By ASHLEY SWEET
Business Manager
In order to take a stance against violence against women, people honor Domestic Violence Awareness month each spring, people organize 5k runs, Buzz Feed has made short videos, the National Football League created a foundation. Then we have Cosmopolitan magazine, who decided they were going to combat it by producing a sexualized photo of a woman being suffocated on the cover of its February issue.
Cosmo claimed that the cover was created to honor Shafilea Ahmed, a British Pakistani girl who was murdered by her parents in 2003 at the age of 17. After Ahmed refused an arranged marriage, her father forced a plastic bag down her throat and suffocated her to death. This was done in front of her own siblings.
Stylite said the cover was “provocative” and “powerful”, but in my own opinion it is shocking and offensive. I am not sure how honoring Ahmed by making a sexualized, photo version of her death makes sense. But anything goes in today’s media.
To make matters worse, the edition included nothing having to do with domestic violence, honor killings, sex trafficking or any women’s issues that could have been associated with Ahmed. Instead there were more stories about celebrities and everyday nonsense that the media sets the agenda on.
This is nothing new. In a time where there are so many trying to fiercely combat the way women are displayed, one of the most powerful magazine titles in the world chooses to do this. There is rarely anything being sold nowadays that isn’t using a sexualized, objectified female body to do it. I don’t even know if many of them are real as they are photo shopped into oblivion. Never to be seen again.
Women for ages have been the major industry’s way of getting the public to buy another round. Corona loves putting nearly naked girls on a beach with a bottle in their hands. Axe says that women will flock to you, all the way from heaven, just to smell you. Carl’s Jr says that a girl can’t help but strip while eating there, apparently. Victoria Secret says she will be your angel, after months of no carbs and constant sit ups. Kia has equated a reborn dorky high school girl to their latest model. A half-naked woman is used to sell nearly every magazine in creation. And don’t even get me started on GoDaddy, Gucci, Dolce & Cabana and Calvin Klein. Let’s not even go there.
The problem is women are treated as objects on a daily basis. Whether she is on the cover of a magazine or sitting next to you, women are treated as objects. The woman on the magazine cover is a sales tactic. The woman sitting next to you is just another statistic to said magazine.
Women each day are bombarded with ways in which they are not good enough. Men each day are bombarded with ways in which women are objects. Women are portrayed as things. The media portrays a girlfriend as an object, the girl at the bar as a prize, get it?
Therefore, it is no surprise that so many women today experience violence. Sometimes it isn’t even as severe as being abused, it can be the way women are treated as replaceable and usable by others.
Axe for example, the women are just thoughtless, sexual creatures gravitating towards a male presence. They don’t have a name or any kind of feature. They just exist and there are so many that it doesn’t matter if you know them. Just replace them.
Then there are brands like Gucci and Dolce & Cabana that depict women as belongings of men. They are being restrained, held down, and other manners of constraint by a man and they are just letting it be. There is no expression on their face and they often time do not have enough focus to be anything more than a prop.
And that is what is scariest about women on magazine covers, they are just a prop. Just an eye catching detail, something that is easily replaceable every week or month. Replaceable meaning: PhotoShop will make them all look the same.
So as if this line of catastrophic media mannerisms couldn’t get any worse, Cosmo decided to shake things up. To claim that they are honoring a murder women with such a picture is just immoral. Almost as immoral as Urban Outfitters paying respect to Kent State shooting victims, by manufacturing a blood stained, Kent State hoody. Oh yes, all in women’s sizes. (But that’s for another article.)
This is the wrong way to take the saying “fight fire, with fire.” There is no good coming from a cover with another interchangeable female model, who doesn’t have control over her own situation. A women displayed as just another prop in a grand scheme of marketing with sex. This would have been an excellent moment for Cosmo to address domestic violence or sex crimes, but they fell back on their Kardashian stories and pretend the abuse, the objectification isn’t a daily part of every woman’s life.
