Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body

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Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body
Beauty (Re)discovers
the Male Body
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M en on Display
Puttin g classical art to the side for the mom en t, the naked and near­
na ked female bod y becam e an object of mains tream consump tion first in
Playboy and its imit a tors , then i.n movies, and only then in fashion pho­
togr ap hs With the ma le body, the trajectory has been d ifferen t. Fashion
has taken the lead, the movies have followed. Hollyw ood may have been a
chest-fest in the fifties, but it was mal e clothing designers who wen t south
an d violate d the really p owerful taboos-not just agains t the explicit de pic­
tion of penises and male bottom s but agains t the ad m ission of all sorts of
for bidden "feminine" qu alities into m ainst ream concep tions of manl iness.
It was the spring of 1995, and I was sipping my firs t cup of morning
coffee, not yet fully aw ake, flipping throug h The New York Times Maga zine,
w hen I had my firs t real taste of w hat it's like to inh abi t this visua l culture
as a man . It was both th rillin g and disconce rting. It wa s the first time in
my exp er ience tha t I had encountered a commercial representatio n of a
male bod y that seemed to deliberately in vite me to linger over it. Let me
make that stronger-that seemed to reach ou t to me, in terru p ting my
mundane but peaceful Sun day morning, and pro voke me in to erotic
consc iousness, whether or not I wanted it. Women-both straight and
gay-have alw ays ga zed covertly, of course, squeezing our illicit little titil­
lations out of represen ta tions designed for-or p retendi ng to-othe r pur­
poses th an to turn us on . This ad m ade no such pretens e. It caused me to
knock over my coffee cup, ru ining the more cerebral pleasures of the Book
Review. Later, w hen I had reg ained my equ ilibr ium, I ma de a scree n-saver
ou t of him, so I could ga ze at m y leisur e.
I'm sur e that man y gay men we re as taken as I was, an d perhaps some
gay women too. The erotic charge of va rious sexual sty les is not neatly
mapped onto sexual orienta tion (let alone biological sex). Brad Pitt's baby'
butch looks are a turn-on to many lesb ians, whi le I-regarded by mos t of mY
gay friends as a pretty har d-core heteros exual-ha ve alw ays fOW1d AnJle
Heche irresistible (even before Ellen did) . A lesbian frien d of mine, read ingS
d raft of my section on biblical S&M, said the same mov ies influenced her
later attraction to bu tch women. Despite such comp lications, un til recently
onl y heterosexual men have con tinu ally been inundated by popular cultu
imag es designed with their sexua l responses (or, at least, what those sexual
sponses are imagined to be) in min d . It's not entirely a gift. On the miIl ,
side is having one's composure continually challenge d by what Timoth,
Beneke has ap tly described as a culture of "intrusive images," eliciting f,
tasies, em otions, an d erections at times and in places where they might 11'
be appropriate. On the plus sid e is the cultural permission to be a voyeur.
Some psychologists say that the circuit from eyes to brain to gen itals is
a qUicker trip for men than for wo me n. "There's Some strong evidence,"
PopUlars science writer Deb orah Blum rep or ts, citing studies of m en's re­
:Onse to pictures of nak ed women, "tha t testosterone is wired for Visual
Or Ponse." Maybe. But who is the electrician here? God ? Mother Nature?
Hefner ? Practice m ak es perfect. And women have had little
ctice. The Calvin Klein ad ma de me feel like an ad olescen t again,
'Ught me back to that day when I saw Barry Resnic k On th e basketball
.of Weequahic High and realized that men's legs coul d make me
k In the knees. Men 's legs? I kn ew that women's legs were su pposed to
y. I had learned that from all those hose-straightening scenes in th "
~ugh
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SUSAN B ORDO
movies. But men 's legs? Wh o had ever see n a woman gaga over some
g uy's legs in the movies? Or even rea d about it in a book? Yet the m uscu ­
lar grace of Barry's legs took m y breath away. Ma ybe something was
wrong with me. Maybe my sex drive was too strong, too m uch like a
man's. By the tim e I came across that Ca lvin Klein ad , severa l decades of
fem inism and life experience ha d left me a little less worried about my sex
dr ive. Stilt the sight of that model's body made me feel that my sexual ed­
uca tion was still far from com plete.
I brou gh t the ad to classes an d lectures, asking women what they
thou ght of him . Most began to swea t the mo me n t I unfold ed the p icture,
then go t thei r bearings and trie d to exp lore the bewit ching stew of sexua l
elemen ts the pictu re has to offer. The mo de l-a young Jackson Browne
look-alike-stan ds there in his form-fittin g and rip -sp eckled Ca lvin Klein
briefs, head lowe red , dark hair loosely falling ove r his eyes. H is bod y pro­
jects streng th, solidi ty; he 's no male wa if. Bu t his finely muscled chest is
not so overdeveloped as to suggest a sex ua lity immob ilized by the thick
ma tter of the bod y. Gay theor ist Ron Lon g, describing con tem porary gay
sexual aes thetics- lean, taut, sin uo us mu scles rathe r than Schwarzenegger
bulk-points to a "d ynamic ten sion " tha t the incredible hu lks lack. Stiff,
engo rged Schwarze negger bodies, he says, see m to be surroga te penises­
w ith nowhere to go and nothing to do but stand there lookin g massive­
w he reas mu scles like this young ma n 's see m des igned for moveme nt, for
sex. His bod y isn 't a stand -in ph allus; rather, he has a penis-the real
thing , not a symbol, and a fairl y breathtaking one, clearly ou tlined
th rough the soft jersey fabr ic of the briefs. lt see ms sligh tly erec t, or per­
haps that 's his non erect size; either way, there's a subs tan tial presence
there th at' s palp abl e (it looks so tou chab le, you want to cup yo ur hand
over it) and ver y, ver y male.
At the sa me time, however, my gaze is invited by some thing "femi­
nine" abou t the yo ung ma n. H is underw ear may be rip ped, bu t ever so
sligh tly, subtly; unli ke the origina l ripped-underwea r poster boy Kowal­
ski, he 's hardly a thu g. He doesn 't stare at the viewer cha lleng ing ly, bel­
ligerently, as d o so man y models in othe r ads for mal e underwe ar, facing
off like a street tou gh passing a memb er of the rival gang on the street.
("Yeah, this is an under wear ad and I'm half nak ed. But I'm still the one in
charge here. Who 's gonn a look away firs t?") No, th is model's lan guid
body posture, his ave rted luok are classic signa ls, both in the "na tural"
and the "cultural" worl d , of willing su bo rd ina tion. He offers himself
no naggressive ly to the gaze of an other. Hip cocked in the sna ky S-cu rve
us ua lly reser ved for depic tions of women's bod ies, eyes downcas t but not
closed, he gives off a sul try, mood y, subtle but undeni abl y seductive con­
scio us ness of his erotic allure. Feas t on me , I'm here to be looked at, my
body is for your eyes. Oh my.
Such an attitu de of male sexual supp lication, although it has (as we'll
see) classical antecede nts, is very new to con tem porary mainstream repre­
sentations. Hom ophobia is at work in this tab oo, but so are attitu des ab out
gender tha t cut across se xual orien tation . For many men, both gay and
stra ight, to be so passively dependent on the gaze of another person for
one 's sens e of self-wo rth is inco mp atible w ith being a rea l man. As we' ll
see, such notions abo ut man liness are embed ded in Creek culture, in con­
temporary vis ua l rep rese ntati on, and even (in disgu ised form) in existen ­
tialist philosophy. "For the woman," as philosophe r Simone de Beauvo ir
wri tes, " ... the absence of her lover is always to rture; he is an eye , a
judge .. . awa y from him , she is dispossessed, at on ce of herself and of the
world ." For Beau voirs some time lover and lifelong so ul mate Jean-Pa ul
Sart re, on the othe r hand, the gaze (or the Look, as he called it) of ano ther
pe rso n-includ ing the gaze of one's lover-is the "hell" that other peop le
represe nt. If we we re alone in the world, he argue s, we wo uld be utterl y
free- w ith in physical con straint s- to be who mever we' wanted to be, to
be the cre atures of our own self-fantasies, to define our behavior however
we like. Other people intrude on this soli ps ism, and ha ve the audacity to
see us from their own p ersp ective rather than ours. The result is what
Sartre calls primo rd ial Sham e un der the eyes of the O ther, and a fierce de­
sire to reasse rt one 's freed om . The other person has stolen "the secr et" of
who r am . I mu st figh t bac k, resist their atte mp ts to def ine me .
I un derstan d, of cour se', w ha t Sar tre is talking abou t here. We've all,
male an d fema le alike, felt the shame th at ano ther pai r of eyes can bring.
Sart re's ow n classic examp le is of being caug ht peeking throu gh a ke yhole
by an oth er person. It isn 't until those othe r eyes are upon you that you
trul y feel not just the "wrongness" of wha t yo u are doing, bu t- Sartre
would argue- the ve ry fact that yo u are doing it. Until the ey es of another
are up on us, "catching us " in the act, we can dec eive our selves, pretend .
Getting caug ht in mo ments of fantasy or vanity may be especially shame­
ful. Whe n J was an adolescen t, I loved to pretend J was a rad io persona l­
ity, and talkin g int o an empty co ffee can crea ted just the right sound. One
day, my mo the r caugh t me speaking in the smooth and sligh tly sultry
tone s that rad io pe rso nalities had even in those da ys. The wa y I felt is
what Sartre me ans whe n he des cribes the Look of another perso n as the
fulcrum of shame-ma king . My face go t hot, and suddenly I saw how
ridiculous [ must have seem ed, m y head in the Chock Full 0 ' N uts, my
narcissistic fan tasies on full d isplay. I was caught, I w anted to run.
The disjunc tion between self-conception and extern al judgment can be
especi ally harsh when the extern al de finitions carry racial and gende r
stereotypes w ith them . Sartre doesn ' t present such examples- he's in ter­
ested in cap tu ring the contours of an existentia l situation shared by all
rather than in analyz ing the cultural differences that affect tha t situa tion­
but they are surely relevant to und erstanding the meanin g of the Look of
the Oth er. A black man jogs d own the street in sweat clothes , thinking of the
class he is go ing to teach later that day; a w hite woman passes him , clutches
her handbag more tightly, qui ckens her step; in her eyes, the teach er is a po­
tentially dan gerou s an ima l. A Latin American stu de nt ar rives earl y the first
day of college; an administrator, seeing him in the still-deserted hall, asks
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him if he is the new janit or. The aspiring stu dent has had his em erging iden­
tity erased, a stereotype put in its place by another pa ir of eyes. When
women are tran sformed from professionals to "pussies" by the comments
of me n on the street, it's h umiliating, not so much because we're puritans as
because we sen se the hos tility in the hoots, the desire to bring an uppity
woman d own to size by reminding her that she's just "the sex" (as Beau voir
put it).
