Violence against women -- en Vogue (?)

Vogue Italia's April 2014 edition features (prominently, as of the first page) photographer Steven Meisel's Cinematic: a photo-video narrative intended to mimic classic horror films, and in some way (Vogue readily admits) to address the issue of violence against women. It's not the first time Meisel headlines for Vogue (see the equally macabre August 2008 issue). Nor is it the first time the notorious fashion-magazine now celebrating its 50th year of publication confronts controversy. But Vogue has come under fire for what some are calling a campaign that glamourises, idealises, and misinterprets real issues surrounding domestic violence in a country where this problem has become (or continues to be) so current (30% of women suffer domestic violence, only 10% of whom report it to police) that it is now referred to as femicide.

A fact that bears pause if you consider that femicide for many years referred most routinely to honour killings in cultures that have commonly (and mistakenly) been identified as less evolved than the European ideal.

This post is by no means an apology for Vogue Italia or an endorsement of an editorial (and perhaps political) move that, by my estimation, clearly misses its mark. Nor is it, however, a condoning of the mass's misguided (and a little uninformed and unimaginative) battle cry against it. What it intends to be is an evaluation both of Vogue's Cinematic (and, more problematically, the language used to describe it) and of popular reaction to it.

In other words, this is one of those instances where, from the heights of my horse, I pronounce that everybody got it wrong.

The most frequent attack on Cinematic - and one that Vogue itself addresses in its (unreadable -- who translated it?) letter from editor Carlo Ducci - is its cheap appeal to obvious controversy to make sales. Ducci writes, in an excerpt from said letter:

"Saying NO to violence against women enables us to be, in our own way, useful. And to convey, as our civic duty, a message against barbarism. It doesn’t matter if we run the risk of causing a general uproar with the media or arousing criticism; or if we are accused of exploiting pressing issues just to push our way in newsstands. What is important for us is that at least one of the dozens of women suffering violence every day can feel our nearness. And that those who follow us may feel stimulated to take action, condemn, and support women in trouble. And that they all see that all of us at “Vogue Italia” are on their side: by utterly and radically condemning all types of violence. This awareness urges us to make some noise."

What he fails to account for, however, is the way in which this exploitation occurs and manifests itself.

A little context: in the summer of 2013, Twitter exploded with posts about various Italian campaigns aimed at raising awareness about domestic violence, with the hopes of eventually eradicating it altogether. Most compelling among them (in my opinion) was a contest engineered to compensate the best ad-length films to treat this issue in a constructive way. These various initiatives, like rolling stones, gathered moss and made some stir (not as much as they - or I - had hoped). People commented, followed, tweeted, and retweeted, and added a little of their own. But that was almost a year ago, when it would have been more appropriate - or at least more publicly accepted - for Vogue to broach the same issue. Since then, it has (predictably) died down again in most news circles (despite the propagation and promotion of all-female led businesses, blogs, and news outlets in Italy). Vogue's meaning was well-intentioned, and perhaps even sufficiently couched in popular discourse and informed by current trends. But it came a year too late. Emerging only now, it seems nothing more than an after-the-fact reflection, flippant and unconcerned, on a topic that spent an entire summer - last summer - making waves. The question I ask is, why now? Does Vogue intend to be the Saviour of Women that swoops in to rekindle the dead flame of their issues and make them heard? Unlikely. Least of all with a man spearheading its intended movement. (I mean, Vogue Italia has a strong female figure in Franca Sozzani, and as much as I generally disagree with everything she says, I wonder why her voice is entirely absent from an issue that explicitly claims to address her half of the human species.)

The second claim that comes against Cinematic is its "glamourization" of domestic violence - its transformation of the issue into a fantasy lightened by the beautiful clothing photographed that almost justifies it. It's chic to be beaten, is what many critics of Cinematic claim to be its take-home message. In ways obvious to anyone who has actually looked at the whole contents of the photo-shoot and its associated short film, that interpretation is obviously wrong (if we are willing to entertain the editor's very naïve approach to domestic violence and still more discounted artistic interpretation of it). Cinematic features an equal number of male and female characters and roles clearly divided by gender: the men are the perpetrators of violence against women, the women the tormented subjects of these predatory attacks. Except for one woman - and the film's (and photo-shoot's) protagonist. She appears on the cover in exhausted victory over her male assaulter, who she does defeat in the project's short film. The film's narrative comes closer to defending the project overall: in it, the stills that in the photo shoot distinctly show men terrorizing women in gorgeous clothing, unmarred by the bloodiness around them, move quickly together to tell the story of a woman who, despite the constant threat of a presence who never truly makes himself visible, overcomes her fear -- and her attacker. Men are all but absent in the film, which places greater emphasis on women, both as victims and, eventually, as victors (or victorias, perhaps). The stills, however, reverse any good the film does by easily setting up a dichotomy that only in one photo is effectively overturned.

