Sexism the issue in Glee pic spread row

A MILDLY pornographic slide show of photos accompanying GQ's November cover story about Glee recently went up on the magazine's website. Now the onslaught from parents groups has begun, with terms like "paedophilia" being used and renewed complaints that the show is too sexually explicit for the audience it courts.

But the problem isn't so much the sex as the sexism.

The photos feature Dianna Agron (Quinn), Lea Michele (Rachel) and Cory Monteith (Finn), kicking off with Monteith smiling his all-American smile while grabbing the scantily clad derrieres of two young women. So fresh. So daring.

Monteith is, of course, fully clothed. Not so his female co-stars, who bare their midriffs and decolletage, bras and panties, in thighs-spread, derriere-hoisted poses made more than slightly unsettling by their school-girl ensembles.

Of course, Agron and Michele are grown women who only play high-school students and there is some version of satire at work here — the story "gleefully" references complaints from those uptight parental groups. But it's of the smug have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too variety. The result is not so much saucy and in-your-face as it is predictable and depressing — oh look, more young women being asked to assume the position. No doubt Agron and Michele did it to be sexy and playful and were not at all manipulated by forces that have put generations of women in the same poses for the same reasons — to feed the fantasy, promote the show and sell magazines.

And that just makes it worse.

One assumes Michele, whose poses are much more aggressively suggestive than Agron's, also wants a pay-off for the hours she has clearly spent in the gym since the show premiered, or at least a bigger pay-off than her recent Britney Spears number. And no one can blame a young actress for wanting to make it very clear that, Broadway cred notwithstanding, she isn't a theatre geek but a sexually attractive woman who shouldn't be boxed into Rachel roles. But, honestly, does a woman have to strip down to panties and thigh-highs and straddle a bench to accomplish this? That's not titillating or even retro. It's just sad.

While the pictures don't affect the quality of the show itself, they do make one thing clear. Glee is now a franchise working its way into pop consciousness and wallets with the same intensity of the Disney machine it once seemed determined to send up.

The good news about the GQ photos is that, unlike Miley Cyrus when she did those unfortunate Vanity Fair shots, these performers are all adults. The bad news is that the women decided to strip down anyway.

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