Behold the Man

The Hype and Selling of Male Beauty in Media and Culture

Edisol Dotson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317957478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

The first comprehensive study of how images of male beauty are projected onto society, Behold the Man: The Hype and Selling of Male Beauty in Media and Culture examines the role media and society play in creating the image of the idealized male. This book explores how these images are interpreted by all genders and sexual orientations in order to investigate the phenomenon's effect on the self-esteem of adolescent and adult males. Behold the Man provides you with research and examples that identify this problem from many angles to help you realize that being a man is more than merely possessing muscles and good looks. Discussing examples in which both attractive men and women are idealized as "the norm, " Behold the Man argues that men are experiencing the same injustices as women--splashed on the covers of magazines and in advertisements, based on their sex appeal, sometimes to promote nothing more than their looks. Within Behold the Man, you'll find topics that relate to the reasons for and effects of male beauty standards, such as:

• aspects of male beauty, from Ancient Greek ideals to how it is visualized throughout history in art
• the vision of "the ideal male, " along with sexual connotations, in advertisements for clothing, cologne, sunglasses, automobiles, and shaving products
• the emphasis of strong, well-built males and their bodies in movies, music videos, and literature
• how men alter their bodies by dieting and cosmetic surgery to achieve the look found in advertisements
• today's growing numbers of male eating disorders caused by the notion that only good-looking, muscular men are acceptable
• reasons behind the exploitation of the male body and the double standards for male beauty found within gay male communities
• how advertisers and authors faithfully follow the "bigger is better" theory--from pectoral and bicep muscles to penis size Recognizing how society has created and changed the appearance of the ideal male, this text explains to you the danger men of all ages face who feel they need to be physically handsome to be desirable. From Behold the Man, you'll learn about the real messages of advertising and media, the problems they cause, and that true self-worth cannot be measured by physical attributes.

Chapter 1

Where We Are

 

 

 

Men are meat—their naked bodies hoisted up on larger-than-life billboards, flashed across movie and television screens, frozen in print advertisements, displayed as props and playthings in music videos, begged for in pornography, silenced in erotica, shamed into dieting, chopped up in cosmetic surgery centers. Words such as objectification, glorification, exploitation, and stereotyping come to mind. These words once rang as battle cries from women who were sick and tired of having their bodies turned into plastic toys. These words that helped spark a movement toward equality are words of war.

No battle or movement is fought or won without casualties. Men are beginning to lose what women have begun to gain in the war against the depiction and treatment of human bodies. The difference, however, is that most men probably do not realize what their bodies are being put through. Women are not offered the same luxury because the power structure continues to favor men. It is mostly the male power structure that makes demands and places expectations on the appearance of the female body. Women react with extreme body-altering activities—excessive exercise or dieting or cosmetic surgery—so they and their bodies can meet the demands and live up to the expectations issued by men.

Yet, as the decades continue to unfold, the power structure is beginning to crack just enough to allow women the opportunity to enter its domain. Although the power women have gained is minute in scope and scale when compared to the amount of power still held by men, women’s power is nonetheless present. Power, even in small amounts, brings privilege in our society. Some women now find themselves in a position in which they can make demands and place expectations on the appearance of the bodies of the opposite sex.

How one views the body and appearance of the opposite sex is a component of the power structure, and more and more men are finding themselves suddenly on the other side of the viewing stand. This of course does not mean that a balance in power has been established. Men are still in control when it comes to high-power or high-profile careers, higher incomes, and wide-reaching or unilateral decision making. A challenge to men’s hold on this power exists but continues to be seen more as a nuisance than an actual threat. Men see the possibility of losing this power but are not overly concerned with the loss becoming a reality—not yet, anyway.

Even though the bodies of women continue to be splayed across the canvases of media and popular culture as the ideal of feminine perfection, alongside them are the bodies of men, equally naked, equally perfect.

Maleness, now less identified and symbolized by historically or biologically assigned characteristics—fulfilling the role of breadwinner or the possession of a penis—has become a multifaceted and multidefined existence that includes ever-changing and often confusing ideas of masculinity. More important, altered ideologies of male physical appearance and male beauty play a pivotal role in the search for masculine identification.

More and more we are seeing naked or near-naked male bodies in print advertisements and television commercials, using the male body solely as a means to grab the consumer’s attention. Male bodies shown in these advertisements are obviously chosen for their appearance of facial beauty and muscularity. An ideal is created, mass-produced, and then disseminated throughout the population.

