Richard Kaye

Department of English
Hunter College, CUNY
RKaye43645@aol.com

 

Review of: Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

 

When former Republican senator and one-time presidential aspirant Robert Dole appeared on television last year extolling the benefits of the drug Viagra, a fundamental module in the imagery of American masculinity would seem to have been dislodged. To be sure, Dole never uttered the word “impotence,” preferring, instead, to invoke a clinical demurral, “E.D.”–Erectile Disfunction–but there, nonetheless, was the surreal specter of an icon of American conservatism speaking what had hitherto been unspeakable amongst the golf-and-martini set. The austere setting in which Dole appeared (a senatorial library, perhaps) reminded viewers that this particular E.D. sufferer was speaking from a place in the culture far removed from that of most Americans. Yet in some ways Dole was the ideal poster guy for breaking the silence on E.D. Although the syndrome affects men of all ages, men of Dole’s generation–veterans of World War II, men who had heroically sacrificed their bodies in battle–have been famously reluctant to discuss their physical frailties.

 

Dole’s hand injury from an explosion during World War II had been powerfully if somewhat quietly deployed throughout his campaign against Bill Clinton. It was, of course, the noncombatant Clinton who would prove the better campaigner, despite a soft body given over to fast food; the generational gulf between silent virility before Fascism and weak child of the Sixties was registered during the presidential race. Clearly, it takes a Republican to achieve what no mere Democrat can accomplish: arguably Dole’s appearance in a television ad for Viagra accomplished on the domestic front what Nixon’s 1972 visit to China did for international diplomacy–helping to end, as it were, another Cold War.

 

At the moment, the body of the American male is being subjected to more scrutiny than ever before as an ever-wider array of new images of the male physique permeates the culture. Television shows like Ally McBeal and The View depict fictional and real-life women giddily discussing male performance and penis size, magazines devoted to male fitness and health break circulation records, and advertisers become bolder and bolder in purveying hardened übermenschen. Adolescent boys–the newest focus for worried psychologists and social workers, according to The New York Times Magazine–fret over the relative scrawniness of their physiques, worrying over ab definition and penis size much as young women worry over breast size and fat. In a democracy, evidently, everyone gets to be anxiety-ridden about his or her physique.

 

The utopia of androgynous bodies that the counterculture welcomed in the 1960s has been supplanted by an androgyny of a fierce corporate culture, so that women must now have hard physiques to arm themselves in the jungle of business culture and males are encouraged to eliminate wrinkles and invest in Propecia, lest they be considered too old for the youth-dominated world of computer-era innovation. The writer Susan Faludi has turned from the backlash against feminism to the backlash against the American male. Her latest book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, excerpted as a cover story in Newsweek, has been greeted as a startling turnaround for a feminist–a laudatory truce in the war between the sexes. It is a key point of Faludi’s book that the average American guy has been forced to develop “womanly” skills such as communication–not by his female mate, but by corporate culture. All of this concern for the fragility of American men has fomented its own backlash. In a recent cover essay in The Times Literary Supplement, the conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield decried the low repute into which “manliness has fallen in our culture” (14).

 

Meanwhile, Masculinity Studies is experiencing a boom. In the latest issue of American Quarterly, Bryce Traister writes of “the new phallocriticism in American literary studies” and declares that “judging from the sheer number of titles published, papers solicited, and panels presented in the last ten years,” it would appear that “masculinity studies has emerged as a discipline unto itself. Masculinity, one might say without irony, is everywhere” (289). According to Traister, male critics, male writers, male characters, male perspective–all of them are being rapidly restored to “the center of academic cultural criticism” by a renaissance at once informed by and defensively responding to feminist criticism (and, to a lesser degree, queer studies). American masculinity studies, which Traister labels “heteromasculinity studies,” is, he says, “academic Viagra” that has invigorated more than a few disciplines, bringing “the hitherto ‘normal’ into closer historical proximity with its previously repudiated others: gays, racial and ethnic others, [and] women” (292). Once upon a time, John Updike could declare that “inhabiting a male body is like having a bank account, so long as it’s okay one does not think about it,” since “to inhabit a male body is to be somewhat detached from it,” but those days obviously have gone the way the three-piece suit and the fedora (519).¹

