. At the dramatic peak of the sequence, the man smashes the woman across the face. What's more, she seems to enjoy it: on the next page she is shown nudging him affectionately. Rochelle Udell, art director of Vogue, justifies this kind of brutal eroticism on the ground that "years ago, mannequins were clothes hangers. Now women wearing those clothes are touched by life. So we use some situational photography--the mysterious and the dangerous, things that are totally reflective of the culture."

Even fashion pictures of strong women seem designed to play on the fears of misogynist men. A Von Wangenheim photo in the current Vogue has a vagina dentata theme: a vicious dog faces the camera, with bared teeth directly in front of a woman's crotch. Doesn't the picture seem to say that women are sexual killers? "Well," rationalizes Von Wangenheim, "it works better that way."

Battered Woman. Store windows also reflect the kinky trend. In Cambridge, the Camel's Hump boutique displayed a dead woman, blood running from her mouth, tumbling out of a garbage can. Men's shoes ("We'd Kill For These") were placed on her head and neck. Last fall, a Bon wit Teller window in Boston featured a woman dragging a female body wrapped in a rug.

However degrading, these images apparently sell merchandise. Cheeks sales for the final quarter were up 500% over the previous year, and the Camel's Hump display increased sales by 25%. The John Anthony jumpsuit worn by the battered woman in Avedon's Vogue pictures sold "beautifully," according to a company spokeswoman. "There was a lot of good reaction," she said, "so business-wise it was very successful."

Why does mistreatment of women stimulate sales in a predominantly female market? Some scholars think that fantasies of abuse appeal to many women. A 1974 survey indicates that perhaps half of American women have sexual fantasies of being overpowered by men and forced to surrender. And some analysts report that strong, independent women often produce masochistic fantasies as a compensation for succeeding in a man's world. "There has been a great rise, in women's sexual fantasies, of perceiving themselves as victimized," says Psychiatrist Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse. "If you pursue your independence in an antagonistic way, you will make up for it in your fantasies."

Another explanation is that the ads draw attention, but that women interpret them innocently. The Vogue spread drew only 35 letters, pro and con. Says Managing Editor Kate Lloyd: "The pictures reminded me of when I was 16 years old and indulged in horseplay with fellas. That's why it surprises me that people would read into it real harm."

Images of abused women may soon be balanced by images of abused men. Loren Miles, creator of the Cheeks ad, has noticed that the company's women's slacks are selling faster than its men's slacks. Perhaps in an attempt to cash in on male masochistic feelings, he is planning a new campaign showing women abusing men. Says Miles: "We haven't quite worked it out yet, but the woman might be slapping the guy or throwing a cocktail in his face. I don't think women deserve to be beaten any more than men."

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