Male Beauty: Postwar Masculinity in Theater, Film, and Physique Magazines

Introduction

Introduction This study examines various cultural artifacts from a specific period and geographical situation in order to understand changes within a particular gender construct. The time is the postwar era and the place, the United States; the gender construct is masculinity. Although time and place are easily understood, the gender construct is far more complicated. Masculinity is difficult to discuss. In their everyday comprehension of the world, most people tend to believe, as Uta Brandes puts it, that “[a] human being must be either male or female and . . . each gender is given characteristics and attributes” (139). This notion of two complementary genders—a binary—is pervasive. So is the idea that gender is innate, essential, something with which men and women are naturally born. Thus, the figure of what many would call a “masculine man” may be construed, according to Giannino Malossi, as “radiating the confidence that comes from an unexamined relationship with one’s own gender” (24). Despite common belief, over the past hundred years, the binary opposition of two sexes and two genders and the notion that gender is purely instinctive, have been subjected to intense scrutiny. A host of academic writers have explored the nature of gender and of masculinity in particular. In reviewing their work, Todd W. Reeser, in Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction, points out how masculinity, in its primary position in binary opposition to femininity, “tends to function as ‘unmarked,’ ” just as in the binary that opposes heterosexuality to homosexuality , the former becomes the most known and the least different (8). Because of this, modern investigations of gender began not with masculinity (which has functioned as the norm) but with femininity and with gender constructs that differed (due to race, class, or sexuality or other factors) from what was conventionally thought to be masculine. Reeser suggests that masculinity is in some ways like an ideology or rather a series of ideologies (20). Masculinity, in this view, exists as a set of beliefs that people accept unquestioningly and experience as ordinary and 1 2 MALE BEAUTY genuine; just as Americans consider capitalism as “a normal part of everyday life, . . . a large percentage of people take masculinity for granted as part of real life” (21). However, because “[a] series of ideologies are at play” (28), the discourse of masculinity, subject to shifts in individual component ideologies, is by necessity contradictory (32–33). Resistance to masculinity, in forms that in some way spotlight these contradictions, may come most noticeably from individuals or groups excluded from the construct, but resistance also comes from those included in the construct (34); women, for example, may launch a critique of masculinity, as happened during the late 1960s, but at the same time, so-called “men” may rebel against and defy the gender construct supposedly created by and for them. As sets of ideologies, masculinity and femininity are open to inquiry. Reeser proposes, in the terminology of Jacques Derida, that femininity exists as supplementary to masculinity (37) and that even though masculinity may appear to “function alone and on its own terms, it inevitably functions in implicit or explicit relation to a series of others” (41). In other words, masculinity cannot exist without the existence of everything that is supposedly contrary to masculinity. Thus, to some degree, it is logical that someone operating within the gender construct would have to learn (rather than know instinctively) at least some of what is and what is not proper to masculinity. For example, are we born to recognize that certain colors denote specific genders or sexualities, or are we taught these color codes? Perhaps then it is understandable that a male “experiences a nearly consistent move or oscillation between . . . two poles,” that is, between the belief that masculinity is instinctive to males and the recognition that certain aspects of masculinity are obviously learned and acquired (50). A male will also experience in himself and others missteps—momentary lapses or lapses of a longer duration—that appear not to be masculine in nature. Even so, Reeser indicates, gender fluidity is usually taken as exceptional when in reality it is omnipresent (73). Still, people tend to see masculinity as “coherent” and thus immune to such fluidity because so many aspects of it are repeated “in ways that are perceived as coherent. Once that coherence is imagined, people may . . . ignore or not perceive elements that do not fit in the image that they already have. . . .” As Reeser concludes, “[I]t is the necessity of repetition that reveals the...