 

In The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, Susan Bordo aims to make sense of the sudden obsession with masculinity by concentrating on the American male’s bodily incarnations; she navigates the shifting terrain of guy imagery as it alters almost daily. She registers a sea change occurring in American life, and like Faludi, she views American men as newly vulnerable–scrutinized, refashioned, victimized–in a Brave New World in which conventional masculinity is forced to submit to brutalizing marketplace ideals. The culture no longer honors traditional codes of manhood, argues Faludi, as corporate-culture values dominate. The veterans of World War II, according to Stiffed, were eager to embrace a manly ideal that revolved around providing rather than dominating, but postwar white-collar employment, especially for defense contractors fat on government largesse, required “organization men” who found themselves confused by what they were managing.

 

As with Faludi’s analysis, Bordo’s study is far more absorbed in the question of male frailty than male power. In a quaint tack for a feminist critic, Bordo can become almost rhapsodic about the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which men, we are instructed, maintained a certain innocence about their physiques and Hollywood stars like James Stewart and Cary Grant became screen idols without having to bare any flesh. But whereas Faludi the intrepid journalist tackles the social history of American males, skirting a direct discussion of the representation of the male body, Bordo the cultural critic thrives in the world of popular icons, in which men must now care about their bodies with obsessive attention because the culture has become oversaturated with hairless, buff Adonises. (As if to illustrate Bordo’s thesis on the pressures to dangle male icons before a salivating public, Newsweek took the occasion of excerpting Faludi’s book to offer several pages devoted to pictures of hunky males. Running alongside Faludi’s piece were movie and sports stars as well as “unknowns,” among them a full-page head shot of an unshaven model looking bruised–and not just emotionally, as a small, fetching scar on his nose testified.)

 

Bordo worries over the pressures put on the American man, now required, as women have always been, to accept mass-produced myths. If anorexia continues to bedevil females, as Bordo argued in her previous book, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), today males have “bigorexia” (compulsive body building) and intense insecurities about penis size. The whole culture, Bordo repeatedly demonstrates, has been Hellenized. In her earlier study (a book that already has become a classic work of feminist cultural analysis), Bordo hinted at the relation between idealized female and male forms, seeing a Victorian precedent for current gender divisions in that

 

The sharp contrast between the female and male form, made possible by the use of corsets and bustles, reflected in symbolic terms, the dualistic division of social life into clearly defined male and female spheres. At the same time, to achieve the specified look, a particular feminine praxis was required–straightlaced, minimal eating, reduced mobility–rendering the female body unfit to perform activities outside its designated sphere. This, in Foucauldian terms, would be the “useful body” corresponding to the aesthetic norm. (181)

 

Now the ideal male body, transformed into the new century’s Organization Man (who may or may not have to leave the house to participate in Internet Culture) has become feminized aesthetically as gender dualities begin to collapse. Male bodies no longer need be mobile, but they must be thinner, sleeker, more adaptable, and this may be one reason that, according to Bordo, the phallus takes on an added symbolic burden for contemporary American men.

 

In what may be the most exhaustive exegesis of the cultural manifestations of the penis ever written, Bordo devotes a chapter to how perceptions of the phallus have altered over time. She sees in male anxiety about penis size the analogue to (late-twentieth-century) female discomfort over weight. “The humongous penis, like the idealized female body,” she writes in The Male Body, is a “cultural fantasy,” one that metaphorically turns the penis into a useful tool, more like a dildo than anything made of flesh” (71), and she itemizes the objects to which the fantasy penis is usually compared: “Big Rig. Blowtorch. Bolt. Cockpit. Crank. Crowbar. Destroyer. Dipstick. Drill. Engine. Hammer. Hand tool. Hardware. Hose. Power Tool. Torpedo”–objects that never get soft and always perform (48).

