"a real dangerous muthafucka in a white see-through silk shirt?"

I was so compelled by the overall tone of this piece that I found myself reading and rereading, gaging the levels of sarcasm and cynicism and never once feeling sorry for the male. The text is, not surprisingly, drowning in overt feminism from the very beginning.  Bordo notes, "Now that men are taking off their clothes, the culture is suddenly going too far. Could it be that the author doesn't even read all those naked female bodies as "overexposed"?" She goes on to describe (and, in fact, reproduce) several images of scantily clad males using such explicit detail I wondered if she set out to write a philosophical text or intended to provide the academic world with twenty five pages of erotica.  Either way, several pages later, her rhetorical strategy becomes incredibly obvious: in her argument about the sexualization of the male body, she employs the exact same language and rhetorical devices used to describe the female body and the woman as a sexual entity. And this language, when used to describe the male body, makes people feel uncomfortable. When the distinction is made between the two distinct physiological responses the SAME LANGUAGE evoke, there is suddenly something counter-cultural about the ability of the public eye to freely linger on a man's naked, chiseled body.  And so Calvin Klein took advantage of this dangerous new freedom and tapped into a formerly unsolicited market: the homosexual man.  Bordo notes, "Kleins genius was that of a cultural Geiger counter; his own bisexuality enabled him to see that the phallic body, as much as any female figure, is an enduring sex object within Western culture."

And after turning out billions of dollars in profits, I have to wonder why no one had the guts (or business sense) to appeal to this market before (after all, it's about time the heterosexual male "man up" and admit that the gay man has a more finely tuned fashion sense than he).  Bordo posits, "Throughout this century, gay photographers have created a rich, sensuous, and dramatic tradition which is unabashed in eroticizing the male body, male sensuousness, and male potency, including penises. But until recently, such representations have been kept largely in the closet." (I imagine the pun was intended; maybe not.)  She goes on to trace the evolution of the male model industry, noting that the first provocative, male centered advertisements embodied a "highly masculine aesthetic." Is anyone else catching on to how pervasive the prevailing gender roles still are? Males are, for the first time, faced with the overwhelming insecurities women have dealt with since the creation of the "women's magazine" and they insist on maintaining their "masculinity" in the form of chiseled muscles and ripped shirts.  Most would think that impossible; the sexualization of the male body leaves little room for the maintenance of masculinity.  Yet, "masculinity" has endured, and advertising--although intentionally targeted at the gay male--pictures incredibly "straight looking" (whatever that means) men as to not limit the audience or turn off their consistent readership. It's brilliant, really.  As surprising it is that a man was the brains behind this operation, it is equally as unsurprising that nothing has changed for the woman because of this "overexposure".


NOTE: This is a response to "Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body" by Susan Bordo.  I am certain those two paragraphs made little sense to someone who isn't familiar with the said text. It's also important to note that such a short response scarcely does justice to the highly intelligent (albeit a bit sardonic) text to which this post is responding. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the idea of gender & sexuality, specifically the social construction of the former and the perception of femininity associated with the latter.

See excerpts here.