We may all have felt shame, bu t- as th e diff erent at titudes of Beauvoir
and Sart re suggest-men an d women are socially sanctioned to deal with
th e gaze of the Other in different wa ys. Women learn to an ticipate, even
play to the sexu alizing gaze , try ing to become what will please, captiva te,
turn sh am e into pride. (In th e process, we also learn how sexy being gaz ed
at can feel-perhaps pr ecisely because it walks the fine ed ge of sh ame .)
Many of us, truth be told , ge t som ewhat ad d icted to the experience. I'm
renting a video, feeling a bit low , a bit tired . The young man at the
counter, unsolicited, tells me I'm "looking goo d. " It alters ev ery thing, I
feel fine, alive; it seem s to go right down to my cells. I leave the store feel­
ing yo ung er, stro nger, more aw ake. When women sense tha t they are not
being assessed sexually- for exampl e, as w e age, or if we ar e d isab led-it
may feel like we no lon ger exist.
Women may dread being surveyed harshl y-being seen as too old, too
fat, too flat-chested-but men are not supposed to enjoy being surveyed pe­
riod. It's femin ine to be on d isplay. Men are thu s taught-as my un cle Leon
used to say- to be a moving target. Get out of ran ge of those eyes, d on 't let
them catch you -€ven as the object of their fant asies (or, as Sartre would
put it, don' t let them "possess," "s teal" your freedom) . This phobi a has
eve n distorted scien tific research, as mentioned ea rlier. Evolutionary theo­
rists ha ve lon g acknowled ged displ ay as an important feature of courting
behavior among primates - except when it com es to our closest ancestors.
With descriptions of hominid behav ior, ma le displ ay behavior "suddenly
drops ou t of the primate evolutionary picture" (Sheets-Iohnstone) and is
replaced by the concep t of year-ro un d female sexu al receptivity. It seems
that it has been intolerable, unthink able for male evolutionar y theorists to
imagine the bod ies of their ma le ances tors being on display, sized up, de­
p endent on selection (or rejection) by female ho minids.
Scienti sts an d "ord ina ry guy s" ar e totally in synch here, as is humor­
ously illus trat ed in Peter Cattaneo's popular 1997 British film The Full
Monty. In the film, a gro up of unemployed metalworkers in Sheffield, Eng­
lan d, wa tch a Ch ippendale's sho w and hatch the mon ey-making scheme of
presenting their own male strip sh ow in which they will go right down to
the "full Mon ty." At the star t of the film, the he roes are hardly pillars of
s uccessful manl iness (Caz, their leader, re fers to them as "scrap "). Yet even
they have been sheltered by their guy hood, as they learn while putting the
show together. One gets a penis pump. Another borrows his wife's face
cream . The y run, they wrap their bellies in plastic, the y do jumping jacks,
they get artificial tan s. The most overweight one among them (temporarily)
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Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body
173
pulls out of the sh ow. Before, these guys hadn' t lived their lives under
physical scrutiny, but in m ale action mode , in which m en are judged by
their accomp lishments. Now, an ticipa ting being on d isplay to a roo m ful of
spectators, they suddenly realize how it feels to be judged as women rou­
tinely are, sized up by ano ther pair of eyes. "I pray that they'll be a bit
more un derstan ding about us" than they've been with wom en, David (the
fat one ) murmurs.
They get past their discom fort, in the en d, and their show is greeted
with wild enthusiasm by the aud ienc e. The movie leaves us with this feel­
good ending, not ra ising the qu estion obvious to every woma n watching
the film: would a troupe of out-of-shape women be received as w armly, as
affectionately? The climac tic mom ent w hen the m en throw off the ir little
pouches is dem ur ely shot from the rear, mo reover, so we-the audience­
don 't get " the full Mon ty." Nonetheless, the film ge ntly and humorously
makes an importan t po int: for a heterosexual man to offer hims elf up to a
sexually evalu ating ga ze is for him to make a large, scary leap-a nd not
jus t because of the anxieties about size d iscussed earlier in this book (the
guy who d rops ou t of the show, remem ber, is embarrassed by his fat, not
his penis). The "full Mont y"-the nak ed penis-is not merely a bod y p art
in the movie (henc e it d oesn 't really matter that the film d oesn't show it).
It's a symbol for male exposure, vu lnerability to an evalu ati on an d judg­
ment tha t w omen-elothed or naked- experience all the tim e.
I had to laugh out loud at a 1997 New York Times Maga zine "Style" col­
umn, entitled "Overexp osur e," w hich compla ined of the "con tagion" of
nudity sp reading through celebrity cult ure. "Stars no longer have pr ivate
parts," the author observed, and fretted that civilians wou ld soo n also be
measured by the beau ty of their buns. I share this author's concern about
Our bod y-obsessed culture. But, pardon me, he's just no ticing this now???
Actresses ha ve been baring their breasts, thei r butts, even their bushes, for
some time , and ord inary wo men ha ve been tromping off to the gy m in
pursuit of comparably pe rfect bodies. What's got the author sud den ly cry­
ing "overkill," it turns out, is Sly Stallone's "surreall y fat-fr ee" appearance
on the cover of Vanity Fair, an d Rupert Everett's "d imp led beh ind " in a
Karl Lagerfeld fashi on spread. N ow th at men are taking off their cloth es,
the culture is sudde nly going too far. Could it be that the author d oesn ' t
even "read " all th ose naked female bodies as "overexposed "? Does he
protest a bit too mu ch when he declares in the first sentence of the piece
that he found it "a yaw n " when Dirk Diggler unshea thed his "p rosthetic
shillelagh" ("penis" is still a word to be av oide d when ever po ssible) at the
end of Boogie N ights? A ya w n? My friend 's pa lms were sw ea ting pro­
fusely, and I was not about to drop off to sleep either.
As for dimpled behinds, my second choice for male pinup of the
de cade is the Cucci ser ies of two ads U1 which a beautiful yo ung man, sh ot
from the rear, puts on a pair of briefs. In the first ad , he's holding them in
his hands, con templating them. Is he checking out the correct wa shing­
machine temp? It's od d, surely, to stand ther e lookin g at your underwear,
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bOth ways), but for me-and for thou sands of gay men across the coun try­
this was a mom ent of political magni tude, an d a deli ciou s one. The bod y
arts that we love to squ eeze (those plastic bre asts, they're the real yaw n
tr me) had come out of the closet and into mainstream culture, where we
can enjoy them w ithout a trip to a specialty store.
But all this is ve ry new . Women aren't used to seeing naked men
frankly portrayed as "objects" of a sexual gaze (an d neither are heterosex­
ual men, as that Tim es writer makes clear) . So pardon me if I'm skeptical
when I read arguments about men's greater "biological" resp onsivene ss
to visual stimuli. Thes e "find ing s," besid es being ethnocen tric (no one
think s to poll Trobriand Islanders), displa y little awarenes s of the imp act
of chan ges in cultural representations on our cap acities for sex ual re­
sponse. Popular scien ce wr iter Deborah Blum, for exam ple, cites a study
from the Kinse y Institute which showed a gro up of men and women a se­
ries of photos and dra wings of nudes, both ma le and fema le:
Fifty-four percent of the men were erotically aroused versus 12
percent of the women-in other words, more than four times
as many men. The same gap exists, on a much larger scale, in
the business of pornography , a $500-million-plus industry in
the Ll.S. which caters almost exclusively to men. In the first
flush of 1970s feminism, two magazines-Playgirl and Viva­
began publi shing male centerfolds. Viva dropped the nude
ph otos after surveys showe d their reader s didn 't care for them;
the editor herself adm itted to finding them slightly disgusting.
but never mind. The point is: his underwea r is in his hands, not on his butt.
It-his bottom, that is-is gorgeously, completely naked-a motif so new
to mainstream advertising (but since then catchin g on rapidly) that several
of my friends, knowing I wa s writing about the male body, E-mailed me
immediately when they saw the ad. In the second ad , he's put the under­
wear on, and is adjusting it to fit. Luckil y for us, he ha sn't succeeded yet, so
his buns are peeking out the bottom of the underwear , looking biteable­
For the Tim es w riter, those buns may be an indecent exp osure of parts that
should be kep t privat e (or the y're a boring yawn, I'm afraid he can't have it
Blum pr esents the se findings as su ggestive of a ha rd-wired d ifference
between men and women. I'd be cautious about accep ting th at conclusion.
First of all, the re's the question of which ph ysiological resp onses count as
"erotic arousal" and whe ther they couldn't be evidence of othe r states .
Clearl y, too, we can learn to have certain phy siologica l resp onses-and to
Suppress them- so nothing biologically def initive is proved by the pre s­
ence or absence of physical aro usa l.
Studies th at rely on viewers' own rep orts need to be carefully inte r­
preted too. I know , from talking to women students, that they some times
aren't all that clea r about w hat they feel in the presence of ero tic stimuli,
and even when the y are, they may not be all that comfortabl e admitting
What they feel. Hell, not just my students! Once, a lover asked me, as we
Were about to part for the evenin g, if there was any thing that we hadn't
done that I'd really like to do. I knew immediately wh at that w as: I
Wanted him to undress, very slowly, while I sat on the floor and just
Watched. But I couldn't tell him. I was too embarrassed . Later, alone in my
compartment on the train, I sorely regr etted my cowardice. The fact is that
I love to watch a man gettin g undressed , and I especially like it if he is
conscious of bein g looked at. But there is a lon g legacy of sh ame to be
overcome here, for both sexes , and the cultural models are only no w just
emerging which might help us move beyond it.
t
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S USA N B OROO
Perhaps, then , we should wait a bit longer, d o a few more stud ies, be­
fore we come to any biological conclusions ab out women's failur e to get
arous ed by naked pictures. A new er (1994) Uni versity of Chi cago studv
found that 30 percent of women ages eighteen to forty-four and 19 percent
of wo men ages forty-five to fifty-n ine said the y found "watching a partner
undress" to be "v ery ap pealing ." (" No t a bad percentage," Nan cy Friday
comme nts, "g iven that Nice Girls didn't look .") The re's still a gender
ga p-the respective figures for men of the same age groups we re 50 per­
cent and 40 percent. We're just learning, after all, to be voyeuses. Perhaps,
too, heterosexual me n could learn to be less uncomfortable offering them­
selv es as "sexual objects" if the y realized the pleasure women ge t from it.