 

The first third of The Male Body is given over to a detailed inquiry into images of the American male from the 1950s to the present. Bordo examines ad campaigns, paradigmatic Fifties male movie stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, and films of the last fifty years. The key cultural markers are A Streetcar Named Desire, Rebel Without a Cause, Father Knows Best, Shampoo, American Gigolo, and My Best Friend’s Wedding. Bordo argues that popular culture, even at its most legitimizing of patriarchal assumptions, is always mediated through individual experience. To drive home her point she offers her own experience as a middle-class, intellectually inclined adolescent, fascinated by the Bad Boys of her youth who modeled themselves on Brando and Dean. In Bordo’s view, the Fifties were never so suffocating that the movie industry could not produce disreputable male matinee idols to entice young women out of their complacent acceptance of domestic virtues. If the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich once focused on the Playboy cult which, she argued, rendered stay-at-home women economically at risk and thus helped usher in the feminist movement, Bordo now sees women like herself as having been galvanized by the reckless glam-boys of Fifties culture (not by Heffner, of course, but by Brando and Dean).

 

While Heffner was proffering images of men in silk smoking jackets (images that time has cruelly recast as a sort of Straight Camp), women such as Bordo were dreaming of Brando and Paul Newman taking them out of the stultifying world of the prom dance and the sorority tea. One learns much about Bordo’s own experience here–as when she writes about her father, sometimes powerfully, and sometimes, as when she writes about her erotic fantasies, a little embarrassingly. A real strength of Bordo’s study is that its author continually registers the contradictory responses popular culture evokes in her, refusing to have hard or permanent feelings about writers such as Philip Roth, say, who have been excoriated by an early generation of feminist critics but whom Bordo guiltlessly announces had a liberating effect on her cramped, middle-class youth.

 

The second part of The Male Body explores how gay-male driven icons have slipped into mainstream culture: the strapping males in Calvin Klein ads, for example, who wink at gay men with one eye while wooing self-identified straight guys and their girlfriends and spouses. An epiphany that Klein had in 1975 at a gay disco–in which the designer realized that men could be portrayed as “gods”–becomes a key epoch-changing transition for Bordo. The image of shirtless young men with hardened torsos was swiftly disseminated throughout the world, and a once-underground gay ideal overnight became, mutatis mutandis, everyone’s ideal. Much of Bordo’s thinking here has antecedents in the work of queer cultural critics such as Dennis Altman, Michael Bronski, Richard Dyer, and Daniel Harris, who have charted the ways in which American culture has become “homosexualized,” as Altman and Bronski argued, or in which gay experience has become dissipated, as Harris polemically contends in The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. For Harris, the successful realization of gay crossover dreams of entering “straight” culture is a sad dilution of a pure homosexual culture that flourished before corporate America discovered the value of the gay (male) dollar. Unlike Harris, Bordo is not troubled by the disappearance of a gay underground or its hijacking by the so-called mainstream. In recent movies such as My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Object of My Affection, for example, Bordo cheerfully welcomes what she characterizes as yet another sea-change: the homosexual male depicted as an idealized urban cosmopolitan, the openly gay actor Rupert Everett revamping the playful charisma of the sexually ambiguous Cary Grant, only now as an explicitly gay-male charmer.

 

Bordo might have acknowledged more of these queer critical predecessors, some of whom have been writing for decades on the subject of gay imagery and its emergence into and accommodation by “straight” culture that she tackles here. She also might have updated her analysis of advertising images to include phenomena such as the more recent versions of the so-called “gay vague” trend in advertising, in which ads deliberately, coyly court gay consumers without alienating their straight constituency. First introduced in Paco Rabane cologne advertisements in the early 1980s, these ads typically depicted a semi-nude man lying in bed as he talked on the phone to a genderless lover. Today, these ads have been revamped for what is arguably the more conservative millennium, encompassing Ikea furniture ad campaigns in which (evidently) gay male lovers worry over home furnishings. The homosexual as fast-lane narcissist popularized by Calvin Klein morphs into a countervailing picture of gay domestic bliss. In Bordo’s scheme, urban gay males forever function as libertine sensualists delivering good news (sex, drugs, youth, beauty) to a too straight-laced straight culture. But nowadays it’s so-called “straight” culture that seems eager to deliver the good news (marriage, fidelity, home ownership) to urban gay men.

