On July 31, the New York Post published nude photographs of Melania Trump on its Sunday cover with the offensive headline “The Ogle Office.”
The newspaper’s express intention for publishing the racy images was to shame the former model and, by extension, her husband, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Fortunately, neither the would-be first lady nor the GOP candidate seemed to have been at all fazed by the offensive and misogynistic coverage.
In fact, when asked about the racy photographs, Trump simply shrugged and replied that his wife was a beautiful woman who had modeled for years before they even met and that pictures like these are generally considered art in Europe, where they were taken in 1995 for a French magazine.
On this point, Trump is right.
Although sexually provocative, the photographs in question are tasteful and far from exceedingly graphic.
But even if they had been, so what?
The female form has for millenniums been considered a subject of art, both classic and popular, and Melania should feel no more remorse about having posed for the photographs than did Victorine Meurent, who modelled naked for Édouard Manet, or Gala Diakonova, who was both the muse and chief female subject of Salvador Dalí.
(If cultural history has shown us anything, it is that one man’s porn is another man’s art, and images that may have been viewed as scandalous when created, often turn out to be considered masterpieces by future generations.)
But while Donald and Melania have nothing to be ashamed about when it comes to the photographs’ publication, the New York Post has plenty of explaining to do for its crass and tacky reporting.
The mere fact that the Post felt that the photographs would somehow mar the image of the model is inherently sexist in that it validates the antiquated and societal perception that women should remain demure and virginal until marriage.
Models by definition sell their image, and regardless of what degree of dress or undress they may pose in, they are merely commercializing their God-given assets of physical beauty, just like a musician who performs in a concert hall or an athlete who competes in the Olympics.
By suggesting that having willingly posed for a nude photo shoot in some way degrades or humiliates Mrs. Trump, the Post has resorted to tawdry and misanthropic stereotypes that should have gone out with the sexual revolution.
Worse yet, the Post’s tasteless and exploitative headline carries a dangerously disempowering message that, despite the fact that women around the globe are struggling to earn an equal footing with men in the workplace and to exert their basic human right to make decisions about their own bodies, the female form is intended to be “ogled.”
Regardless of what people may think of her husband, Melania Trump is a strong and determined woman who, having been born in Soviet-controlled Yugoslavia to middle-class parents with very few resources to educate their daughter, managed to learn to speak five languages fluently and become an internationally acclaimed supermodel.
And anyone who can find fault with her having posed for the nude photographs is showing their own chauvinistic biases.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected].
