Object or Ground? The Male Body as Fashion Accessory1Buchbinder, David, 1947-

Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 34, Number 3,2004, pp. 221-231 (Article)

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Object or Ground? The bject or Ground? The ject or Ground? The ect or Ground? The ct or Ground? The t or Ground? The or Ground? The or Ground? The r Ground? The Ground? The Ground? The round? The ound? The und? The nd? The d? The ? The The The he e Male Body as Fashion ale Body as Fashion le Body as Fashion e Body as Fashion Body as Fashion Body as Fashion ody as Fashion dy as Fashion y as Fashion as Fashion as Fashion s Fashion Fashion Fashion ashion shion hion ion on n Accessoryccessorycessoryessoryssorysoryoryryy1

David Buchbinder

“Is that what a man looks like?” scornfully asks the anonymous nar-rator (played by Edward Norton) of his alter ego, Tyler Durden(Brad Pitt), in the 1999 film Fight Club, as they stare at two almostnaked, youthful, muscular male bodies in an advertisement forGucci men’s underwear. The past couple of decades have seen anefflorescence in Western popular culture of public representations ofthe male body, especially in a naked or near-naked state, unknownsince 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 evenignores us altogether—from billboards, the pages of magazines andnewspapers, and the screens of our televisions and cinemas. Theirbodies have become not only the objects of spectacle, but, in themost common representations, spectacular objects, seemingly defin-ing for our culture the ideal male body and, by implication, mascu-linity itself.2

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

have good reason to be concerned. Everywhere they look theysee naked male flesh served up to the public on billboards, maga-zine covers and television screens. Men’s bodies are on displayeverywhere; but the grounds of men’s anxiety is not just thatthey are being exposed and commodified but that their bodiesare placed in such a way as to passively invite a gaze that is undif-

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ferentiated: it might be female or male, hetero or homo. Traditionalmale heterosexuality, which insists that it is always active, sadis-tic and desiring, is now inundated with images of men’s bodiesas passive, masochistic and desired. Narcissism, the desire to bedesired, once regarded as a feminine quality par excellence, seems,in popular culture at least, now more often associated with menthan with women. (Simpson 4; emphasis in original)

The reasons for the proliferation of images of the male body in pop-ular culture are many and complex, and their thorough examinationis 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 pastthree decades in achieving not only some equality with men but alsosome prominence in the public arena. The display of the femalebody is, of course, traditional and familiar: Historically, the repre-sentation of that body has been intended for men’s consumption(see, e.g., Berger). Although there is the argument that the comple-mentary spectacularization of the male body is, in a sense, an equal-opportunities move to satisfy women’s desire for visual pleasure, itis by no means evident that the motivation is so simple. Given latecapitalism’s tendency to commodify everything, the increasingprominence of women and women’s issues has served merely tooffer a further opportunity for commodification, in this particularinstance, of the male body, produced by the media as “desire-wor-thy” by women: The assumption seems to be that women desire inthe same way as men, although there are theorizations of desire thatidentify visual pleasure as typically masculine, as opposed to hapticpleasure (the pleasure of touch) as typically feminine. I should addthat such theorizations may be contested as intrinsically masculinistand as re-inscribing women as the passive beings who feel and menas the active beings who do.

It is worth noting that media techniques for representing the malebody tend to construct it as heroic, sculptural, even when in repose.These bodies are not merely muscular and powerful; through theirstrong definition and the consequent hardness of the lines andplanes of the body, these male forms become self-contained, the cor-poreal fortresses that Antony Easthope sees in the muscular bodilyideal (35–44). Such bodies thus assert themselves as objects withinthe frame of the representation.

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It is significant that the physical type reiterated across countless rep-resentations is one seemingly important to men’s notion of them-selves; at least, it is marketed to men as much as to women, as aglance through many a men’s magazine will demonstrate. However,the exhibition of the male body runs the risk, as Simpson points out,not only of rendering that body passive to the gaze, as the femalebody has traditionally been, but also, therefore, of feminizing it. Thismay be counted gender equality, of course; but there remains somelatitude for doubt as to whether it is ethically or philosophically ade-quate or appropriate. Nonetheless, the effect has been to create a sortof optical illusion: The male body as desirable object is also the maleobject as the ground on which is inscribed female desire.