Getting wha t yo u hav e been most deprived of is the best gift, the most
heal ing gift, the most potentiall y transforming gift-because it has the
capa city to make one more whole. Women have been deprived not so
much of the sight of beautiful mal e bodies as the experience of having the
mal e body offered to us, handed to us on a silver pl atter, the wa y female
bodies-in the ads, in the mov ies-are handed to men . Getting this from
her partner is the erotic equ ivalent of a woma n's coming hom e from w ork
to find a meal prepa red and ready for her. Delicious---even if it's just
franks and beans.
Thanks, Calvin!
Despite their bisexu al appeal, the cul tural genealogy of the ads I'v e been
discu ssing and oth ers like them is to be traced largely through gay male aes­
thetics, rather than a sudden blossoming of appreciation for the fact that
women might enjoy looking at sexy, well-hung young men who don 't ap­
pear to be about to rap e them. Femini sts might like to imagine that Mad ison
Avenue heard our pleas for sexual equality and finally gave us "men as sex
objects." But wh at' s really ha ppened is that women have been the beneficia­
ries of what might be described as a triumph of pure consumerism-and
with it, a burgeoning male fitness an d beauty culture--over homophobia
and the taboos against male vanity, male "femininity," and erotic display of
the male body that ha ve gone alon g with it.
Thr ou ghout this cen tury, gay photographers have crea ted a rich,
se nsuous, an d dram atic tradition which is unabash ed in erot icizing the
male body, male sens uo usness, and male potency, including penises. But
until recently, su ch representations hav e been kept largely in the closet.
Mainstream responses to several important exhibits which opened in the
seventies-featuring the groun dbreaking earl y work of Wilhelm vo n Gloe ­
den, George Dureau, and George Platt Lynes as we ll as then-contemporary
artists such as Robert Mapp letho rpe, Peter Huj ar, and Arthur Tress­
would today probabl y embarrass the critics who wrote about them when
they ope ned . John Ashbery, in New York magazine, dismissed the entire
genre of male nude photography with the same sexist tautology that
covertly underlies that Times piece on cultural "overexposure": "Nude
uty (Re)discovers the Male Body
177
en seem to be in their natural state; men, for som e reason, merely look
:;::::essed ... Wh en is a nude not a nude? When it is male." (Substitute
"blacks" and "whites" for "women" and "men" and yo u' ll see how offensive
the statement is.)
For other rev iewers , the naked male, far from see ming " merely un­
dressed," was unnervin gly se xua l. New York Times cri tic Gene Th ompson
wrote that "there is some thing discon certing about the sight of a man's
naked body being presented as a sexual object"; he went on to des cribe the
world of homoerotic photography as one "closed to most of us, fortu­
nately ." Vicki Goldber g, w riting for the Saturday Review, wa s m ore ap pre­
ciative of the "beauty and dign ity" of the nude mal e body, but concluded
that so lon g as its dep iction w as erotic in emphasis, it wi ll " remain half­
private, slightly aw kward, an art form cast from its traditions and in
search of some niche to call its home."
Goldberg needed a cour se in art histor y. It's true that in classic al art,
the nak ed human bod y was often p resented as a messenger of spiritual
themes, and received as such. But the male bodi es sculpted by the Greeks
and Michelangelo were not exactl y non erotic. It might be more accurate to
say that in modernity, w ith the spiritual interp reta tion of the nude body
no longer a convention, the contemporary homophobic psyche is not
screened from the sexual charge of the n ude male bod y. Go ldb er g was
dead w rong about something else too . Whatever its historical lineag e, the
frankl y sex ua l rep resentati on of the male body was to find , in the ne xt
twenty yea rs, a far from private "niche to call its home" : consumer culture
discov ered its commercial potency.
Calvin Klein had his epi phany, accor di ng to on e biography, one night
in 1974 in New York 's gay Flamingo bar :
As Calvin wandered throu gh the crowd at the Flamingo, the
body heat rush ed through him like a revelation; this was the
cutting edge . . . . [The] men! The men at the Flamingo had less
to do about sex for him than the notion of portr aying men as
gods. He realized that what he was watching was the freedom
of a new generation, unashamed, in-the-flesh embodi ments of
Calvin's ideals: straight-looking, masculine men, with chiseled
bod ies, young Greek gods come to life. The vision of shirtless
youn g men with hard ened torsos, all in blue jeans, top button
opened, a whisper of hair from the belly button disappearing
into the denim pants, would inspire and inform the next ten
years of Calvin Klein's print and television ad vertisements.
Klein 's genius was th at of a cultural Geiger counter; his own bisexual­
ity enabled him to see that the phallic bod y, as much as any female figu re,
is an enduring sex object within Western cultur e. In America in 1974, how­
ever, that ideal was still lar gely closeted. Onl y ga y culture unashamed ly
sexualized the lean, fit body that virtually eve ryo ne, gay and straight, now
aspires to . Sex, as Calvin Klein knew, sells . He also kn ew that gay sex
wouldn't sell to straight men. But the rock-hard, athletic gay male bodies
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iBtJluty (Re)discovers the Male Body
179
~
that Klein admired at the Flamingo did not advertise their sexual prefer­
ence through the feminine codes-limp wrists, raised pinkie finger,
swishy walk-which the straight world then identified with homosexual,
ity. Rather, they embodied a highly masculine aesthetic that-although
definitely exciting for gay men-would scream "heterosexual" to (clue­
less) straights. Klein knew just the kind of clothing to show that body off
in too. As Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher tell it:
He had watched enough attractive young people with good bod­
ies in tight jeans dancing at the Flamingo and Studio 54 to know
that the "basket" and the behind was what gave jeans sex appeal.
Calvin sent his assistants out for several pairs of jeans, including
the classic five-button Levi's, and cut them apart to see how they
were made. Then he cut the "rise," or area from the waistband to
under the groin, much shorter to accentuate the crotch and pull
the seam up between the buttocks, giving the behind more shape
and prominence. The result was instant sex appeal-and a look
that somehow Calvin just knew was going to sell.
So we come to the mainstream commercialization of the aesthetic
legacy of Stanley Kowalski and those inspired innovations of Branda's
costumer in A Streetcar Named Desire. When I was growing up, jeans were
"dungarees"-suitable for little kids, hayseeds, and juvenile delinquents,
but not for anyone to wear on a date. Klein transformed jeans from utili­
tarian garments to erotic second skins. Next, Klein went for underwear.
He wasn't the first, but he was the most daring. In 1981, Jockey Interna­
tional had broken ground by photographing Baltimore Oriole pitcher Jim
Palmer in a pair of briefs (airbrushed) in one of its ads-selling $100 mil­
lion worth of underwear by year's end. Inspired by Jockey's success, in
1983 Calvin Klein put a forty-by-fifty-foot Bruce Weber photograph of
Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintinauss in Times Square, Hintinauss's large
penis clearly discernible through his briefs. The Hintinauss ad, unlike the
Palmer ad, did not employ any of the usual fictional rationales for a man's
being in his underwear-for example, the pretense that the man is in the
process of getting dressed-but blatantly put Hintinauss's body on dis­
play, sunbathing on a rooftop, his skin glistening. The line of shorts "flew
off the shelves" at Bloomingdale's and when Klein papered bus shelters in
Manhattan with poster versions of the ad they were all stolen overnight.
Images of masculinity that will do double (or triple or quadruple) duty
with a variety of consumers, straight and gay, male and female, are not dif­
ficult to create in a culture like ours, in which the muscular male body has a
long and glorious aesthetic history. That's precisely what Calvin Klein was
the first to recognize and exploit-the possibility and profitability of what is
known in the trade as a "dual marketing" approach. Since then, many
advertisers have taken advantage of Klein's insight. A recent Abercrombie
& Fitch ad, for example, depicts a locker room full of young, half-clothed
football players getting a postmortem from their coach after a game. Beauti­
ful, undressed male bodies doing what real men are "supposed to do."
Bronzed and beautiful Tom Hintinauss: a breakthrough ad for Calvin Klein-and the
beginning of a new era for the unabashed erotic
display of the male body
Dirty uniforms and smudged faces, wounded players, helmets. What could
be more straight? But as iconography depicting a culture of exclusively
male bodies, young, gorgeous, and well-hung, what could be more "gay"?
It required a Calvin Klein to give the new vision cultural form. But the
fact is that if we've entered a brave, new world of male bodies it is largely be­
cause of a more "material" kind of epiphany-a dawning recognition among
advertisers of the buying power of gay men. For a long time prejudice had
triumphed over the profit motive, blinding marketers to just how sizable-­
and wel1-heeled-a consumer group gay men represent. (This has been the
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180
case wi th other "mino rities" too. Hollywood prod ucers, never bothering to
do an y demographics on middle-class an d professional African American
wo men---or the issues that they sha re with women of othe r races and classes
in this culture-were shocked at the tremend ous box office success of Waiting to Exhale. They wo n' t make that pa rticular mistake aga in.) It took a survey conducted by The Advocate to jolt corporate America awake about gay
cons um ers. The survey, done betwee n 1977 an d 1980,showed that 70 percent
of its readers aged twen ty to forty earned incomes we ll above the national
medi an . Soon, articles were appearing on the business pages of newspapers,
like one in 1982 in The New York Times Magazine, w hich desc ribed ad vertisers
as newly interested in "wooing . .. the white, single, we ll-educated, wellpaid man who happens to be homosexual."
