Object or Ground? The Male Body as Fashion Accessory

"Is that what a man looks like?" scornfully asks the anonymous narrator (played by Edward Norton) of his alter ego, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), in the 1999 film Fight Club, as they stare at two almost naked, youthful, muscular male bodies in an advertisement for Gucci men's underwear. The past couple of decades have seen an efflorescence in Western popular culture of public representations of the male body, especially in a naked or near-naked state, unknown since the days of the high Renaissance. A parade of young men, more or less clothed, smiles coquettishly, stares with indifference, scowls sullenly or pouts at us, the readers or viewers—or even ignores us altogether—from billboards, the pages of magazines and newspapers, and the screens of our televisions and cinemas. Their bodies have become not only the objects of spectacle, but, in the most common representations, spectacular objects, seemingly defining for our culture the ideal male body and, by implication, masculinity itself.²

However, as Mark Simpson observes, the escalation in the depiction of the male body—perhaps especially in its naked or near-naked state—has occasioned, amongst men, "[t]he fear of the trivialization of masculinity and the revelation that it might, after all, have no substance, no core and no dignity …" (4). He goes on to remark that men, moreover,

have good reason to be concerned. Everywhere they look they see naked male flesh served up to the public on billboards, magazine covers and television screens. Men's bodies are on display everywhere; but the grounds of men's anxiety is not just that they are being exposed and commodified but that their bodies are placed in such a way as to passively invite a gaze that is undifferentiated: it might be female or male, hetero or homo. Traditional male heterosexuality, which insists that it is always active, sadistic and desiring, is now inundated with images of men's bodies as passive, masochistic and desired. Narcissism, the desire to be desired, once regarded as a feminine quality par excellence, seems, in popular culture at least, now more often associated with men than with women.

(Simpson 4; emphasis in original)

The reasons for the proliferation of images of the male body in popular culture are many and complex, and their thorough examination is beyond the scope of this article. I will here discuss only four, which I take to be central to this phenomenon.

The first of these is related to the gains made by women in the past three decades in achieving not only some equality with men but also some prominence in the public arena. The display of the female body is, of course, traditional and familiar: Historically, the representation of that body has been intended for men's consumption (see, e.g., Berger). Although there is the argument that the complementary spectacularization of the male body is, in a sense, an equal-opportunities move to satisfy women's desire for visual pleasure, it is by no means evident that the motivation is so simple. Given late capitalism's tendency to commodify everything, the increasing prominence of women and women's issues has served merely to offer a further opportunity for commodification, in this particular instance, of the male body, produced by the media as "desire-worthy" by women: The assumption seems to be that women desire in the same way as men, although there are theorizations of desire that identify visual pleasure as typically masculine, as opposed to haptic pleasure (the pleasure of touch) as typically feminine. I should add that such theorizations may be contested as intrinsically masculinist and as re-inscribing women as the passive beings who feel and men as the active beings who do.

It is worth noting that media techniques for representing the male body tend to construct it as heroic, sculptural, even when in repose. These bodies are not merely muscular and powerful; through their strong definition and the consequent hardness of the lines and planes of the body, these male forms become self-contained, the corporeal fortresses that Antony Easthope sees in...