The second possible cause for the explosion of images of the malebody in popular culture is related to the increasingly high profile,since the early 1980s, of gay men and gay subculture and, especially,the emergence of queer theory and of queer ways of seeing–reading.The muscular, youthful male form has dominated homosexualdesire from the time of classical Greece through Renaissance depic-tions of the male body and nineteenth-century homophile notions ofthe perfect male form and the emergence of physical culture. What-ever the reasons for the pre-eminence of that form, the developmentof a more visible gay subculture has allowed that particular kind ofbody again to be commodified, initially for gay men and then forpopular, mainstream culture. The appropriation of that body bymainstream culture defuses anxieties felt by non-homosexual menthat the gay body might be perceived as more masculine than thestraight one. The effect, ironically, has been to make the idealizedmale body not only an object to be imitated by men in the culture butalso, regardless of their sexual orientations or preferences, to bedesired by them. In this queering of both the represented male bodyand the male gaze that beholds it as object, there is again that shift tothe body as the surface on which is inscribed a desire, this time amale one, which therefore becomes a cause of anxiety for men in theculture.

The third cause is connected to the advent, in the early 1980s, of theHIV/AIDS epidemic. Though the early appalling media images ofemaciated AIDS patients led briefly to a foregrounding of the over-weight male body as demonstrably HIV-free, the muscular maleform rapidly reasserted itself, now not only reclaiming its positionas the object of male homosexual desire but also proclaiming its sta-tus as healthy—even, indeed, as the Australian satirist–comedian

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Barry Humphries remarked in a recent interview with talk-showhost Andrew Denton, as “unnaturally healthy.” The association ofthat body with health has also entered mainstream culture, eventhough the regime of diet and exercise necessary to attain and main-tain such a body goes beyond what would normally be required forfundamental physical health and well-being. In this respect, the con-tours and form of the body become simply signs for that health.

The fourth and final reason I offer for the proliferation of images ofthe male body is associated with shifts in employment patterns inthe culture since the 1970s. Equal employment opportunities forwomen and their resulting greater presence in the market place, eco-nomic downturns and the consequent “downsizing” of businessesand industries, the removal offshore of the manufacturing of items,and an increasing emphasis on managerial and technological ratherthan physical skills—these are some of the reasons why, in late capi-talism, men are no longer automatically the breadwinners in a fam-ily nor even necessarily employable. An important definition of themasculinity of the male subject since the Industrial Revolution hasthus become unstable or irrelevant. The male body thus becomeslegible in terms of its status as employed citizen, a status determinednot only through the condition of the body itself but also throughthe appurtenances—the clothing, jewellery, location, and so on—ofthe body.

These four factors have together contributed to the undermining ofindividual men’s consciousness of themselves as masculine sub-jects—through the sense of displacement occasioned by the higherprofile of women in the culture, the interrogation of traditional het-erosexual masculinity as the only masculinity of value, the threat ofbodily invasion by a disease associated, in the popular mind any-way, with homosexuals, and finally, the economic disempowermentbrought about by a number of causes, including gender equitymoves in favour of women. For many men, therefore, the body hasbecome the irreducible ground zero of their subjectivity as mascu-line: It has become that which—apparently, anyway—cannot betaken from them or colonized in some fashion. A number of popularcultural texts point to this development. For instance, in the 1997British film The Full Monty, the unemployed former steelworkerswho are the principal characters (and many of whose womenfolkhave found or retained employment) no longer have even the labourof their bodies to offer in exchange for wages: They are driven tosimply exhibiting those bodies as objects in a striptease perform-

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ance; in the 1997 Australian film Head On, Ari, the unemployed, cul-turally displaced Greek-Australian protagonist, likewise lives a lifeof the body, whether in terms of sex, drugs, dance, or physical vio-lence; and in the 1999 American film Fight Club, the men drawn tofight club use their bodies to express their frustration, rage, anddespair at being, as the charismatic Tyler Durden puts it, “a genera-tion of men raised by women.”

In this context, the male body becomes the site of resistance againstthe declining power of men in the culture, often perceived (and ren-dered in shorthand) as the feminization of men. However, not allbodies are eligible for the public exhibition of such resistance, andWayne Edisol Dotson, taking his cue from Naomi Wolf’s The BeautyMyth, articulates concern over the way that men are pressured,through media representations and advertising, to conform to andthereby to consume certain restricted notions of what it is to be maleand attractive. Dotson points out how compelling the iterated repre-sentations of that body are for men in the culture, who are urgedthereby to aspire to the representations, to emulate them and, in sodoing, to homogenize their own actual bodies with those repre-sented as the desirable ideal—or to accept rejection and ridicule asnon-men if they fail in that effort.