"Happens to be hom osexual" : the phrasing-suggesting that sexual
identity is peripheral, eve n accide ntal- is telling. Becau se of homophobia,
dual marketing used to require a delicat e balan cing act, as advertisers
tried to speak to ga ys "in a way that the straight cons umer will not notice." Often, that's been accomplished th rou gh the use of play and parody,
as in Versace's droll portraits of men being groomed and tended by male
servants, and Diesel's overtly narcissisti c gay posers. "Thanks, Diesel, for
"I' m known more for my supe rb bone cons tr uction an d soft,
supple hair than my keen int ellect. But eve n I can hoo k up
Kenwood's Centerstage Home Theater System in a few minutes."
king us so ve ry beautiful," the y gus h . Or tak e the ad on the previous
lJ\~e, wit h its gorgeous, mec hanically inept mod el ad mi tting that he's
~own more for my superb bone construction and soft, supple hair than
lilY keen int ellect." The
pl a y~1 t~ne
reassures heterosexual con~ ume rs
that the vanity (and mechanical incompetence) of the man selling the
roduct is "just a joke." For gay consumers, on the othe r hand, this reasis itself the "joke"; they read the humor in the ad as an ins ider
wink, which says, "This is for you, guys." The joke is fur ther layered by
the fact that they kn ow the model in the ad is very likely to be gay .
Contrast this ad to the ostentatious heterosexual p rot est of a Per ry Ellis
ad which ap pea red in the ea rly 1990s (and no, it's not a pa rod y):
~urance
I hate this job. I'm not just an emp ty suit who sta nds in front of
a camera, collects the money and flies off to St. Maarten for the
weekend .
I may model for a living, but I hate being treated like a
piece of meat. I once had a loud -mouthed art director say
"Stand there and pretend you're a human ." I wa nted to punc h
him, but I needed the job.
Wha t am I all about? Well, I know I'm very good -looking,
and there are days whe n that is enough. Some nights, when I'm
alone, it's not.
I like wome n-all kinds.
I like music-all kinds.
I like myself so I don't do drugs.
Oh yeah, about this fragrance . It's good. Very good.
When I posed for this picture, the art director insisted that I
wear it while the pictur es were being taken. I thought it was
silly, but I said "What the hell? It's their mone y."
After a while, I realized I like this fragran ce a lot. When the
photo shoot was over, I wa lked right over, picked up the bottle,
put it in my pocket and said " If you don 't mind , I'd like to take
this as a souvenir." Then I smiled my best f-- you smile and
walked out.
Next time, I'll pay for it.
It's tha t good.
. Today, goo d-looking stra ight guys are flockin g to the mode ling age nCIes, much less concerne d about any homosexual taint that will cleave to
them. It's no lon ger necessary for an ad to plant its ton g ue firmly in cheek
W~en lavishing ero tic attention on the male body---or to pepper the ad
With proofs of heterosexuali ty . It used to be, if an advertise me nt aimed at
straight men da red to sh ow a man fussing over his looks wi th see m ing ly
:m~nticpl~s in mind, there had better be a woman in the picture, makb ~ It. clear Just whom the boy w as gettin g pr ett y for . To sell a muscleUildmg product to heterosexuals, of course, you had to link it to virility
and the ability to attract women on the beach. Today, muscles are ope nly
Bold for their looks; Chroma Lean nutritional supplement unabashedl y comthe well-sculpted male body to a work of art (and a gay ma le icon , to
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S USAN B ORDo
boot)-Michelangelo's " Dav id." Many ads displ ay the nak ed male body
with out shame or plot excuse, and often exp loit rather than reso lve the
sexua l ambiguity that is gene rated .
Today, too, the athle tic, musc ular male bod y that Calvin plastered all
ove r build ings, magazin es, and subway stops has becom e an aesthetic
norm, for straights as well as gays. "No pees, no sex," is how the trendy
David Barton gym sells itself: "My motto is not 'Be healthy'; it's ' Look better naked,' '' Barton says. The notion has even made its wa y into that most
determined ly hetero sexual of con texts, a Rob Reiner film . In Sleepless in
Seattle, Tom Ha nks's character, w ho hasn 't been on a da te in fifteen years,
asks his frien d (played by Rob) what wo men are looking for nowadays.
"Pees and a cute butt," his friend repli ed w ithout hesitati on. "You can 't
even tu rn on the news nowadays without hearing about how some babe
thought some guy's butt was cute. Wh o the firs t woman to say this was I
d on ' t know, but somehow it caugh t on." Shou ld we tell Rob that it wasn' t
a woman w ho star ted the craze for men's butts?
Rocks and Leaners
We "no uvelles vo yeu ses" thus owe a big measur e of than ks to gay
male design ers and con sumer s, and to the aesthe tic and ero tic overlapnot uniform or total, but significan t- in what makes our hearts go thump.
But although I've been using the term for convenience, I don't think. it's
correct to say that these ads depict men as "sex objects." Actua lly, [ find
that w ho le notion mislead ing, whether ap plied to men or women, because
it seems to suggest that w hat these representat ions offer is a bod y that is
inert, dep erson alized, flat, a mere thing. In fact, adv ertisers put a huge
amount of tim e, money, and creativity in to figuring out how to crea te images of beautiful bodies tha t are heavy on attitude, sty le, associations wi th
pleasure, succes s, happiness. The most compelling ima ges are suffused
with "s ubjectivi ty" - they speak to us, they sed uce us. Unlike other kinds
of "objects" (chairs and tabl es, for example), they don't let us use them in
any w ay we like. In fact, they exert considerabl e power over us-over our
ps ych es, our desires, ou r self-image.
How d o ma le bodies in the ads speak to us nowadays? In a variety of
ways. Sometimes the message is challe nging, aggressive . Many models
stare cold ly at the viewer, defying the obser ver to view them in an y way
other than how they hav e chosen to present themselves: as powerful, armored, em ot ionally impenetrabl e. "I am a rock," their bodies (and sometimes their genitals) seem to proclaim . Often, as in the Jackson Browne
look-alike ad , the penis is pr ominent, but unlike the penis in that ad, its
presen ce is martial rather than sensual. Overall, these ad s de pict what I
wou ld desc ribe as "face- off ma sculinity," in w hich victory goes to the dominant con testant in a game of will against will. Who can stare the othe r man
down? Wh o will avert his eyes first? Whose gaze will be triumphant? Such
moments- "facing up," "facing off," "staring down"-as anthropologist
Face-off masculinity
David Gilmore has documented , are a test of macho in many cultures, inclUding our ow n . "Don't eyeball me!" barks the sergean t to his cade ts in
training in A n Offic er and a Gentl eman; the authority of the stare is a prize to
be won only with full manhood. Before then, it is a ma rk of insolen ce-or
184
SU SA N B ORD()
stupid ity, failure to understand the codes of masculine rank. In Get Shorty,
an unsuspecting film director challenge s a mob bos s to look him in the eye;
in retu rn, he is hurled across the room and has his fingers broken.
"Face-off" ad s, except for their inno vations in the amount of skin
exposed, are pretty traditional-one might eve n say primal-in their conception of mascul inity. Man y other species use staring to establish dominance,
and not only our close primate relatives. It's how my Jack Russell terrier intimid ates my male collie, who weighs over four times as much as the little
gu y but cowers un de r the autho rity of the terrier's macho stare. In the doggie world, size doesn 't matter; it's the power of the gaze-which indicates
the power to stand one's ground-that counts. My little terrier 's dominance,
in other words, is based on a convincing acting job-and it's one that is very
simila r, according to William Pollack, to the kind of pe rformance that young
boys in our culture must learn to ma ster. Pollack's studies of boys suggest
that a set of rules-which he calls "The Boy Code"-govern their behavior
with each other. The first imperativ e of the code-"Be a stur dy oak"-represents the emotional equivalent of "face-off masculinity": Never reveal weakness. Pretend to be confident eve n though you may be scared. Act like a rock
even when you feel shaky. Dare others to challenge your position.
The face-off is not the onl y available posture for male bodies in ads
today. An other possibility is what [ call "the lean"-beca use thes e bodies
are almost always reclining, leanin g against, or propped up again st something in the fashion typical of women' s bodi es. James Dean was probably
our first pop-culture "leaner"; he made it stylis h for teenagers to slouch.
Dean, however, never posed as languidly or was as openly seductive as
some of the high-fashio n leaners ar e tod ay. A recent Ca lvin Klein "Escape " ad depic ts a young, sensuous-looking man leaning agai nst a wall,
arm ra ised, dark un derarm hair exposed. His eyes seek out the imagined
viewer, soberly but flirtatiously. "Take Me," the copy read s.
Languid leaners have actu ally been aro und for a long time. Statues of
sleep ing fauns, their bod ies d raped langu orou sly, exist in classical art
alongside mor e heroic model s of male beauty. I find it interestin g, though,
that Klein has chosen Mr. Take Me to advertise a perfume called "Escape."
Klein' s "Eterni ty" ads usually depict happy, heterosexual couples, often
with a child . "Obsessio n" has always been cutting-ed ge, sexually amb iguous erotica. This ad, featu ring a man offering him self up sed uctively, invitingly to the observer, promises "escape." From what? To what? Men have
complained, justly, about the burden of alwa ys having to be the sexu al initiato r, the pursuer, the one of whom sexual "performance" is expected. Perhaps the escape is from these burde ns, and towa rd the freedom to ind ulge
in som e of the mor e receptive pleasures traditionally reserved for wo men.
The plea sures, not of staring someone down but of feeling one's body caressed by another's eyes, of being the one who receives the awaited call
rather than the one who must bu ild up the nerve to make the call, the one
who doesn' t have to hump and pump, but is permitted to lie quietly, engrossed in reverie and sensation.
Beau!J!J!e)discovers the Male Body
185
Some people describe these receptive pleasures as "passive "-which
gives them a bad press with men, and is just plain inaccura te too. "Passive" hardly describes what's going on when one person offers himself or
herself to an other. Inviting, receiving, responding-these are active behaViors too, and rather thrilling ones. It' s a macho bias to view the only
real activity as that which takes, invades, aggresses. It's a bia s, however,
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SUSA N BORDo
tha t's been w ith us for a long tim e, in both stra ight and gay cultures. In
man y Latin cultu res, it' s not a di sgrace to sleep w ith o ther men, so long as
one is activo (or machista)-the penetrator ra the r than the pe netratee. To be
a pasiuo, on the other hand, is to be socially stigm atize d. It's th at way in
pri son cultures too-a good indic ation of the power hierarchies invo lved.
These hier archies dat e back to the ancie nt Gree ks, who believed th at passivity, receptivity, penetrabili ty were mar ks of inferior feminine being.
