That's disgusting! That picture of the dead woman, I mean. Even more disgusting, I can remember getting caught up in "dead woman frenzy" as a young art student. Dead women were romantically sublime. We "feminist" art school girls painted beautiful paintings of dead women and I remember one of my favorite sculptures that I created was of a "drowned dress." It was oh so very romantic at the time!

Alison, I agree the Black Dahlia movie picture is quite macabre (though nothing like the real Elizabeth Short who was severely mutilated). I don't understand why some people are fascinated by such dark things. However, it is interesting that the head of the art department for that production is a woman (Katie Abiad). Also, as you said, female art students were the ones painting these dead women - and yet Dr. Blaine's contention is that this is all part of some male fetish. If that's true, why are so many women generating these dark images as part of their artistic vision? You have this one liberating moment to put anything you want on canvas, a moment when you don't have to "side" with anyone, and yet this is what some women choose? Why?

i saw a walk to remember years ago and it made me want to puke. it is possibly one of the worst movies ever made. i thought it was over, and then she got cancer and it went on and on and on and on.... i can't imagine why any adult would watch that movie, it is obviously targeted towards 13-yr olds.

I was lecturing about that film in my rhetoric class and one of my students said that when she'd first seen the movie, she said to her friend, "that girl's going to die" before knowing it was even a part of the plot. Yep, it's so formulaic that even without understanding the theory involved, she could sense where the narrative was headed.

Good girl=too good for this world. And only those who reject their own desire and stifle their own strengths are "good."

Juno, I think Diana covered what you are saying in her post. Her point is that in order to succeed in a male oriented world, women allow themselves to become trapped in the man's world view. In essence, when the artists sat down to create these images they were using a male perspective to attract a male audience without allowing their own voice to be heard.

By George I think Hank's got it! Nicely put. I have a fantastic painting one of my students did for her final project in which she depicts herself as an artist standing in front of a blank canvas. Off to the side is a stylized figure of a female nude. This moment captures her reflection upon what her relationship as female artist is to that female body. The canvas is blank as she imagines what the "female gaze" would look like or if one is even possible under patriarchy.

This student artist came to her awareness of these gendered dynamics after reading feminist theory. Until and unless we are given paradigms that reveal cultural ideologies, they remain hidden, naturalized by propaganda and yet impacting our lives in powerful and not necessarily healthy ways.

For more on the eroticism of the dead body topic: Professor Jacque Lynn Foltyn gave a lecture at the University of Bath called "Dead sexy: The corpse is the new "porn star" of pop culture" in february 2006 the podcast is here: http://www.bath.ac.uk/podcast/lectures/002-podbath-Deadsexy.mp3

I live in Los Angeles and read a lot of true crime stuff, so of course I'm familiar with the Black Dahlia case. I absolutely shudder when I think of the publicity that this movie will draw to the unsolved crime, and the resulting romanticism of what was a brutal and sadistic act of fatal dominance over an innocent female. And the fact that DePalma is directing it just makes it worse, of course.

Yes, I absolutely could have used a course in feminism when I was an art student. And thank you, Hank, for your perfect explanation.

The sad thing is, I have great parents who are both feminists and raised me to be likewise. But the power of the media and peers is immense. Thus, I thought it was very sexy to be a dead or weak women during my formative years as an artist and young woman. I would have loved the emptiness of Black Dahlia as a young woman, and sadly, many young men and women today will also find it seductive.

Diana and Hank, you've made your assertion, now I'll make mine. I assert that women are responsible for the corpse imagery in popular culture because women are inherently fascinated by, and obsessed with, death and crime. As evidence, I point to the female-dominated viewership for TV shows replete with corpse imagery (e.g. CSI, Bones etc.) and the fact that women are the primary readers of murder mystery and true crime books (see vikkitikkitavi's earlier post). Furthermore, I assert that men only watch these shows, or read these books, because they are subconsciously conditioned by constant exposure to the cultural imagery that stems from female obsession with crime and death. They are trapped in a women's world view. How can a young man escape the influence of powerful women obsessed with murder, such as Agatha Christie, the world’s greatest-selling modern author? Unfortunately, current paradigms don’t address the plight of young men, so the effects of such imagery on the male psyche are not well understood – but the damage is perhaps reflected in data, such as those reported by Kleinfeld (1998), that show that young women get better grades, score higher on achievement tests, and graduate from college more often than young men. Would you please explain to us how your assertion, that male fetish is at the root of corpse imagery, is better supported by the bulk of the evidence than the assertion I’ve posited here? Please note that I'm asking about evidence, not "theory".

See Elisabeth Bronfen's Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic and Beth Ann Bassein's Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature.

So what you're saying is that subjective psychoanalytic pontification on literary and artistic works selected specifically to make the author's point, somehow constitutes evidence of a pervasive social phenomenon? Has the premise that art accurately reflects, or even significantly affects life and society, ever been tested? Wouldn’t such a test be specific to the subject matter and population or demographic in question? Also, how does one evaluate whether or not his or her literary or artistic analysis A) accurately represents the psychology or philosophy of the artist and B) that it accurately captures the effect or influence the art has on the viewer/reader? Even this assumes a homogenous effect, which is totally unrealistic. Or is evaluation and testing of “theory” not important? For instance, anyone can claim that most men have a corpse fetish (a dubious claim in my opinion), but if you were really interested in evaluating this assertion honestly, wouldn’t you try to measure the mental and physical simulation that images of dead women actually have on a sample population of men – perhaps using women or preadolescent children as control subjects? You could couple this data with what the subjects actually reported about their thoughts and emotions after seeing the images. Which of these approaches might better capture the psychology of modern society: recording and quantifying the reactions of a random subset of actual people, or the psychoanalysis of the writings of long-dead eccentrics like Edgar Allen Poe or that long-discredited cokehead Sigmund Fraud?