 

The last third of The Male Body splits off from the first two-thirds of Bordo’s book, as it explores the subject of sexual harassment, the Clinton White House scandals, and the question of whether a sexual harasser is a “sex fiend.” (Bordo thinks not.) What this last portion of Bordo’s work has to do with the matter of male bodies, as opposed to male behavior, is never clear, and there is a curiously long detour of a discussion of the two film versions of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It is, however, in some ways the most intelligent, coherent section of The Male Body, and that which relies least on Bordo’s personal experience. Bordo can be a subtle and engaging critic of popular images, and this latest book represents the intelligent dissemination to a wider reading public of academic ideas that have been circulating in fields such as Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Queer Theory for nearly a decade. It’s a pity, really, that even as the media has taken a hostile stance against innovative academic fields, invariably seeing them as abstruse if not wacky, books such as The Male Body do not receive wider attention. Bordo picks and chooses among advanced thinking in fields such as Gender Studies at the same time that she distills her own evocative view of culture as richly textured, ideologically complex and–this is key to her whole approach–fun.

 

Still, despite the good-humored, Life-is-a-Wonderful-Seminar brio with which Bordo pursues her theme, there are several problems with The Male Body, the first of which is related to Bordo’s first-person responsiveness to her material as well as to something that might be called History. The turn toward the autobiographical voice in cultural critique has had salutary results, reminding readers that experience is always arbitrated by subjective selves. It has also had some tedious effects. The confessional first-person singular can be a complex, endlessly changing one, but the trouble with the personal voice Bordo assumes here is that it’s also a fairly familiar one. The narrative here in some ways has its own prefabricated structure: the Bad, Intelligent Girl Caught in Bad Times–namely, the Fifties–comes to realize that pop cultural icons allow for freedom, a respite from the dreariness of Fifties culture. Bordo’s account has by now become the conventional wisdom. So much personal anecdote can be engaging, but it also leaves out a more deeply-grained historical story. The problem with the Cosmopolitan Magazine voice and its attendant insights is that if it personalizes the political, it also tends to privatize history, so that one is never sure of the larger implications of Bordo’s self-chronicling. “We’re all earthlings,” Bordo writes breathlessly at one point, “desperate for love, demolished by rejection” (87). One need not be a heartless non-Earthling to wonder how this kind of statement not only flattens out differences but simplifies experience.

 

History is precisely what gets short shrift in Bordo’s book, and in its place one finds a series of survey gatherers, professional psychologists, and journalistic pundits whom Bordo quotes each time she requires evidentiary backing for some social or cultural phenomenon. One moment she claims that “pop psychologists are dead wrong” (35), the next she quotes them approvingly (“I was struck by Psychology Today‘s finding that women who rate themselves as highly attractive were more concerned about penis size than other women” [82]). Elsewhere, she breezily quotes Eileen Palace, director of Tulane University’s Center for Sexual Health, on Viagra and other “histological problems having psychological bases” (63). Bordo never considers that the institutionalized procedures of psychological counseling and interviewing might themselves be problematic and worth questioning, or that survey gathering is a highly mediated, pseudoscientific procedure that invariably reveals less about inherent truth than about what people like to tell interviewers.

 

One of the best features of The Male Body is Bordo’s critique of evolutionary psychologists (“Darwinian fundamentalists” in Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase) who have attempted to see the “male personality” and the imagery associated with it as related to transhistorical, nature-imbedded “drives.” But Bordo wants to have it both ways, wryly (and acutely) critiquing the “truths” of evolutionary psychology when it suits her larger thesis, but falling back on the latest biological studies and pop psychology’s insights when it suits other rhetorical aims. The real limitation is in a system of knowledge that reduces complex selves to a series of attitudes recorded in surveys and accounts by journalists. Movies and books, images and reputations, all tend to get flattened out into a rhetoric of factoids, anecdotes, and social-science data. One moment Bordo is a merciless critic of the universalizing assumptions of evolutionary psychologists, the next she is surrendering to the deeper assumptions informing their endeavors. “Perhaps, then, we should wait a bit longer, do a few more studies, before we come to any biological conclusions about women’s failure to get aroused by naked pictures,” Bordo asserts at one point, seemingly unaware that conclusive biological “truths” about attraction form a system of knowledge that creates “problems” as it inevitably claims to “solve” them conclusively (178).