A photo of a woman (in white patent leather platforms) holding a bloody cleaver in her hand.

We are to assume, as the film and the cover shot make clear, that she, like the shoot's protagonist, has killed her attacker -- hooray for women! We have emerged as mistresses of our own fates! Right? Right?!

Wrong.

The problem no one seems to address, here, is that Vogue Italia's only proposed alternative to domestic violence against women, its only recourse of action, its only imagined solution, is domestic violence against men. Only in killing their (our) attackers can women right the wrongs against them (us) and avoid the pain of impending physical attack. Only by becoming villains can they (we) also become victorious.

It's a problem, especially in Italy, where women are already villainised simply for being women; where we are called greedy, money-hungry, manipulative and false; where we are accused of trying to be men, without actually trying (that is, receiving the proper training) to be men; where we are held in contempt simply for climbing corporate (or political) ladders, which seldom happens without the intervention of nepotism or sexual misconduct -- in which case, we are called opportunists and whores. It's a problem because it reduces women to what is already considered the only card in our deck (and the one that, since the sixteenth-century, has defined us): our instinct and the impulsive behaviours it is said to engender. It's a problem because it assumes that women have no other way out, no model of empowerment that is not linked to primitive retaliation or self-defense. It strips women of our agency to be on the offense in a society that all too frequently leaves us in the defensive zone.

I don't often go on what pop culture calls "feminist rants" because I prefer to think of women as established equals to men, as winners in the fight against sexism, as beings who only by unflinchingly focusing on our worth and contribution to society - and not by lingering on issues of inequality that only further draw attention to it and worsen it - can ensure the successful survival of our species. I prefer to embrace and appreciate our differences from men, and to use them for a greater good. I prefer to think of my male peers as supporters and allies, not adversaries. This is why Vogue Italia's Cinematic spread is so offensive. Not because it makes domestic violence okay. Not because it relies on it to sell copies. But because it so clearly and thoughtlessly continues to propagate the idea that men and women are enemies, that one is more powerful than the other, that one must kill the other in order to survive, that they cannot cooperate. It insists on aspects of this so-called "feminist discourse" that advances no one, least of all feminists. It stagnates on an idea of gender-equality that is at least 30 years old and that has proven to be ineffective in its larger cause.

What is worse, it presumes to undo, with its "controversial look at violence against women" fashion-publishing's more common practice of espousing and profiting on dream-like alternatives to reality to ensure popularity:

"It is a controversial as much as an essential relationship the one that connects fashion publishing with daily life. A palpable and fertile interaction, continuous and constant, a mutual nourishment that brings them closer or takes them apart, embracing the dimension of the dream, an inalienable element in this publishing sector. A dream that in most cases is inspired by and nods to that part of our reality that most people define “light”, associated to entertainment, which  is undoubtedly intriguing." 

Domestic violence is indeed real. Violence against women is real. Hell, in Italy, even violence against women in pretty clothing is real. But the resolution of it that Cinematic offers is just as much an unrealistic dream as any other. Only this time, it's not the fictive promise of massive jewels or pristine yachts on sale.

In essence, I don't think Steven Meisel's project is bad. I think, as is the case with most (self-assumed) high-end fashion photography, that it is aesthetically beautiful, that it captures an (albeit limited) array of human emotion, that it effectively completes the narrative proposed to it. But it died at the hands of Vogue's editors, who insisted on publicly making it about violence against women, when they could have just taken the (to them) moral low-ground and left it at fashion's take on horror films. There are issues appropriate for Vogue, as a publication concerned with beauty and fashion, to comment critically upon (July 2005's critique of plastic surgery, for example). Cinematic works as the title of something that doesn't pretend to be anything more than an interpretation of that - of cinema and the fantasies that it, by its very nature, promotes. It ceases to work as the title of a campaign against domestic violence that, for reasons beyond the popular opinion I have come across so far, undeniably fails.