The Sexes: Really Socking It to Women

The two friends, both recently jilted, wanted some revenge on women. So Advertising Executive Loren Miles, 21, and Photographer Todd Gray, 22, produced a spectacularly successful ad last fall for a Los Angeles pants company named Cheeks—a picture of a woman shrieking while a man paddles her Cheeks. Says Miles: "We decided to develop a campaign men could really identify with. We really wanted to give it to women."

However befuddled by misogyny, Miles and Gray are not alone. Despite the rise of feminism—or perhaps because of it—images of women being physically abused are becoming increasingly common. In record-album photos, fashion and men's magazine layouts, and even a few department-store windows and billboards, women are shown bound, gagged, beaten, whipped, chained or as victims of murder or gang rape. Says Zox, a Los Angeles photographer who has shot photos of women mutilating themselves: "S and M has been a trend in the arts for a while. It is just becoming a commercial trend."

Why the kinky images? Some think it is nothing more than a scream for attention from photographers and editors who find their audiences increasingly difficult to shock. Alex Liberman, editorial director of Conde Nast publications, considers it "just an experiment with something new, a trend, a moment of spice." Feminists take a darker view. "Men are feeling guilty and sexually threatened," says Cambridge, Mass., Teacher Jean Kilbourne, who lectures on the influence of the communications industry. "The image of the abused woman is a logical extension of putting the uppity woman in her place." Many psychiatrists agree that the trend reflects the emotional problems of males. Says Manhattan Psychoanalyst Lawrence Hatterer: "Men's angry and hostile and impotent feelings are surfacing in all these ways because men don't know where to go with these feelings."

In June, Atlantic Records put up a billboard on Sunset Strip to push the Rolling Stones album Black and Blue; it showed a bound woman saying, "I'm 'Black and Blue' from the Rolling Stones —and I love it!" A new organization, called Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), protested to Atlantic, which took down the billboard. Now WAVAW is demanding that Atlantic, Warner Brothers and Elektra clean up their album covers, but the companies are stonewalling. Says Warner Bros. Publicity Director Bob Merlis: "If a group wants a gorilla on the cover, they get a gorilla on the cover, unless it's illegal or there's a marketing reason why gorillas aren't a good idea."

Kings of Kink. WAVAW has asked record-buyers to boycott the three companies. But so far the tactic has had little impact. In fact, record shops may be on the way toward luring browsers away from dirty-book shops. Some current albums: Wild Angel by Nelson Slater (girl wearing a chain gag); Bloodstone's Do You Wanna Do a Thing? (gang-rape scene); Pure Food and Drug Act's Choice Cuts (woman's bare buttocks stamped with the album title). A group called the Ohio Players has illustrated a series of albums with sadistic photos. Among them: a woman chained, a woman being hanged, and a woman hugging a man with one hand while stabbing him to death with the other.