The qua lities we re inh erent in wo men; it was our nature to be passively
contro lled by our sexual need s. (Un like us, the Gr eeks viewe d womennot men-as th e animalistic one s.) Real Men, who unlike women ha d the
necessary rationa lity and w ill, we re exp ected to be jud icious in the exercise of their desires. But bein g judiciou s and being "active"-deciding
whe n to pursu e, w hom to pursu e, making adv ances, pleading one's
case--went hand in hand .
Allowing oneself to be p ursued, flirt ing, accep ting the ad vances of another, offer ing one's bod y-these behaviors were permitted also (bu t only
on a temporar y basis) to still-de velo ping, younge r men. These young
men-not little boys, as is some times incorrectly believed-were the true
"sex objects" of elite Greek culture. Full-fled ged male citizens, on the
other hand, were expected to be "ac tive, " ini tiators, the penetrators not
the penetr atees, mas ters of the ir ow n desires ra ther than the objects of another 's . Plat o's Symposium is full of speeches on the d ifferent sexual behaviors appropriate to ad ult men w ith full beards and establi sh ed professions
an d glamoro us young men still revered more for their beauty than their
mind s. But eve n youth could not make it okay for a man to behave too
much like a woman. The admirable yo uth was th e one w ho-unlike a
woma n-was able to rem ain sexually "cool" and remo te, to keep his w its
abo ut him. "Letting go" was not seemly.
Wh ere does our cultu re stand today w ith resp ect to these ideas about
men 's sex ua lity? We ll, to begin w ith, consider ho w rarely male actors are
shown-on their faces, in the ir utterances, and not merely in the movements of their bod ies-having orgasms. In sex scenes, the moanings and
w rithings of the fem ale partn er have becom e the conventional cinematic
code for heterosexual ecstasy and climax. The mal e's participation is
largely repr esented by caressing h ands, humping bu ttocks, and-on rare
occasio ns-a facial expression of intense concentra tion . She's transported
to ano the r wo rld; he's the pil ot of the ship that takes her there. When men
are shown bein g tran sp orted themse lves, it' s usu ally been played for comedy (as in Al Pacino's shrie ks in Frankie and Johnny, Eddi e Mur phy 's
moanings in Boomerang, Kevin Kline's con tortions in A Fish Called Wanda),
or it's code d to sugg est that some thing is no t quite normal abo ut the
man-he's sexua lly enslave d, for example (as with Jerem y Irons in Damage). Mostly, men 's bodies are p resented like action-hero toys- wind them
up an d wa tch them perform .
Hollyw ood -still an ove rw helmingly stra ight-male-domina ted industry-is clearl y not yet ready to sho w us a man "passively" givin g
, self over to ano ther, at least not when the act ors in qu esti on are our
~tural icon s. Too feminine. Too s ugges t i~e, metaphorically.sp eaking,
of penetration by ano ther. But perhaps fash ion ad s are less uptigh t? I de'ded to perform an experime n t. I gro uped ads th at I had collected ove r
:cent years into a pile of "rocks" and a pile of "leane rs" and found, not surrisingly, that both race and age play ed a role. Afri can America n mod els,
~hether in Esquire or Vibe, are almos t alw ays posed facing -off . And leaners tend to be yo unger tha n roc ks . Both in gay publ icati ons and straight
ones, the more lan guid, come-hithe r p oses in advertise me n ts are of boys
and very young men . On ce a certain matur ity line is crossed, the challenging stares, the " face-off" postures ar e the norm. Wha t does one learn from
these ads ? Well, I would n' t wa nt to claim too much . It used to be th at
one could tell a lot abo ut gende r and race fro m lookin g at ads . Racial
stereotypes were tran sparen t, the establis hed formulas for rep resen ting
men and women w ere pr etty clear (sociologist Erving Goffman eve n
called ad s "gender advertise ments"), and when th e conven tions were
defied it was usually because advertisers sensed (or d iscovered in th eir
polls) that social shifts had mad e cons u mers read y to receive new images.
In this "post-modern" age, it's more of a free-fo r-all, and images are often
mor e reactive to each othe r th an to social change. It's the viewers' jad ed
eye, not th eir socia l pr ejudices, that is th e prime considera tion of every
._.
A yo uthful, and rogynous "leaner"-app ropriately eno ug h, advertising
[CK One] fragrance "for a man or a wom an "
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SUSAN BORDO
ad cam pa ign, and advertisers are qu ick to tap into taboos, to defy expectations, simply in orde r to pr oduce new and arresting images. So it would n' t
surp rise me if we soo n find lan guid black men and hair y-chested leaners
in the pa ges of Gentlemen's Quarterly.
Bu t I haven't seen any yet. At the very least, the cu rre nt scene suggests
that even in this era of postm od ern pastiche racial cliches and gender
taboos persist; am on g them , we don 't wa nt grown men to appear too
much the "passive " objects of anot her 's sexua l gaz e, ano ther's de sires. We
ap pear, still, to have so mewha t di fferen t rules for boys and men. As in ancient Greece, boys are perm itted to be sed uctive, playful, to flirt with
being "taken." Men mus t still be in command . Leon ardo DiCaprio, watch
out. You r da ys may be numbered.
"Honey, What Do I Want to Wear?"
Just as fifties masculinity was fou ght over (me tapho rically speaking)
by Stanley Kowa lski and Stanley Bank s, the male fashion scene of the
nin eties invol ves a kind of con test for the so uls of men too. Calvin Klein,
Versace, Cucci, Abercrombi e & Fitch have not onl y brought naked bottoms and bulging briefs onto the comme rcial scene, they present underwear, jeans, shirts, and sui ts as item s for enhancing a ma n's appe arance
and sexu al appeal. They suggest it's fine for a man to care abo ut ho w he
looks and to culti vate an open ly ero tic style. In resp on se, agg ressively heterosexual Dockers and Haggar ads compe te-for the bu yin g dollar of
"I'm damn we ll gonna wear w hat I want.
Honey, what do I want?"
-
Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body
189
en, but in the pr ocess for their gend er consciousness too--by stress ing
:e no-nonsen se utili ty of khaki s. Con sid er the Haggar cas uals adve rtisement on the previou s page, and what it says abou t how " rea l men " should
feel about their clothes :
"I'm damn well gonna wea r what I want. . . . Honey, what do I want?"
Looked at in one light, the man in the adv erti sem ent is bein g mad e fun
of, as a self-dece ived blu sterer wh o asserts his ind ep endence "like a man "
and in the next breath reveals tha t he is actually a helpl ess little boy who
need s his mommy to pick out his clothes for him. But fashio n incompetence is a species of helpl essness that man y men feel quite comfortable
with, eve n proud of. Recogni zin g this, Haggar and Dockers a re amo ng
those manufactu rers w ho have put a grea t d eal of effort into marketing
" nonf ashion -gu y fashion" to a niche of straight men-w orking-class and
yuppie-wh o, they pr esume, wo uld be scar ed off by eve n a w hiff of "feminine" clothes-consciou sn ess. Here 's an other one from Haggar 's:
"In the female the ability to match colors comes at an ea rly age. In the male
it comes when he marries afemale."
The juxtaposition of ine p t male /fashion -con sciou s female, w hich w ith
one stro ke establishes the masculinity and the heterosexuality of the depicted man, is a staple of virtua lly every Haggar ad . In a Haggar television
spot wi th vo ice-over by John Goo dman (Rosea nne 's beefy former television hu sband), a man wakes up , sleepily pulls on a pai r of kha kis, and
goes outside to ge t the pa pe r:
"I am not what I wear. I'm not a pair of pants, or a shirt." (He then wa lks
by his wife , handing her the front section of the paper.) " I 'm not in touch
with my inner child. I don't read poetry, and I'm not politically correct." (He
goes down a hall, and his kid snatches the comics from him.) " I' m just a
guy, and I don't have time to think about what I wear, because I've got a lot of important guy things to do. " (Left wi th only the spo rts section of the paper, he
heads for the bathroom .) "One-hundred-per-cent-cotton-wrinkle-Jree khaki
pants that don't require a lot of thought. Haggar. Stuff you can wear."
Yes, it's a bit of a parody, but that only allows Haggar to d ou ble its
point that real guys have better things to do than think abo u t what they
are going to wea r or how they appe ar to others. The guy who wo uld be so
Worried abou t his image that he couldn' t po ke fun at h imself wo uldn' t be
a real gu y at all. Real guys do n't take themselves so serious ly! That' s for
~imps who favo r poetry, self-he lp psychology, and bleeding-h eart p olitics. That' s for girls, and for the men who are pussy-whipped by them .
In Ha ggar 's world, real guys don't choose clothing that w ill enha nce
the appearance of their bodi es or display a sense of styl e; rea l guys just
put on some "stuff" to wear becau se they have to, it's socia lly requ ired.
The less decorati ve, the better. "We wou ld never d o anything wit h our
pants that wo uld frig h ten an yone away," says Dockers designer Gareth
Morris as rep ort ed in a 1997 piece in The New Yorker. "We'd never do too
many belt loops, or an unusu al base cloth . . . [or] zips or a lot of poc ket
flaps and details on the back." Pocket flaps, the ultimate signifier of suspect sexuality! In such ads, male naivete about the sexual potency of
190
clothes, as age ncy maven David Altschi ller claims, is cri tical. "In wo men's
adv ertisin g," he points out, "se lf-confide nce is sexy. But if a ma n is self.
confident-if he knows he is attractive an d is beautifully d ressed-then
he's not a man an ymore. He's a fop. He 's effeminate." In Dockers' "Nice
Pants" television ad s, for example, it' s crucial that the guy not know his
pa n ts are "nice" until a go rgeous wo man p oints it out to him.
It's no accident that the pant s are described via the low-ke y understatement "nice" (rather than "great," for example, which would suggest that
the guy was actuall y trying to look go od) . For the real ma n (according to
Dockers), the mirror is a tool, not a captivating pool; if he could, he'd look
the other wa y while he shaves. Man y other advertisers capitalize on such
notion s, encouraging me n to take care of their looks, bu t reassu ring them
that it's for utilitarian or instrumental purposes. Cosmetic surgeons em.
ph asize the corp orate adv antage that a face-lift or tummy tuck w ill give the
aging executive: "A you thful look ," as on e says, "gives the appearanc e of a
more dynam ic, charging ind ividual wh o will go out and get the business."
