Dead Women in Pop Culture

Last night I went to an “Introduction to Feminism” lecture given by a USC professor. One of her areas of interest is the ways in which dead women are portrayed in popular culture. According to her, the culture is full of images of women who are both sexy and lifeless. (She showed a poster for the new movie Black Dahlia as a recent example.) She said it’s very hard to find comparable images of sexy, lifeless men. Her point was that the preponderance of such images of women subconsciously encourages people to place too much value on the qualities that these images emphasize — physical beauty and passivity. Later, I mentioned this at grad student bar night, and one of the women there concurred, citing a recent fashion shoot in Cosmo (I think) in which models on a staircase were posed to look as if they’d all just fallen and broken their necks. I’d never really noticed this pattern before, but now I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.