Skrillex keeps putting butts in my Twitter feed. One butt, actually—a woman's, clad in tight, fuchsia bikini bottoms. There's a front view of her, too, complete with an anatomically improbable thigh gap. The curves of her body have been retouched, and her skin is covered with digitally applied tribal tattoos, OWSLA logos, and space aliens. The whole thing is really fucking creepy, frankly; it's like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as reimagined by DIS magazine. Oh, and she's also cut off from the shoulders up, so the upper part of her body is just a skeleton. (Maybe the designer was feeling inspired by Art Department, who also cut off a woman's head in a recent flyer.)

The image in question is part of an advertisement for a new compilation from OWSLA, Skrillex's label, and it's also being used to promote a party that he's throwing in Miami later this month, during Ultra. But thanks—or no thanks—to the way that Twitter displays photos, it's that bikini-clad body that commands your attention as it comes thrusting its way into your feed, ass- or crotch-first, like a health-goth avatar of pure, hot-pink sex, optimized for Retina Display.

Perhaps this is all supposed to be ironic, a way of slyly poking fun at the sun-sex-and-spring-breakers clichés that have long accompanied Winter Music Conference party flyers. But the visual style of the image doesn't feel ironic. There's nothing particularly tongue-in-cheek about its sexualized tropes; it merely replicates them. Consider, too, the way the viewer is treated to both back and front views of the woman's nether regions: it's like she's been put on a spit and left to rotate for our visual pleasure. It's party flyer as horndog Panopticon.

-=-=-=-Unfortunately, this kind of voyeuristic, objectifying male gaze is all over dance music, and it seems like it's getting worse. For years, the Ultra label's various compilations have featured a parade of buxom, oiled-up swimsuit models on their covers, but the press release for last year's Ultra Dance 15 spent two full paragraphs discussing its bikini-clad cover girl (Melanie Iglesias, 2010 winner of Maxim's "Hometown Hotties" competition) before even touching upon the songs inside. Not only that, but Ultra also shot "behind the scenes" cheesecake videos to promote recent editions.

If Ultra hadn't, somebody probably would have done it for them. Just search YouTube for "electro house" or "deep house" and you'll be confronted with a veritable deluge of semi-naked women in kittenish poses. For the administrators of YouTube channels, bared (female) skin is all part of the quest to bring in clicks, and thus ad dollars. In just the past three years, Majestic Casual has racked up 2.3 million subscribers, and more than 646 million views, with a business model that involves pairing moody tech-house with sultry, soft-lit photos of young women in various states of undress. Dozens of channels pursue a similar approach, and though their aesthetics vary from "tasteful" Hipstamatic blur to Victoria's Secret tacky, they are united in their objectification of women's bodies. You can't necessarily blame the artists whose songs are featured on those channels; their music is often used without permission, and getting one's music taken down requires a fair amount of effort. Then there are artists like Henry Krinkle, whose own uploads are festooned with all manner of lad-mag-inspired skin shots, from "lesbian" softcore to Lolita-like ingénues. (Then again, what would you expect from a guy who names himself after an alias of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, he of the child-prostitute fixation?)