Male groom ing pr odu cts too are often marketed by way of "action hero"
euphem isms wh ich obsc ure their relat ion to feminine versions of the same
product (a male girdle ma rketed by Bod ySlimmers is called the Double
Agent Boxer) and the fact that their func tion is to enhance a man 's app earance: hair spray as "hair control," exfoliating liquid as "scruffing lotion,"
ast ringents as "scrubs," moisturizers and fragrances as "a fter" or "pre" accompaniments to that most manl y of rituals, the sha ve. They often have
nam es like Safari and Chaps and Lab Series, and come in containers
shap ed like spaceships and other forms a girl could have some fun with.
The notions about gende r that are ma int ained in this mark eting run
deep er than a refusa l to use the word " perfume" for products designed to
make men smell good . In the late seventies, coin cide nt with the de velopment of femin ist consciou sness about the se ma tters, ar t historian John
Berger d iscovered wha t he arg ued we re a set of implicit cul tural paradigms of mas culinity and fem ininity, crystallized in a visual "r ule" of both
classical pai nt ing and com mercial ad vertisemen ts: "men act and women appear." Here 's a con temporary illustration:
The man in the Nautica ad on the facin g page, rigging his sail, seems
obliv ious to his ap pearance; he's too busy chec king the prevailing winds.
The woman , in cont rast, seems well awa re and we ll pleased that her legs
have caught the att ention of the men ga ping at her. A woman's appearance,
Berge r argu ed , has been socia lly determ ined to be "of crucial importance
for what is normally though t of as the su ccess of her life." Even walking
on a city stree t, head ed for th eir highpowered executive jobs, wo men exist
to be seen, an d they know it- a no tion com m uni cated by th e constant
tropes of fema le narcissism : w omen sho wn p reening, looking in mir rors,
strok ing their own bodies, exhibiting themselves for an assumed specta·
tor, as king to be admired for their beau ty.
With de pictions of men, it's just the opposite. "A man ' s presence, "
Berger w rote, "is dependent upon the promise of power which he
191
Men act and women appear
embodies . . . w hat he is capab le of doing to you or for yo u." Thus, the
classic formula for representing men is alw ays to sh ow them in action, immersed in w hateve r the y are do ing, seemingly un aware of any one who
might be lookin g at them. They never fond le thei r own bodies narcissistically, display them selves purely as "s ights," or gaze at themselves in the
mirror. In every thing from wa r pain tings to jeans an d cologn e ad s, men
have been portrayed as u tterly oblivious to thei r beauty (or lack of it), intent only on getting the job done- raising the flag, baling hay, lassoing a
steer, busting up concrete. The ability to move hea vy things aro und, tame
wild creatures-that' s manly business. Fretting about you r love han d les,
your dry skin, your sagging eyelids? That's for girl s.
Women in ad s an d movies thus require n o p lot excuse to show off
their various body parts in ads, proud ly, shyly, or sed uctively; it's the
"business" of all of us to be beautiful-wh ether we are actr esses, politi~ns, homemakers, teach ers, or rock stars . This has changed very little
SInce Berger came up wi th his formula. Whe n Time ma gazine di d a story
on the ne w dominance of femal e stars in the rock world, its cover fea~d singing star Jewe l, no t perfor m ing, but in a dewy close-up, lips
InOlst and soft eyes smilin g from behind curled lash es. Th is formidable
new "force" in the rock world might as well have been mod eling Maybel~ine . True, a beautiful wo man tod ay may be d ep icted p uffing away on
.a cigar, getting "in touch wi th he r ma sculine side." But in expression
She's still a seductress, gazing throu gh lon g-lashed lids int o the eyes of an
gined viewer . "Do yo u like what you see?" the expressions of the
·Odels seem to ask.
192
Men, accor d ing to Berge r's formula, mu st nev er seem as though they
ar e asking this qu estion, and may di sp lay their bea uty on ly if it is an unavo idable side effect of other "business." Th us, a lot of the glistening,
naked male ches ts in the mo vies of the fifties and sixties were on the bOdies of wa rriors, pr isoners, slaves, and prizefight ers. No one could claim
there was vanity in suc h nakedn ess. (No time for preening while nailing
sp ikes on a cha in gang or rowing in a slave galley.) So a stro ng dose of
male skin could be sneaked in to a movie wi thout dis turbing the gender
ru les. The ph ysical presence of an ac tor like Richard Cere, who emanates
consciousness of his bod y as the eroti c focus of the gaze and invi tes it, has
always annoyed and disconcerted critics. The pomposit y of Cha rlton Heston, on the othe r han d, his n aked (and actu ally rather gorgeous) chest
p uffed up in nu merous biblical epics, goes unnoticed, because he's doing
it all in a builder-of-the-uni verse rather than narc issus-in-the-mirror
mode.
Saturday Night Fever (1977) deserv es me ntion here, for openly brea king
with this convention . Tony Manero (John Travolta), a di sco-d ancing
da ndy w ho knows how to use his wa lk, was a man who really needed a
cou rse in mascul inity-accord ing-to-Haggar. He blows a ll his wages on
fancy shirts and shoes. On Sat urd ay night, he pr epares his bo dy meticulously, shav ing , de odorizing, blow -dr ying, choosing just the right combination of gol d cha ins and amu lets, torso-clinging pants, shiny platforms.
Eating dinner wi th his family, he sw athes himself in a sheet like a bab y to
prot ect his new floral shi rt; when h.is father boxes his ear roug hly, his only
thou ght is for his pompadour: "Just watch the hair! I wo rk on my hair a
lon g tim e and yo u hit it. He hits the hair!" Man ero spe nds much of his
time in front of the mirror , getting himself pretty, posi ng, an ticipating the
impression he's go ing to make when he enters the disco or stru ts down
the stree t.
Never before Saturday Night Fever had a heterosexual male movie hero
spent so much time on his toilette. (Even Cary Gra nt's glamorous looks
we re never shown as requiring any conscious effort or attention; in The
Awfu l Truth he sits under a tann ing lamp-bu t that's to fake a trip to
Florida .) Altho ug h this wa s the polyester seventies, and men like Sonny
Bon o d ressed like Tony on televisio n, Bono was very carefu l (as the
Beatles were too) to treat his flamboyant ruffles as showbiz costumes,
wh ile Cher pr ou d ly stru tted her feathers and finery as a second skin for
her bod y and sex ua lity. Tony, like Cher, chooses his cloth es to highlight
his sin uo us form .
Ma nero was , in man y wa ys, the cinema eq uivalent (reass uringly
straight and working-class) of the revolution that Calv in Klein was making in more sexua lly am biguo us form in the fashion wo rld. As a dancer,
Ton y is un emb arr assed- and the camera isn' t em ba rrassed either- to
make his hips, gro in, and buttocks the mesm ertzin g center of attention.
Travolta was also the firs t acto r to appe ar on-sc reen in form -fitting (if discree tly black) briefs. One scene find s him asleep in his underwear, blanket
uty (Re)discovers the Male Body
193
between his legs, hip jutti ng up ward; the camera mov es slow ly down the
Jength of h is bod y, wa tches as Tony rouses, sits up , p ulls the blanket from
between h is legs, and puts his hand in his briefs to adj ust his pe nis . (The
ript orig ina lly had called for Travolt a to appear nak ed in a later scene;
he balked, suggesting the ear ly mo rni ng scene as a comp romise .) We then
folloW him to the mirror (wh ere he compares hi mself ad miringly with a
poster of Al Pacino) an d int o the hall, wh ere he flexes teasingly for his
shocked grand mo ther. Th is was new stuff, and some peo p le were a bit
taken aback by such open ma le va nity and exhibitionism . (Pa uline Kael,
for one, seem ed to nee d to conv ince herself of Ton y's sexua l orie n tation.
"It's a stra igh t heterosexual film," she wrote, "but wit h a feeling for the
sexiness of young boys who are burs ting their britches with energy and
desire.")
Tru e, there is the sug ges tion, in the film , tha t Tony ma y g ro w out of
his na rcissism onc e he leaves Brook lyn and the gold cha in crowd .
Hollyw ood , of course, had show n men preening , decora ting, and oiling
themselves before-pimps and hom osexu als, usuall y, but also va rious
unassimilated nati ves (blacks, Puerto Rican s, Italians) dep icted as livin g
more fully in their bod ies, wi th a taste for flash y cloth es that ma rks them
as declasse. Man ero fits those stereotypes- but only up to a po int. He ma y
have awf ul taste in jewelry, but he also has boyish charm and "na tive"
intelligence. Un like his friends-a path etic trio of racist, hom oph obic,
sexist homeboys- Ton y has integrity. He is enraged w hen, at the "2001"
dance contest, racism and favo ritism land him firs t pr ize ove r a Puer to
Rican coup le. He's also the only one of his friends who doesn't taunt a gay
couple as they pass on the stree t. The movie may poke affecti ona te fun at
him, but it also ad mires him. A hero-narcissu s-a very new image for
postw ar Ho llywood.
Of course, mos t men , gold cha ins or not, straight or gay, do care how
they "appear. " The gender d ifferences descr ibed in Berger 's for mula and
embedded in the Dockers and Haggar advertisemen ts are "fictional," a
distillation of certain ideas abou t men and women, no t an emp irical generalization about their act ua l behav ior . This doesn' t mea n, however, that
they have no imp act on "real life." Far from it. As embo die d in attrac tive
and sometime s high ly manipulative images, "men act and wo me n appear " func tions as a visua l instru ction . Wom en are supposed to care very
~uch about fashio n, "va nity," looking good, and may be seen as unferninIne, man -hating, or lesbian if they don 't. The reverse goes for me n. The
~an Who care s abo ut his looks the w ay a woman does, self-esteem on the
line, read y to be sha ttered at the s lightest insult o r weigh t ga in, is unmanl y, sex ua lly suspe ct.
So the next time you see a Dockers or Haggar ad , think of it no t only as
an ad vertisement for khakis but also as an advertisement for a certain notion of wha t it mean s to be a man . The ad execs know that's wha t's going
on, th ey're open abo ut not wanting to frighten men off wi th tou ches of
feminine decor ativeness. What they are less open about is the fact that
194
SU 5Al\ BOROO
such ads don't just cater to male phobias about fash ion but also per petu_
ate them. They have to. Now adays, the Dockers man is competing against
other mo dels of mascu linity, laug hing at him from bo th the pages of history and from wha t was prev iously the " margin" of contempora ry culture. Can you imagine Ca ry Grant, Rupert Ever ett , or Michael Jorda n as
th e fashion-incompetent man in a Dockers ad? The stylish ma n, Who
began to make a new claim on popular cultu ral rep resentations w ith the
gr ea ter visibili ty of black and gay men-the men consumer cultu re once
ignored-was chiseling cracks in the rule that "men act and women app ear " even as Berger was formulating it.
