Thousands Have Called for 'Maxim Korea' to Pull This Heinous Cover Depicting a Murdered Woman

While Maxim here in the U.S. has done well to rejuvenate its image, Maxim Korea is headed 100 mph in the wrong direction with this disturbing cover. The cover depicts a man casually enjoying a cigarette while a woman's dead body is stuffed in the trunk of his car. The image is for Maxim Korea's September issue, which has a "bad guy" theme, and features an actor notorious for playing villains, Kim Byung-ok. Next to Byung-ok is the copy, "So girls like ‘bad guys’? This is what a bad guy looks like. Dying for him, right?"

Unsurprisingly, the offensive cover has prompted an online petition that calls for Maxim Korea to pull the magazine from newsstands, Cosmopolitan UK reports. The petition currently has almost 10,000 signatures. Its landing page includes some pretty damning statistics that somehow shine the magazine cover in an even worse light. "Korea has increasing violence crime rate and sex crime rate," the petition writes before pointing out that Korea ranks 117 out of 142 countries on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index 2014.

The inside of the magazine doesn't make matters any better, either. The spread with Byung-ok continues as he is seen pulling the woman from the trunk from her perspective and later abandoning the body in a garbage gab. Still, Maxim Korea is defending its choice to Women You Should Know. "As you can see, in the context of the cover, we show a heinous crime such as murder and abandonment of a dead body, but the image does not depict sex crimes," a publication from the statement reads. "Films direct scenes for delivering a story and mood. We hope you can also see the cover as expressing a scene of crime to show the contexts of this issue."

Continue Reading On Complex