Today, partly as a result of the women’s movement and partly due to the changing roles of men in society, images of beautiful men have firmly established the standards of what men must look like to meet the criteria of being desirable. In short, the male image has been reduced to a four-letter word—hunk. If men are not hunks or clever enough to hide their unmanly or unmuscular bodies with the right clothing—they are led to believe that they stand little or no chance of achieving or emulating the emotional and sexual satisfaction illustrated in the cultural images surrounding them.

A concern for male beauty, once regarded as a trait of questionable sexuality, has been introduced fully into heterosexual culture. As they did so successfully with women, the male beauty molders of Madison Avenue and Hollywood are forcing images of men onto the general population which are causing men to alter their self-perceptions and which are in turn causing women to change their perceptions of men. These images have created a dramatic shift in what it takes for men to compete in changing cultural, social, sexual, and professional societies.

THE NEW MAN EMERGES

Beauty is a business, a huge money-making industry, feeding and surviving on the low self-esteem of women and men. The beauty industry, an expansive amalgamation of several image-oriented industries, creates low self-esteem by distorting reality to the degree that both women and men find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between truth and fantasy. Million-dollar profits are earned by the beauty industry by exploiting the vulnerabilities and insecurities of women and men, telling them they are not beautiful enough to survive in today’s world. But, if you buy our products or pay for the services we offer, the beauty industry says, we will make you beautiful, we will make you worthy, we will make you successful, we will make you sexy. Women’s magazines have been doing this for years. They have set what Naomi Wolf calls in The Beauty Myth “the beauty index.”¹ Cosmetic and plastic surgeons have done the same. So too have advertisers, movie, television, and music video producers, and writers and other artists. Having firmly established themselves as leaders of a beauty cult, mainly at the expense of women, industries and professionals have turned their attention to men. It isn’t that these industries have stopped creating and re-creating beautiful women; they have now set their eyes on creating the perfect complement to beautiful women: beautiful men. Recent reports indicate that men are spending $3.3 billion annually on grooming products such as fragrances, deodorants, and hair-coloring treatments. Another $4.27 billion is spent on gym/health club memberships, exercise equipment, and exercise machines for the stomach muscles. Bald men or men losing their hair now spend $1.36 billion annually, mainly on transplants, wigs, and hair-restoration treatments. An additional $507 million is spent on cosmetic surgery procedures.² These staggering amounts of money clearly indicate that the desire to be beautiful in our society is no longer a desire particular to women only.

Only within the last decade or so has notice of the male body, beyond its clothes, hair, and face, been pushed to the forefront of cultural observation. Now, how men look without their clothes is essential to who they are, what they become, where they go, whom they marry, and with whom they have sex.

In 1989, Psychology Today printed an article summarizing data from a survey they had previously published on identifying the current version of an idealized male body. The article concluded that neither men nor women expressed concern for the size of a man’s chest, only for a man’s desire to remain committed to the family unit and to his own growth.³ In 1993, the same magazine offered another survey asking for its readers’ opinions on the male physique. At the beginning of the survey, the authors state that a sudden concern for the physical appearance of male bodies came about because of shifting roles of men and women in society.⁴ In four short years, a well-respected publication, aimed at an intelligent, sophisticated readership, went from finding men and women not being concerned about male physical appearance to asking their male readership questions about the importance of muscles on the male body and their female readership questions about the relationship between being attracted to a man and the presence of muscles on a man’s body?⁵ Why did this shift in curiosity in what constitutes the ideal male occur? What happened between 1989 and 1993 to make a publication such as Psychology Today become concerned about whether men and women pay attention to muscles on the male body?

In 1987, Cosmopolitan magazine printed an article titled “What Makes a Man Sexy Today?” The author opens her discussion by relating a story of meeting a man on a plane whom she describes as looking “like a kid” and “scrawny.” Because of these visual qualifications, she assumes the man is gay. When at dinner the man admits to her that he is flirting, the author writes, “I changed my perception of his body from scrawny to compact.” The scrawny kid who she thought was gay was suddenly someone with whom she wanted to have sex. She wanted to have sex with him not because she found him physically attractive or even manly, but because his flirting had reached her on a level beyond mere physical attraction.⁶

Further into the article, the author establishes criteria for assessing a man’s sexiness. She lists intelligence, confidence, trust, wealth (and, in some cases, even poverty), all as being attributes which a man can possess that will make him sexy in ways mere good looks cannot.⁷ In 1987, according to Cosmopolitan, women were not overly concerned with the look of the male body.