Male Decorativeness in Cultural Perspective
Not all heterosexual me n are as uptight about the pocket flap s on their
pant s as the Haggar executive would have us believe. Several weeks after
the piece on khakis ap pea red in The New Yorker, a reader wrote in protesting that the idea " that men do n't want to look like they ' re trying to be
fashionable or sexy" was rath er culture-bound. May be, this reader ackn owledged, it ap plies to American, Eng lish, and Japanese men . "But are
we really to believe that French, Italian, an d Spanish men shar e this concern? And, when we expand the catego ry 'male' beyo nd human beings,
biologists have sho wn that the demon stration of male sp lendo r is a key element in the ver tebrate mat ing game. Are American males just an anomalous species?"
The lett er reminds us that there are da ngers in dr aw ing broad conclusions on the basis of on ly those worlds w ith which one is familia r. And it's
not just different interna tional attitudes toward men and fash ion that cast
do ub t on th e un iversal applicability of the Dockers/Haggar view of masculinity. To look a t the varia bles of race, class, and his tory is to produce a
picture of ma le attitudes toward fashio nable displ ay tha t is far from consistently ph obic.
First of all, for most of human history, there hav en't been radi cally different "masculine" and "feminin e" attitudes toward beauty and decorativeness. On farms, frontiers, and feudal esta tes, wo men were needed to work
alongside men and beau ty was hard ly a priority for either. Amo ng aristocrats, it was most important to maintain class privilege (rather than gender
difference), and standards of elegance for both sexes (as Anne Hollander's
fascinating Sex and Suits documents) were largely the sam e: elaborate headwea r, cosmetics, nonutilitarian ad ornments, and accessories. Attention to
beauty was associated not with feminini ty but with a life that was both privileged and gove rned by exacting stan dards. The constrictions, precarioUS
adornments, elaborate fastenings reminded the elite that they were highlY
civilized beings, not sim ple peasant "animals." At the same time, decorativeness was a mode of royal and aristocratic competition, as households and
courts would try to out-glam each other with jewels and furs. Hollander describes a sixteenth-century summit meeting between Francis I and Henry
195
VIII, in which eve ryone wore "silver covered with d iamonds~ except ~h en
they were in cloth of gold and cover ed With rub les. Everything was lined
WIith ermine and everything was 20 yar ds long, and there wer e plumes on
everybody." Everybody-male or fema le-had to be as gorgeous as possible. It was a mode of power competition.
Until rou ghl y the fou rteenth century, men and women did n' t even
dress very di ffer ently. (Thin k of th e Greeks and Romans and their unisex robes and togas.) Clear differences star ted to em erge only in the late
Middle Ages an d early Renaissance: women's brea sts began to be exposed
and emphasized in tight bodices, whil e their legs we re covered wi th lon g
skirts. Men 's legs-and som etimes their genitals as we ll- we re "fu lly articulated " an d visi ble throu gh pa ntaloons (wha t we call " tigh ts"), with
body armor cove ring the chest . Whi le to ou r sens ibilities, the sha pely legs
and genitals of men in tights (unl ess requi red by a ballet or historical
drama) are eith er to be la ugh ed at or drooled over, Hollander argues that
in the Renaissance, to outline the male body was to ma ke it mo re "real"
and "natural," less a temp late for sexual fantasy (as women's bodies were
becoming) . This trend contin ue d, wi th men's clothing getting progressively more unrestrictive, tailored, simp le and women 's mor e stiff, tightly
fitted, deco rati ve. Still, int o the sev enteenth century, fashionable gen tleman continued to wear lace and silk, and to don powder and wigs before
appearing in public. Hollander regards the nineteen th century as a "grea t
divide, " after which not only the styles of men's and women 's clothing
(trousers for men, incr easin gly romantic froufrou for women) would become rad ically di fferent, but ideas abo ut them as we ll. Men 's clothing
must now be "honest, com fortable, and utilitari an ," while wo men's begins
to develop a rep utation for being "frivo lous" an d "deceptive." The script
for "men act and women ap pear" was being written-right onto ma le and
female clothing.
LOOking beyond fashion to the socia l world (something Hollander refuses to do , but I'll vent ure), it's hard no t to sp eculate that these changes
anticipate th e emergence of the midd le class an d the nineteenth-century
development of distinctively separ ate spheres for men an d women
Within it. In the ind ustria l era, me n 's sphere-increasingly the wo rld of
~nufacturing, bu ying, selli ng, power brokering- was performanceonented, and demanded "no nonsense." Women, for their part, were expected not onl y to provide a com for table, well-ord ered home for men to
return to but to offer beau ty, fan tasy, and charm for a ma n to "escape" to
~~ ~estore himself with after the grim gr ind of the wo rking day. As th is
diVISion of labo r developed, strong dualistic notions abou t " masculinity"
Clncl "femininity" began to em erge, with sanctions against the man or
Woman who dared to cross over to the side of th e divide whe re they did
l\ot belong "by na ture."
By the end of the nineteenth century, older notions of manliness
!l'elllised on altruism, self-restraint, and moral integrity--qualities tha t
oJnen could have too-began to be understood as vaguely "feminine."
196
Writers and politicians (like Teddy Roose velt) began to complain loudly
abo ut the emasculating effects of civilization and the excessive role pla yed
by wo men teachers in stiflin g the development of male nature. New
words like "pussyfoot " and "s tuffed shirt"- and , most de adl y, "s issy'<.,
came into parlance, and the "homosex ual" came to be classified as a perverse personality type which the normal, het erosexual male had to prove
him self distinct from . (Before, men 's relations with each othe r had been
cons ide rably more fluid, and eve n the het erosexual male was allowed a
certain degree of phys ical intimacy and em otional connection-indeed,
"he teros exuality" as such was a notion that hardly made sense at the
time .) A new vog ue for bod ybuilding em erged. "Wome n pity weakly
men ," O. S. Fowl er warned, but they love and ad mire "ri ght hearty feeders, not dainty; sp righ tly, not tott ering; mor e mu scular than exq uisite, and
more powerful than effemina te, in mind and bod y." To be "exq uisite," to
be decorati ve, to be on display, was now full y wo man' s bu siness, and the
man who cros sed that line w as a "fop."
From that time on, male "vanity" went into hiding, and when cosmetic
products for men began to be marketed (for men did use them, albeit in secret), they had to justify them selves, as Kath y Piess documents, through
the manly rhetoric of efficiency, rugged individualism , compe titive advan tage, autonom y. While Pompeian cream promises to "beautify and
yo uthify" women, the same p roduct for men wi ll help them "win success"
and " make pr omotion easier" on the job. Even that most manl y of rituals
(from our persp ective), shavin g, required speci al rhetori c when home
shav ing wa s first intro d uced early in the tw entieth century. "The Gillette
is typi cal of the Ame rican sp irit," claimed a 1910 ad . "Its use starts habits
of ene rgy---of initi ative. And men who do for themselves are men who
think for themselves." Curley'S Easy-Shaving Safety Razor claimed that
" the first Rom an to shave every d ay wa s no fop, but Scipio, conqueror of
Africa." When it came to products used also by women-like scents and
cream s-manufacturers went ou t of their way to reassure pr osp ective customers of their no-nonsense "di fference," through action names (Brisk,
Dash, Vim, Keen, Zest) and other means. When Florian, a line of men's
toiletries, wa s introd uced in 1929, its creator, Ca rl Week s, ad vised druggists to locat e the products near cigar (again!) counters, usin g displays featuring manly acco uterments like boxing gloves, pipes, footb alls. This, he
argu ed, "w ill put over the idea that the mascu-line is all stag. It's for hemen with no wom en welcome nohow. "
Th is isn't to say that from the turn of the nineteenth centu ry on,
the drive to sepa rate "masculine" and "feminine" attitudes toward selfbeautification pu shed forward relentlessly. For one thing, culture is never
of one piece ; it has its dominant images, but also its margin al, recessive,
and countercultu ral images. For another, the history of gender ideology
didn't end with the nineteenth century, as dramatic as its chan ges were. A
centu ry of mutations and permutations followed, as demanded by social,
197
economic, and political conditions. Older ideals lingered too and were revived when need ed . The Depression, for example, brought a love affa ir
with (a fanta sy of) aristocratic "class" to popular cu ltur e, and a world of
Hollywood representations . .. in which sexual di fference was largely irrelevant, the heroes an d heroines of screwba ll comedy a matched set of
glamorously attired cutups. In these films, the appea l of actors like Cary
Grant, Fred Astaire, an d William Powell was largely premised not on assertions of mas culine performance but on thei r elega nce, wit, and charm.
Their maleness wa sn't thrown into question by the cut of their suits.
Rather, being fashi onable signifi ed that the y led an en viable life of plea sure and pla y. Such association s still persist tod ay. Fashi on ad vertisements for Ralph Lauren, Valentino, Hu go Boss, and many others are
crafted to appeal to the class consc iousness of cons umers; in that universe,
one can never be too beautiful or too vain, whatever one 's sex.
In the screwball comedies, it didn't matter whe ther you were a man or
a woman, everyon e's clothes spa rkled and shone . Following the lead of
the movies, many adv ertisemen ts of the thirti es promoted a kind of androgynous elegance. But others tried to have their cake and eat it too, as in
a 1934 ad for Fou gere Royale aftershave, wh ich depicts a group of tony
men in tuxedos, hair slicked back, one even wearing a pince-ne z, but
with the caption "Let's not join the ladies! " We may be glam orous, even
foppish-but puh-lease! Ladies we 're not! I sho uld note, too, that while the
symbols of "class" can functi on to highlight equality between men and
women, they can also be used to emphasize man's superiority over
women-as in a con temporary Cutty Sark ad in w hich a glamorously attired woman relaxes, dreamily stro king a dog, while the tuxe do-clad men
standing around her engage in serious conversation (about stocks, I ima gine); these gu ys don 't need to go off into the d rawing room in order to escape the ladies; they can keep on e aro und for a bit of decorativene ss and
sensual pleasure w hile she rem ain s in her own, more languorous world
Within their own.
