Stop Female Death In Advertising is Lisa Hågeby’s master’s dissertation at Beckman’s University of Design. The project shows how women in commercials are made submissive on a grand scale. To illustrate the phenomenon, she picked the most extreme form of submission, images that allude to a dead woman.
From ReaStars’ perspective, it is not hard to draw a parallel with all the millions of women in prostitution live their lives with a risk of being beaten, tortured and killed. Girls and women who are victims of prostitution run a 40 times higher risk of death than the average. No group of women regardless of vocation or living conditions has a mortality rate as high as women in prostitution. The cause of death varies from murder to accidents as well as drug and alcohol abuse. In a study from 2004, American researchers ascertained that women in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women*.
With this in mind, the ad picturing a murdered woman in the trunk of a car becomes an apotheosis of a brutal power struggle, something fashion houses readily use to bestow “some excitement”. Ads like these are actually an uncritical commercialization – an attempt to profit off of an extremely tragic reality that affects women all over the world, every day. It makes you wonder: is the dead body of a woman a strong selling point?
Isabel for RealStars
*Source: Varat och Varan, Kajsa Ekis Ekman
Sign the petition for a Europe free from trafficking