Elvis, Nudity: Good Taste?

To the Editors of the Crimson:

I am writing to discuss the slides shown by Elvis Costello at last Friday's concert, slides which showed a disturbing pattern and which poisoned much of the concert for me.

After several neutral slides, Elvis showed what he described as "a naked woman." Yet this woman was not merely naked, she was blind-folded, faceless, dehumanized, reduced to a body. It was the most typical pornography, an invitation to regard women as objects.

This invitation was constantly repeated. Elvis next showed a slide of a young woman, and warned students "not to fuck with the god of wine." To illustrate the dangers of this, he projected another slide--supposed to be the result of "one weekend with the god of wine." It was a slide of an old woman, a beautiful woman, one with a lot of dignity. But apparently it is impermissible for women to age, to be no longer an object of sexual desire. So Elvis incited the crowd to laugh at this woman, and, to its shame, it did..

The natural and dreadful culmination of Elvis' attitude towards women came in his final slide, a cartoon of a naked woman pinned under a clothed man. None of her limbs were free; she was helpless. The scene looked, in fact, like a rape. Above this rape a sign bore the word "think."

Would that Elvis had followed this injunction regarding his slides and their grim meaning. Perhaps it is too much to expect of him, perhaps the audience's reaction shows that he is just a reflection of a more general misogyny. But this cannot excuse him. The slides, presumably added as humor, gave the concert a sinister feel. A musician need not be a propagandist of rape culture. David Woodruff '89