Isis, that's a good question. I think I would have to wrestle with it for longer than I've got time for in order to both properly acknowledge concerns regarding gender-based oppression while unpacking my sense that fashion photos are worthwhile and enjoyable.
I do think femininity is socially constructed; fashion photography just makes it more obvious. Femininity is drag, and in the fashion world, it's also camp. I like camp.
Fashion photography aims to be arresting and alluring, and this often means it tries to be erotic (although it also includes models jumping, running down the street, making silly surprised faces, doing deliberately absurd things like pumping iron at the gym in platform heels - not always looking dead).
Sometimes the erotics is in the model-as-object, and the body is twisted and contorted to highlight its allure - tightening muscles, rounding a shoulder, or appearing sexually receptive; sometimes it tries to convey an (illusory) sense of model as subject, where she appears to be lost in a reverie or having an orgasm.
I'm not comfortable determining what that says about women - a fashion magazine can have models posed like dolls, back to back with articles about non-model women who are presented as subjects with agendas other than doing their beauty duty. So I think the photos say more about models than they do about women. A fashion model is a person whose embodiment is used to create an image that women will want to look at.
Masculinity does not escape social construction. There are probably a number of reasons men aren't put into these poses, but not just the obvious idea that men would never be expected to do something so "demeaning".
At least part of it is that it's not seen as masculine to display one's body, to show signs of mental or sexual abandon, to appear to be fantasising, to be sexually passive.
Indeed, with the small exceptions of "metrosexuality" and the glam movement, men are not allowed to look interesting at all. I think we would find men in some twisted, pulled, surrendered poses if we looked at gay erotica. (As well as some tough guy poses because that's a significant trope of gay erotics. But then, we see sexualised toughness in women's fashion photography too).
I disagree with the artist's statement that these are virtually the only images of the feminine in mass media. I find fashion photography very removed from daily life (including my daily media consumption) and as such I do not hold it to the same set of rules I might have about the treatment or behaviour of women in daily life. Indeed, in my reality, fashion photography is practically fringe.
That might say more about me and my choices of media influences than anything else. Yet, that's relevant too; it shows that I, like at least some men and women, am an active agent in my own media consumption. Fashion photography is something I'm able to enjoy when I choose without having my views of women determined by it.
Damning fashion photography as instrumental in the oppression of women assumes I am a passive consumer of it, which I actually find somewhat oppressive.
