Glee celebs pseudo porn shoot: fodder for schoolgirl male fantasies

The latest in the continuing sexualising of young actresses

Glee actresses Lea Michele and Dianna Agron cavort in bras, knickers, short skirts, and long socks in a locker room. There are spread legs, lolly-pops, top tugging and come-hither expressions.

Michele and Agron’s co-star, Cory Monteith, is fully clothed. He’s not spreading his legs or sucking on a lolly-pop. He is not posed as sexually inviting or seductive. The girls are exposing their flesh while he’s playing the drums.

Michele and Agron press up against him, his hands on their backsides. One boy, two girls, at the ready to do his bidding.

“Glee gone wild: We show you what happens when the teachers aren’t around,” is the headline on the November issue of GQ, featuring the stars of the popular Fox owned show about a high-school choir.

The actresses may be in their 20s. But the aim is to sexify their school-girl characters, to play into the fantasy that female students are really temptresses, vixens, seducers, who want to perform sex acts for you in the locker room. GQ readers, these naughty school- girl babysitters want to get their uniforms off for you!

Michele and Agron have been exploited in the interests of GQ readers with tissue boxes close by (and not because the images make them cry).

It would be stretching the bounds of believability to say Fox executives didn’t know where this was heading.

GQ employed photographer Terry Richardson for the job. He’s described here:

For more than a decade, he’s been a high-profile pervy Zelig, documenting his sexual exploits… Virtually everyone who knows Richardson’s name can tell you about the brightly lit, porno-like quality of his pictures.

 Richardson has been accused of inappropriate advances to young female models. You can read what some of his subjects have claimed about his behaviour here.

This is one model’s account:

He takes girls who are young, manipulates them to take their clothes off and takes pictures of them they will be ashamed of. They are too afraid to say no because their agency booked them on the job and are too young to stand up for themselves.

This is the porn stylist paid to give the GQ shoot – featuring high school lead characters – his special touch.

Michele is quoted in GQ: “I’m proud to be on a positive show and to be a voice for girls and say, ‘You don’t need to look like everybody else. Love who you are.”

That’s nice. But Michele has been pornified like so many other young female celebrities. I’ve written about this before.  It’s not taking a different road. It’s the same banal path, the same pre-determined sexualised script. You will bare your flesh. You will be turned into masturbatory material for male readers. You will suck on a lolly-pop in a childish way. You will be styled as barely legal.

The meaning of the Glee shoot is well captured in a piece by Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams:

What do you call a magazine that runs pictures of young women in suggestive poses, dolled up to look like lollipop-sucking, uniform disrobing teens? Barely Legal? Just 18? How about GQ?

For the November issue of the increasingly ironically designated gentleman’s magazine, “Glee’s” so-ubiquitous-they hurt Lea Michele, Dianna Agron and Cory Monteith do what has been done with hot, sexy celebrities since the dawn of periodicals – they cavort around in various stages of undress. Well, the ladies do – Monteith remains demurely covered in rugby shirts and sweaters while his female castmates pull their shirts down, open and off. The shoot was photographed by the notoriously skeevy Terry Richardson and features clothing from American Apparel (neither of which are strangers to sexual misconduct)…

…playing off the setting of the show, it essentially keeps its stars in character, thereby then allowing its readers – median age 33.4 – to ogle them as porny teen fantasy characters – all spread legs and underpants in the locker room… And knowing that it was shot by a man with a long, storied and reputedly unpleasant history involving teenagers makes the whole thing just that much more repugnant.

Here’s what I had to say about the Glee shoot on Channel 7’s Morning Show.