The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham by Paul R. Deslandes (review)

If you download the dating app Grindr, aimed at men seeking men, you will find a neat summary of contemporary male aesthetic ideals. Rows of thumbnail-sized images of men stare back, some smiling, most not, a few attempting the serious-erotic smolder perfected by Rupert Brooke in the famous photograph taken of him by Sherill Schell in 1913. While some opt for mugshots, many profiles display only headless naked torsos; everything you could want, stripped of the encumbrance of personality. To facilitate matches, Grindr encourages users to make further aesthetic judgements by claiming a “tribe” ostensibly associated with subcultures and body types, including bear, jock, otter, clean-cut, trans, and twink. As you dolefully scroll the chiseled abs and not-quite smiles you might wonder, how did we end up here?

The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham traces the origins of this aesthetic moment. Ranging from the 1830s to the early 2000s, the book shows how and why a culture of assessing, measuring, and celebrating male beauty emerged and how this transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, and selfhood. Paul R. Deslandes argues that understandings of male beauty were, in historically specific ways, central to how men achieved and measured professional success, to the emergence of a “modern psychological self” that sought self-realization, and to the idea that this could be achieved through outward appearance (5). Two elements make this book much more than a history of ideas. First, comparatively little space is given to discussions of beauty in philosophy or aestheticism, Deslandes instead focusing on the instantiation of ideas through the technologies, commodities, and practices enabling their reproduction and circulation. Cartes de visite and Pears Soap advertisements were more important than Walter Pater for defining male beauty and encouraging its pursuit. Second, this focus on the objects and practices through which ideas were made and challenged means the book ranges across a plethora of sources, including photographers’ manuals, journals for hairdressers, medical records of wounded soldiers who received reconstructive surgery, paintings by Henry Scott Tuke, and fan letters to John Gielgud. While some of the examples explored will be familiar to readers, the book uniquely shows how thinking in one domain of knowledge shaped and was shaped by that in others that were apparently unconnected. This is a history of what John Tresch calls the “materialization of cosmologies,” or the way in which ideas are “enacted, embodied, elaborated, and contested in concrete settings, institutions, representations, instruments, and practices”—as well as a sideways history of visual culture through this materialization (“Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas,” Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, edited by Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn [Oxford University Press, 2014], 155).

The first part of the book examines how early nineteenth-century physiognomists encouraged men to judge inner qualities and potential through outer appearance, and how photography provided a new means by which to record and share beauty standards. Advertisements, men’s fashion magazines, and hairdressers further consolidated ideas about who was hot and who was not and popularized the pursuit of beauty as part of a wider “culture of self-improvement” (51). By the late nineteenth century, the most prominent idea of male beauty, celebrated by racial scientists, artists, and physical culturists such as Eugen Sandow, connected youthfulness, whiteness, and athleticism with personal worth and civilizational standing. The individual exemplifying this ideal was Rupert Brooke: Brooke was the model of Victorian and Edwardian male beauty and, after his death, metonym for that which could be disfigured by war, shown by the horrific facial injuries sustained by soldiers at the front. He is also the book’s lynchpin, since he provided a figure through which contemporaries perpetuated nineteenth-century ideals of beauty and articulated twentieth-century ideas of sexual, especially queer, subjectivity. Part 2...