'Formulaic' I get Charlotte but can you clarify 'objectionable taste'? Which image(s) are of objectionable taste and to who? You?, everyone?, women in general (except the girl in the pictures of course)? It's such a sweeping statement to make about a set of innocuous images, I'd like to try to understand it.
Innocuous... also such a sweeping generalisation.
Glamour is and always has been (no straw man arguments about Hollywood glamour here...) about the objectification of people. Women primarily. Innocuous means 'not harmful' or 'not offensive', but it is widely considered that glamour imagery damages all kinds of people more than we ever assumed it did. The pictures above are essentially presenting a young woman as being both a sexually attractive ideal and sexually available. Why else would she be provocatively wearing next to nothing and giving a 'come hither' look to the camera?
The problem is that women are so often presented as sexual objects in imagery. They are things to be has, to be possessed by the male gaze. They are objects to fulfil a purpose - in the case of glamour photography the purpose is... well... you know what the purpose is. When you compare them to the way that men are generally presented as sexual beings it's very different - men are presented as subjects, not objects. They have a story to tell in their images, whereas a woman is just generally an object with nothing to say.
But the real issue is that it doesn't stop at imagery. Many women (and men) rate glamour shots as 'trashy' or 'objectionable' or just plain 'tasteless' because to be frank, we have to put up with this kind of objectification every day of our lives. Treated as sexual objects constantly. Seeing yet another woman being objectified in an image just becomes tiresome and you do get fed up with it after a while. Sexual objects, always expected to be sexually available and glamour imagery reinforces the point. Actually no it doesn't
reinforce the point it drives it him with a sledgehammer. We get it, we're supposed to live up to these fantasies.
Of course there is also the additional factor that although we are supposed to be these sexually available things, if we are
actually sexual then we're called a slut. It we
use our sexuality then that is wrong. Sexuality is for hookers, not
nice girls. The guys that look at glamour mags... they're the same guys down the pub who are joking about 'the girl in admin who is a slut' because she happened to sleep with a male co-worker.
- Many in our society still believe that women shouldn't have a sexuality. That is why one camp will object to these images. (Usually an older generation, but not always sadly).
- The other camp object to glamour images because to be honest, we're sick of being told how we should present ourselves to the world. And when we do present ourselves that way, the world tells us we shouldn't.
I personally find most glamour trashy and unnecessary. I don't see that it has much place in the world. I think it's a shame that so many young women see it as a life goal to be presented this way and look to it to gain acceptance.
(N.B. The above images are nice. They're ok. But I don't see their purpose other than to be softcore glamour. There are a million more interesting 'people photos' to shoot.)