Two years later, in an article published in Muscle & Fitness titled “What Makes a Man Sexy? Muscles, Mostly,” the author counters the Cosmopolitan article by saying that what women want, without question, are men who have muscular bodies. There is little in this article about spiritual connections between men and women; nothing about scrawny kids suspected of being gay who become suddenly sexy enough to hump on the dinner table.⁸

Why this disparity in opinions on what makes a man sexy? What compels these two writers to be at such opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to sexy men? The first writer nearly goes out of her way to avoid making good looks and muscles attributes of male sexiness, while the latter waxes at length on the delights, even the necessity, of those same good looks and muscles.

* * *

This is where we are—men in the forefront of cultural scrutiny. Men’s bodies are carefully examined from head to toe. What’s at stake? Men’s self-esteem, self-worth, and their acceptance or rejection as suitable partners.

Chapter 2

Fine Lines: Painting, Sculpture, and Photography

To give a history of the male body as represented in art is beyond the scope of this book. The sampling provided here does illustrate, however, that the male nude in art cannot be ignored or rejected as having had some influence on how we view the male body. Male bodies depicted in historical sculptures and paintings in the societies in which they were created, and subsequently in other societies, hold the same meanings as present-day images of male bodies in our culture’s visual media.

There is little difference in idealized male beauty in art of the past and art of today. Male bodies then, as they are now, were superior only if they were muscular and well-proportioned. Historical heroes, immortalized in stone, marble, bronze, and paint, were men of strength, the muscles of their bodies rippling in battle or exultation. We can be certain there were no statues of obese men standing in the great halls and monuments of ancient Greece and Rome.

It is difficult to imagine a time when the naked human body was not objectified in works of art, either intentionally by modern day artists or unintentionally by those who painted stick figures on cave walls. For centuries, both male and female naked bodies have been viewed as symbols of good and evil, sectionine and material, right and wrong, moral and immoral. From the beginning of time, the naked body has lain at or very near the center of humankind’s quest for the meaning of life. For centuries, historians, scholars, philosophers, scientists, artists, writers, poets, and laymen have tried to determine what role the human body plays in our day-to-day lives and what it means to us when we view the body naked. Is the human body a source of pleasure and beauty, or is it a source of sin and shame? In history, it has been both. It is in art that we find the best and most accurate clues to how the naked human body has been perceived and received throughout the ages.

THE EARLY AESTHETES

There is no evidence to suggest that prehistoric men or women had any reverence or admiration for the male body, not at least in the way we, as modern humans, revere and admire male flesh.

The Greek ideal of male beauty, on the other hand, has influenced artists and nonartists alike for thousands of years. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, most of the notable artists interested in the male nude as subject matter have drawn on classic Greek ideals of the male form and have incorporated these ideals into their own artistic representations.

The nonartists, those who view art rather than create it, also use the comparison of classical Greek art in their everyday references to male beauty. Often we hear someone saying, when describing a man, “He is like a Greek god” or “His body looks like a Greek statue,” or, simply, “He is a god.” According to art historian Kenneth Clark, author of The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, “the perfect human body” in Greek art appeared around 480 B.c. Twenty-five-hundred years later, this body is still with us, still displaying and describing for us the man of our dreams.¹

Although the youthful male was by far the archetype of male beauty in Greek culture, Greek artists, through their art, sought to perfect even the most common man by making the claim that the forms depicted...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Where We Are
• Chapter 2. Fine Lines: Painting, Sculpture, and Photography
• Chapter 3. A Real Head Turner: Fiction
• Chapter 4. Buy Me: Advertising
• Chapter 5. Me Tarzan, You Wimp: Films
• Chapter 6. Body Guide: Television
• Chapter 7. Bigger Is Better: Pornography and Erotica
• Chapter 8. Skin and Bones: Dieting and Eating Disorders
• Chapter 9. The Unkindest Cut of All: Cosmetic Surgery
• Chapter 10. The Fitness Fallacy: Muscles
• Chapter 11. Is He Cute? Gay Male Culture
• Chapter 12. Where Do We Go from Here?
• Notes
• Index