 

By the time we discover Bordo mischaracterizing the late literary critic Charles Bernheimer (whose specialty was nineteenth-century French fiction) as a “social theorist,” we can already intuit Bordo’s preference for social theory over any other form of knowledge (43). (I suspect Bernheimer would have found Madame Bovary to be a much more reliable guide to nineteenth-century gender relations than the work of any imaginary contemporary survey-gatherer.) There’s a curious methodological tic animating The Male Body, in which “reactions” are forever being tracked by social scientists or pop psychologists only to be sorted out by the savvy cultural critic, who is herself always eager to draw on her own personal experience as a way of clinching a point. One comes to yearn for a more nuanced conception of the pop-culture consuming self, an awareness of that part of the self that eludes data-creating social scientists.

 

Even as it traces the history of images of the male physique, The Male Body reveals some serious historical lacunae. First, Bordo overstates the novelty of the cultural phenomenon she tracks, providing a theory of erotic reaction over time that can be breathtaking in its reductionism. “In 1998, we look at the frontal bulges of fashion models clad in clinging jersey briefs and think: Sex. From the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century, it was just the opposite” (26). Recent research by scholars such as Michael Rocke, James Saslow, and Richard Rambuss has questioned precisely this conclusion about early-modern notions of the erotic. Saslow has suggested that many of the paintings of Renaissance artists were received erotically by contemporary viewers. Rambuss, examining some intensely sensual Metaphysical Poetry with putatively theological themes, argues that we need to rethink our notion of what constitutes religious experience if we believe that in the past it invariably was segregated from sexual experience. Bordo also might have more than cursorily discussed what actually took place in the eighteenth-century, that watershed era according to her timeline, so as to better contextualize the uniqueness of the male-as-spectacle phenomenon she takes as her theme. As the art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau demonstrates in Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (1997), the male nude became an object of display in French sculpture and painting beginning in the late-eighteenth century, dominating French art for nearly half a century until it was eclipsed by the female nude. Solomon-Godeau traces a widespread taste on the part of male critics for feminized, passive male bodies, whose languishing, disempowered torsos appeared alongside martial, virile heroes. (Just as today, the Marlboro Man continues to appear in the same magazines that might run a Calvin Klein androgyne.)

 

In terms of the images it produces, popular culture is never quite as ideologically univocal as Bordo ends up suggesting. Decade-itis, which afflicts so many cultural historians, tends to flatten out the contradictory nature of a given period. At the same time, Bordo moves from 1950s culture to 1990s with the speed of someone turning the dial on a radio, skirting at least two decades in the representation of the male body, so that one might be forgiven for experiencing a certain cultural whiplash. She has little to say about the masculine images of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, no doubt because the plot she traces here is one in which the male body keeps getting harder and more muscular. That leaves out all of the androgynous, narcissistic, neo-Romantic princes of pop culture such as David Bowie and Jim Morrison (both unmentioned by Bordo), whose scrawny, unkempt, ghostly pale bodies offered counter representations of masculine beauty, arising from too many drugs, cigarettes, and late-night jam sessions. There is a world of difference between those petulant, messy narcissists and today’s health-obsessed gym guys. The former offered an aura of bisexual, death-courting glamour that the rock-music industry to this day retains, while the latter suggests a frenetic fear of mortality. As Bordo must realize, it is the 1960s rock star that paved the way for Klein’s glossy imagery of androgynous princes. (They may even have indirectly helped in the formation of a recent type that Bordo, glancingly, finds appealing, the ineffectual-but-desirable Jewish males signaled by Ken Olin’s Michael Steadman of television’s thirtysomething or Jerry Seinfeld’s character on Seinfeld.)