Diana, who screwed you over as a child? You are just never happy. The truth is that none of us are/were equal and never have been, deal with it! What you’re supposed to do is learn to appreciate strengths and weaknesses,it takes all kinds.

My favorite part of your latest "story" is where you wrote, "See why I loved finding feminism. It offers a route out of this madness". Don't kid yourself, you found a furtive way to hate yourself.

Wow, I find it so strange when people have so much to prove that they come to a blog just to be adversarial, without any intentions of possibly learning something new or growing.

I love this blog. It doesn't mean that I agree with Diana 100%, but her writing helps me to think in new ways, to learn new things, and to better understand some of the insane things we all see going on in our society in regard to race and gender.

I think it's great to disagree and share that and converse. But to disagree without any real intentions of having real dialogue, but rather to incite - what's the point of that? Deal with your anger some other way.

Juno quotes Kleinfeld, who is in the pay of the usual suspects as a member of the Independent Women's Forum. Among Kleinfeld's targets are such rabidly feminist organizations as the American Association of University Women.
I don't know, actually, what the relationship is between depicting female corpses and women getting better grades than men. Is this just a ploy to obscure the way women run everything and get all the big prizes these days?
In any case, Juno makes it clear that we ought to be talking about men, not women, not even dead women.
See, women are encouraging the idea of woman as victim, and men are getting all upset about that, to the point where they can't do well in school and maybe even may murder women in their confusion.
Do I have this worked out? Set me straight, someone. Preferably a man, of course.

Hattie, I don’t actually believe the assertion that women are oppressing men (I thought that was understood), nor am I advocating the work of Kleinfeld. Many women are oppressed, silenced, belittled, mutilated and mistreated in this country and others, particularly in Islamic nations, which unfortunately for those poor women, western feminists are largely silent about. The point I was trying to make is that I can make any arbitrary assertion and cherry pick data to support it. That doesn’t make the assertion true, that doesn’t make it good scholarship, and that doesn’t make it intellectually honest. The idea that male corpse fetish and male oppression are responsible for images of dead women in pop culture is simply unsupported by actual evidence, just as my assertion that women’s obsession with crime was responsible was also unsupported and fanciful. The Kleinfeld citation was a red herring, just like the views on death of Sigmund Freud or Poe are red herrings in the argument that female corpse imagery in the media is a tool of modern patriarchal oppression.
The idea that women and men are of equal worth, and deserving of equal treatment, certainly should be championed by women and men alike. However, Dr. Blaine is of the sect of feminism (and/or Marxism) that places people in factions based solely upon their sex, skin color, or income and uses politicized, and highly subjective scholarship as justification for their views. It is this that I protest. The perspective of Dr. Blaine’s political/philosophical tradition would hold Paul Rusesabagina culpable for the slaughter of Tutsis because he was born Hutu and he “benefits” as a Hutu from Tutsi death, despite his individual actions and beliefs. Readers, I ask you, does Dr. Blaine’s approach seek to empower women and demand equality for all, or does it seek to create a struggle between strawman as oppressor and strawwoman as victim, depriving all humans of their individuality, personal accountability, and potential for goodness and maturation? Don’t take my word for it, reread Hattie’s words and Dr. Blaine’s words paying close attention to their use of generalizations: ”they” “we” “all men” “all women”, it’s “us” vs. “them”. They present a world of dehumanizing divisiveness and group warfare, while I am advocating a world where each person is given the chance to demonstrate who they are, and what they believe in, without preconceived judgments based solely on the circumstances of his or her birth.

Alison,
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not angry and have nothing to prove. Believe me, I am your classic under-achiever. But I will admit I’m a bit of an antagonist. I will also tell you that I do enjoy coming to this site and “learning something new”. And I welcome dialogue. I will have to work on the “growing” thing though.

See, this site is not about dialogue. If you haven’t noticed, Dr. Diana rarely comments once her story is posted and for sure doesn’t comment to anything I write. I don’t blame her (some times talking to me is like talking to a pregnant woman, there’s no point). This site is a vent, a way for Dr. Diana to have a voice. I just don’t understand it. She is very anti-male. It’s like she is fighting fire with fire, two wrongs make a right, etc.. It doesn’t make sense. She is fighting male chauvinism with female chauvinism. Does that make sense to anyone else?

Now I will agree that there are groups; advocates; etc, that have made life better for lots of people. But I don’t see how unfairly tipping the scale in the other direction is fair either (example: Affirmative Action). Well, never mind, I will save that topic for another time…

Oh, yes, the one about how we're always supposed to be happy!!!! We're bitter, man-hating, blah blah blah. This kind of putdown no longer has any impact. It's not the 50's any more.
And Juno, Judith Kleinfeld is not a red herring. You mentioned her, not I.
But anyway, thanks for setting me straight. I knew you would.

i WAS NOT the head of the art dept for the black dahlia...for the record. Dante Ferretti, an amazing man, was the Production Designer (head of the department) for the film.

The Black Dahlia was about a murder. What should they have put on the movie poster? Maybe a spaceship would have worked but for some reason they went with a dead woman.