That warm, fuzzy feeling I’m getting—is it asphyxiation at the hands of an art director or just my eyes rolling so far back in my head that all the blood vessels just pop?
The September issue of Maxim Korea features Oldboy star Kim Byung-Ok in a cover photo that echoes his noirish action roles. It also features a woman duct-taped in a trunk. The text under the cover line “The Real Bad Guy” reportedly translates to something like, “Women like bad guys. This is a real bad guy. Are you dying to love it?”
Very nice. Pretending to murder scantily clad young women is persistently “in style” among screenwriters and creative directors, and of course, actually murdering women is an edgy yet mainstream trend that just won’t quit. Violence against women is a significant problem in Korea, from whence this adorably interesting cover comes; in a 2010 survey of Korean citizens, over half of married respondents said they’d experienced a domestic violence incident, and over half of those respondents viewed domestic violence as a “minor family problem.” The country only prosecuted its first marital rape case in 2009, for further example.
The magazine’s currently taking a lot of heat on Facebook; some bullshit apology is forthcoming, I’d guess. But no one’s ever charged Maxim Korea with particularly nailing it on the photo-editorial front, anyway.