 

Another problem shadowing The Male Body is Bordo’s too schematic sense of gay cultural history–in her telling, a melodrama in which homosexual men serve largely as cultural apparatchiks whose svelte, feminized physical ideals screw up the culture’s gender fixities. “Gay Men’s Revenge” is the title of Bordo’s chapter on the phenomenon whereby gay men find themselves appearing “positively” in current cinema, spoofing heterosexual norms, but that nifty rubric tends to overstate the so-called subversiveness of Hollywood films like My Best Friend’s Wedding. The idea of an “underground” that successfully presses its resentments onto an oppressive overculture defined as “mainstream” is appealing for its ironies, since in this scenario gay men, so despised by social conservatives, suddenly emerge as the unlikely deliverers of Madison Avenue. Bordo seems to see gay men, one and all, as cultural militants who again and again emerge from their subcultural trenches to lob hand grenades at the Official Culture. It’s a pleasing image, but it fails to gauge the growing tensions within gay culture itself–namely, between the radical cultural left represented by groups such as Queer Nation and the conservative, assimilationist gay men whose representatives (Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer) have proven so popular as “gay spokesmen” with the television media. In this chapter, one senses that Bordo has no particular interest in gay male culture per se, but only in how the cultural values of certain urban gay men have helped to topple heterosexual paradigms and thus have paved the way for male-female rapprochement.

 

Bordo’s understanding of gay men’s relation to popular film and to the culture more generally is similarly fraught and as earnestly positivist in its sense that gay men have proven themselves victorious in the Culture Wars. If one needs to speak of “gay male revenge” to describe (some) gay men’s retaliatory relation to mainstream culture, one might go a bit further than looking at recent films with mega-stars like Rupert Everett. These films are, after all, the products of Hollywood production- and profit-requirements. For a politically freighted cultural critique of heterosexual courtship norms in film–to speak only of the limited area in which Bordo has a keen interest–one might look towards the whole queer independent film movement of the 1990s, in which gay men and women moved beyond the tired pressures to produce exemplary heroes and heroines and instead delighted in offering up a variety of filmic counter myths. The new Queer cinema as exemplified by films such as Swoon, Poison, Tongues Untied, Go Fish, The Life and Times, and High Art, has produced its own set of Bad Girls and Bad Boys. For all her abiding absorption in the most up-to-date products of pop culture, Bordo can be rather square in her tastes, sticking to the latest offerings at the local Cineplex and never making her way into the cultural nooks and crannies that one associates with much recent (and largely urban) Queer culture.

 

What Bordo does value in large part are imaginative reconsiderations of classic Hollywood narratives and cultural idées fixes, although for her these often take the form of movies that offer socially positive plot lines and appealing “role models.” Thus there’s a note of pop-cultural triumphalism in Bordo’s chapter on recent idealized gay men in Hollywood movies, as if a La Cage Aux Folles or a My Best Friend’s Wedding could trump the effects of a film like Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Bordo is so intent on endorsing the allegedly “subversive” value of recent popular culture (no doubt because she wishes to bury the image of the feminist critic as humorless puritan) that she downplays the contradictory messages that the culture telegraphs about gay men. The “specter of effeminacy” that she correctly detects in 1950s films such as Tea and Sympathy endures today, more insidiously than anything the 1950s produced, as in The Silence of the Lambs. The pop cultural landscape is far more volatile, contradictory, and conflicted than Bordo allows. Today, a The Silence of the Lambs would still make a killing at the box-office, pull in a few Academy Awards, and garner serious critical plaudits, but it would have to compete with the sweetly effete (arguably “effeminate”) dandy bachelors of television sitcoms like Frasier or the overt gay guys on Will and Grace, whose power as icons may be greater than Demme’s cross-dressing psychopaths in that they reach much larger audiences and appear on TV several times a week.

