As a photographer, there is a certain “code of conduct” to follow when posing models. You don’t touch the model without their permission, you try to keep them as comfortable and safe as possible, and you never ever blame them for a bad photo. You are the artist and they are essentially your canvas and brush, so you have to be respectful of their willingness to help you create your vision.
After watching Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture, I had my eyes opened to the concept of the aging down of women in advertisements and in the modelling industry. Women are typically posed passively, and this is done to enlongate and excentuate certain features like the neck, arms, and legs. But there are other more subliminal messages we try to portay through the model to express femininity: innocence, youth, and sexuality. Not there is anything wrong with any of these things, but I realized that mixing those things can be really detrimental to the way people precieve women, and more importantly young girls.
When we mix the idea of child-like innocence with female sexuality, we get what we call “lolita”. Lolita is a book by Vladamir Nobakov about a man named Humbert Humbert, who is sexually attracted to young girls, specifically Dolores “Lo” Haze, the daughter of the women he is dating for most of the book. Humbert called Dolores his “Lolita, light of of my life, fire of my loins”, and from this quote birthed a normalized culture of sexualizing the mannerism and clothes of young girls. Which is the exact opposite of what the author intended to come from this book.
We warped the idea of innocence being attractive into a way to sexualize young girls without even realizing. And all it does is cater to pedolphiles and delegitimized womanhood.
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