During World War II, movies and magazines continued to celebrate
independent, ad ven turous women, to whom men were drawn "as much
for their spirit and character as for their looks."! But when the fighting
men returned, the old Victorian di vision of labor was revi ved with a new
COmmercial av idity, and the world became on e in which "men act" (read :
toork) and "wo men appear" (read: decorate -both them selves and their
houseS)-with a vengeance. Would Barbie get on a horse without the
proper accessories ? Would the Marlboro Man carry a mirror with him
?I'the trail? By the late fifties and early sixties, the sexy, wisecracking,
IIldependent-minded heroine had morphed into a pe rky little ingenue. Popular actresses Annette Funicello, Connie Stevens, and Sandra Dee were
liVing Barbie dolls, their femininity blatantly ad vertised on their shirtWaisted bodies. The y had perfectly tended bouffant hairdos (which I
achieved for myself by sleeping on the cardboard cylinders from toilet
198
tissue rolls) and wore high heels even when washing dishes (I drew the line
at that). And what about the dashing, cosmopolitan male figure in fashion.
able clothes? He now was usually played as a sissy or a heel-as for
example Lester (Bob Evans), the slick playboy of The Best of Everything,
who seduces gullible April (Diane Baker) with his big-city charm, then be.
haves like a cad when she gets pregnant.
There have always been ways to market male clothes consciousness,
however. Emphasizing neatness is one. Our very own Ronnie Reagan
(when he was still a B-movie star) advertised Van Heusen shirts as "the
neatest Christmas gift of all" because they "won't wrinkle ... ever!!"
Joining elegance with violence is another. James Bond could get away with
wearing beautiful suits because he was ruthless when it came to killing and
bedding. (A men's cologne, called 007, was advertised in the sixties with
clips from Thunderball, the voice-over recommending: "When you use 007,
be kind" because "it's loaded" and "licensed to kill ... women.") The elegant male who is capable of killing is like the highly efficient secretary who
takes off her glasses to reveal a passionate, gorgeous babe underneath: a
species of tantalizing, sexy disguise.
When elegance marks one man's superior class status over another it
gives him a competitive edge (as was the dominant function of elegance
before the eighteenth century) rather than turning him into a fop. "We
have our caste marks, too" ran a 1928 ad for Aqua Velva, which featured a
clean-shaven, top-hatted young man, alongside a turbaned, bejeweled,
elite Indian man. This ad, however, proved to be problematic, as Kathy
Piess points out. American men didn't like being compared with darkskinned foreigners, even aristocratic ones. The more dominant traditionamong Europeans as well as Americans-has been to portray an order in
which the clean, well-shaven white man is being served or serviced by the
dark ones, as in a 1935 American ad for Arrow Shirts in which the black
maid is so fashion-clueless that she doesn't even know what a manufacturer's label is, or in a German ad for shaving soap depicting the "appropriate" relation between the master race and the Others.
Such codes were clearly being poked fun at-how successfully I'm not
sure-when a 1995 Arid Extra-Dry commercial depicted African American
pro basketball player Charles Barkley dressed up as a nineteenth-century
British colonial, declaring that anything less than Arid "would be uncivilized." The commercial, however, is not just (arguably) a poke at the racist
equation of civilization and whiteness. It's also, more subtly, a playful
assertion of some distinctive African-American attitudes toward male
display. "Primordial perspiration," Barkley says in the commercial,
"shouldn't mess with your style." And "style" is a concept whose history
and cultural meanings are very different for blacks and whites in this
country. Among many young African American men, appearing in high
style, "cleaned up" and festooned with sparkling jewelry, is not a sign of
effeminacy, but potency and social standing. Consider the following description, from journalist Playthell Benjamin's 1994 memoir, Lush Life
199
!iPlode rvlT\.d.
nCV7EI'J
J'elf e
cfbero.
G'1MlI<tc/obt. 1Gtrru1J<:
(while you're reading it, you might also recall Anne Hollander's description of Henry VIII's summit meeting):
[Fast Black] was dressed in a pair of white pants, white buck
shoes, and a long-sleeve white silk shirt-which was open to his
navel and revealed a 24-karat gold chain from which hung a
gold medallion set with precious stones: diamonds, rubies, and
emeralds. His massively muscled body was strikingly displayed
in a white see-through silk shirt, and the trousers strained to
200
SUSAN B ORDO
contain his linebacker thighs. His eyes were bloodshot and his
skin was tight against his face, giving it the look of an ebony
mask. He struck me right off as a real dangerous muth afucka;
mean enough to kill a rock.
A "real dangerous rnuthafucka" in a white see-through silk shirt? For
the white boys to whom the Dockers and Ha ggar ads are largely add ressed,
see-thro ug h silk is for girls, and sho win g off one's body-particu larly with
sens uous fabrics-is a "fag" thing. Thus, whi le a Ha ggar ad may pla y up
the sensu al appeal of soft fabrics-"These clothes are very soft and they'll never
wrinkle"- it makes sure to include a parenthetical (and sexist) referenc e to a
dream ed-of wife: "Toobad you can't marry them." But sartorial sensuality and
decorativeness, as I've learned, do not necessarily mean "feminini ty" for
African American men.
When I first saw the Charles Bark ley commercial, the word "style"
slipped by me unnoticed, becau se I kne w very little about the history of
African American aes thetics. An earl y pap er of mine deal ing with Berger 's
equation w as utterly oblivious to racial diffe rences that might confound
the formula "m en act and women appear. " Luckil y, an African American
male colleague of mine gently straigh tene d me out, ur gin g me to think
about Mike Tyson' s gold front tooth as something other than will ful ma sculine de fiance of the tyranny of appearance. Unfo rtunatel y, at that time
not m uch of a systema tic nature had been written abo ut African Ame rican
aes the tics; I had to find illuminating nuggets here and there. Then, just
this year, Shane White and Graham White's Stylin' app eared. It's a fascinating account of how the d istinctive legac y of African aesthetics was
maintain ed and creatively, sometimes challeng ing ly, incorporated into the
fashi on practices of American blacks , providing a vibrant (and frequently
sub versi ve) w ay for blacks to "write themselves into the American story."
Unde r slavery, white ow nership of blacks wa s asse rted in the most
concr ete, humiliating way around the dis pla y of the body on the auction
block. Slaves were often stripp ed naked and instructed to show their teeth
like horses being examined for purchase. Wom en might have their hair
cut off. Ever yone's skin would be polished to shine, as apples are polished
in gr ocery stores today. As a former slave described it:
"The first thing they had to do was wash up and clean up real good
and take a fat greasy meat skin and run over their hands, face and also
their feet, or in othe r wor ds, eve ry place that showed about their body so
that the y wo uld look real fat and shiny. Then the y would tro t them out before their would-be bu yers and let them look over us rea l good, just like
yo u would a bunch of fat cows that yo u were going to sell on the market
and try to get all you could for them. "
It makes perfect sens e that w ith the bod y so intimately and degradingly
un de r the control of the slave owner, opportunities to "take back" one 's
own body and assert one 's own cultural meanings with it would have a
special significance. On Sundays, slaves would dress up for church in the
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Beauh}(Re)discovers the Male Body
201
most colorful, vibran t clothes they could put together-a temporary escape
{rom and an active repu diation of the subserv ience their bodies were forced
into du ring the week. Their outfits, to whi te eyes, seemed "clashin g" and
mismatched. But p utting together unusu al combina tions of color, texture,
and pattern was an essential ingredient of West African textile tradi tions,
handed dow n and ad apt ed by African Ameri can women. Color and shape
"coordination "- the tyranny of European American fashion until pretty recently-were not the ruling principles of style . "Visual aliveness," Stylin' reports, was. The visual aliveness of the slaves' Sunday best, so jangling to
white sensibilities, was thus the child both of necessity-they were forced to
construct their outfits through a process of bricollage, p utting them together
from whatever items of clothing we re available--and aestheti c tradi tion.
From the start, wh ites p erceived there was something insubordinate
going on when blacks d ressed up-and they were not entirely wrong.
"Slaves were only too keen to display, even to flaunt, the ir finer y both to
slaves and to wh ites"; the Sunday procession was, as I've noted , a time to
reclaim the body as one 's ow n. But at the sam e time , blacks were not just
"flaun ting," but preserving and imprOVising on vibran t African elem en ts
of style wh ose "flashiness" and "in solence" we re largely in the eye of the
white beholder, used to a very different aes thetic. The cultural resistance
going on here was therefore much dee per than offende d whites (and
probably most blacks too) realized a t the time . It wasn' t simp ly a matter of
refusal to behave like Stepin Fetchi t, with head lowered and eyes down. A
new culture of un pred ictable, pl ayfull y dec ora tive, Visually bold fashi on
was being creat ed-and it wo uld ultimately (altho ugh no t for some time)
transform the world of mainstream fashion as much as Klein 's de liberately erotic underwear and jeans.
After "emancipa tion," funeral marches and celebratory promenades
were a regular feature of black city life, in which marchers, male and female
alike, were "emblazoned in colorfu l, expensive clothes," the men in "flashy
Sports outfits: fan cy expensive silk shirts, new pants, hats , ties, socks,"
"yellow trousers and yellow silk shirts," and "bedecked with silk-and-satinribboned streamers, bad ges." Apart from formal processions, stree ts like
Memphis's Beale Street and New Orleans's Decatur Street were ongo ing inlonnal sites for "strolling" and display . The most da zzlingly d ressed men,
often jazz musicians, were known as "sp orts." As "Jelly Roll" Morton deSCribes it, each "sp ort" had to have a Snnday suit, with coat and pants that
did not match, and crisply pressed trousers as tight as saus age skins. Suspenders were essential and had to be "very loud," wi th one strap left
proVocatively "hanging down." These gu ys knew how to "use their wa lk"
too. The sport would wa lk down the street in a "very mosey" style: "Your
hands is at your sides with your index finger s stuck out and you kind of
struts with it." Morton-by all acconnts a particularly flashy sp ort-had
gold on his teeth and a diamond in one of them. "Those days," he recalled,
"I thought I would die unless I had a hat with the emblem Stetson in it an d
sOme Edwin Clapp shoes." Shades of Tony Manero. Or King Henry VIII.