 

Although when reporting on her own experience Bordo can be subtly split in reacting to pop images, she continually forgets that her fellow consumers of pop culture are more than self-identified sexual and sociological entities, and that popular culture functions across demographic groups, and at even a deeper level than Bordo allows. Thus, when Bordo notes that many of her female college students started to “sweat” the moment she shows them a sexy Calvin Klein ad (of a male), one sees the problem with a critical approach that borrows its methodology as well as its wisdom from the tactics of consumer-product testing (170). Presented with the case of a classroom full of young women declaring their attraction to an advertisement, a whole range of questions should come to mind to a critic as theoretically savvy as Bordo: Does the observation that these women “sweat” (by which Bordo presumably means that her female students vocally declared their attraction to the fellow in the ad) indicate that these women were eager to declare a heterosexual identity? What do the comments in this staged scenario indicate beyond what students find comfortable declaring in a classroom setting? Were there any lesbian-identified students in Bordo’s class and if so, how did they respond to those pectorals?

 

Clearly, Bordo recounts this story because she is pleased that today’s female students, unlike her generation of women boxed into those cramped 1950s, are able to speak publicly of their attraction to a Calvin Klein hunk. But a more demanding cultural critic would have gone further in looking at this staged sweat-fest. Elsewhere Bordo breezily and approvingly cites Foucault, but here she seems unaware of what Foucault was so intent on accentuating in The History of Sexuality: the complex relation between vocalized, explicit self-representation, through a language of “sexual attraction,” and a larger discourse of sexuality in which desires are not and perhaps cannot be articulated. Specifically, Bordo seems surprisingly unaware of the power she wields in such a circumstance. A young woman sitting in a classroom in the 1950s would not have been pressured to “articulate” in verbal terms an attraction to that Calvin Klein ad. For many of us, that is more liberating than a classroom of co-eds ready to sweat with Pavlovian exuberance before an approving professor.

 

The Male Body is animated by an unacknowledged paradox that troubles the book throughout: Bordo is drawn to the Brandos and Deans of her youth but repelled by the social implications for heterosexual women of the homoerotic bonds these men seem to articulate–namely that women are dispensable. Always with these matinee idols, women function as the civilizing impediments to an all-male idyll. This self-conflicted relation to the famously homoerotic dimension in American popular culture, from buddy films to fraternity rushes, may explain why Bordo’s ideal gay man is the suave Rupert Everett–wryly articulate, debonairly unthreatening, British. Bordo seems unaware, as well, of the subtle class and racial biases inherent in admiring Everett over, say, the cross-dressing, badmouthed basketball star Dennis Rodman (an appealing mischief-maker in the recent history of the American sportsman’s body and a figure who goes unmentioned by Bordo).

 

History so thoroughly personalized tends to have the parameters and feel of an airless diorama, and finally, the images presented here seem to float too free from their determinants. Whereas Unbearable Weight was driven by a searching, abiding concern with the actualities of a genuine and sometimes deadly social problem (namely adolescent women’s distorted self-conception of their bodies), it is not always clear what the larger pressing concern addressed by The Male Body might be. In her final pages, Bordo offers thoughtful remarks on the culture of high-school and college male athletes, who are confronted with the paradox of having to act savagely on the playing field and then civilly in their gender-sensitive classes. Nonetheless, The Male Body never demonstrates compelling connections between the popular culture it studies (all those buff guy bodies) and an urgent social problem (the allegedly widespread male insecurity and confusion), the kind of correlation that made Unbearable Weight, haunted as it was with women’s morbidly distorted self-images, such an important work. As Bordo seems to recognize, there is only a limited analogy to be forged between anorexia and bulimia as experienced by women and the body-health craze of American males. No one, it needs to be said, ever died of penis-size envy or erectile dysfunction.

Note

 

1. One of the best multidisciplinary texts devoted to Masculinity Studies remains Constructing Masculinity, edited by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1985).

Works Cited

 

• Altman, Dennis. The Homsexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981.
• Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
• Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
• Dyer, Richard. Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Doubleday, 1983.
• Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male. New York: William Morrow, 1999.
• Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1997.
• Mansfield, Harvey. “The Partial Eclipse of Manliness.” The Times Literary Supplement 17 Jul. 1998: 14-16.
• Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
• Saslow, James. Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. New York: Viking, 2000.
• Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997
• Traister, Bryce. “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” American Quarterly 52.2 (Jun. 2000): 274-304.
• Updike, John. “The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review 32.4 (Fall 1993): 517-520.