The sort of male body with which Dotson takes issue has been repre-sented at least from classical Greek times, through the eighteenthcentury in Europe, to the present day: the muscular, youthful, adultmale body. However, the constant re-appearance and re-representa-tion of that figure have been accompanied by cultural reworkingsand re-significations. The youthful, athletic, male body in Greek cul-ture came to be seen, in Kenneth R. Dutton’s view, as the ideal madeflesh. The representation “depicted man, not as he actually was, butas he could or should be” (Dutton 24). Dutton proposes that mod-ern, eroticized notions of the perfect(able) male body may be tracedback to two Renaissance models, both images of the biblical KingDavid: the statues by Donatello and Michelangelo (Dutton 65–9).Dutton suggests that Donatello’s David fails to become the keymodel because it presents too youthful and adolescent—and hencedangerously feminine—a male figure, whereas Michelangelo’sDavid represents its subject as heroic of stature and body: it is maleflesh made ideal.

We can see these two models played out in the difference betweenthe idealized athletic and muscular body favoured by many adver-

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tisers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the more attenuated,almost weightless form of the “waif” figure which has not (yet) dis-placed the other model. The waif’s body, which can be read as aninterrogation of the dominant representation of the male body,reflects the extreme youthfulness and incomplete physical maturity,and hence unfinished masculinity, of the Donatello model, whereasthe athletic male body asserts itself, like Michelangelo’s David, asfully masculine through its size, muscularity, and hard definition.We can discern this opposition at work in a number of popular-cul-tural texts. Fight Club provides a particularly salient instance: BradPitt’s hard, muscular body articulates the Michelangelo model,while Edward Norton’s rather more ordinary body represents, incomparison to Pitt’s, the Donatello model. Unsurprisingly, the filmalso foregrounds the difference between Pitt’s greater attractivenessand aesthetic appeal and Norton’s rather average looks. In Head On,Ari (Alex Dimitriades) provides the body that corresponds with theMichelangelo model, while his friend Johnny’s (Paul Capsis) slim-mer, less muscular frame is overtly feminized through Johnny’sdrag performance as Toula.

Unlike the body of the waif model, the athletic male body appears todominate and organize the space around it. In this way, representa-tions of the male body not only preserve traditional traits of mascu-line dominance but may be said to reclaim them in defiance ofhistorical developments in the culture.

A third type, overlooked by Dutton and generally ignored in popu-lar-cultural representations, except for contrastive and/or comicpurposes, is the figure that I have elsewhere called the Silenus repre-sentation (Buchbinder 21); namely, the overweight, even obese malebody, usually but not always associated with the aging man. If thewaif figure is too flimsy and insubstantial a representation of mascu-linity, the Silenus figure is too weighty, too material. While he mayalso dominate the space in which he is represented, it is throughsheer mass rather than through a subtle and alluring play of clearlydefined lines, planes, and volumes. Yet we should recall that this fig-ure, in other cultures and in the fairly recent past of our own, canalso signify wealth and well-being and, through these, power: Sucha figure may be understood to have acquired its very materialitythrough the ability to profit from the physical labour of others andthrough the capacity to absorb nutrition in both quantity and qual-ity.

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The idealized athletic male body has supplanted this earlier signifierof wealth and leisure; for that body, whatever it owes to geneticinheritance, also usually owes a good deal to specialized diet and,particularly, to many hours per week spent in exercise. Ironically,the muscular male body, which until comparatively recently signi-fied the working-class body, used to be the by-product of physicallabour. It is now the goal of physical effort performed in gymnasia,on home exercise machines, and so on—all of which imply, as wellas require, leisure time in which to perform the exercise, togetherwith the financial resources necessary to purchase gym member-ships or exercise equipment. The athleticism and muscularity of thisbody now tend to signify a subject who is no longer working-class.

Laurence Goldstein remarks, “If the body is all we have, having lostthe soul hypothesized by old-time religion, then making a spectacleof abundant material possessions is our era’s special form of devo-tional piety and bourgeois vanity alike” (Goldstein ix). I suggest,however, that the cult and cultivation of the male body have in effectbecome a new religion, with its own “theology” and rituals. Thedevelopment of the ideal body requires a particular asceticism,involving not only, as we have seen, a rule of diet and exercise butalso, and therefore, a rigid self-discipline and self-surveillance. Italso requires an alert surveillance of others, for purposes of compar-ison and judgment. In this, it is consonant, first, with the dynamicsof patriarchal masculinity by which masculinity is conferred uponthe individual male by other men and may be rescinded by them atany time, should the individual male be judged to have deviatedfrom the recommended–required practices of that masculinity or tohave fallen short of them. Second, it is consonant also with themutual surveillance of members of religious Christian communitiesto ensure not only their own salvation but the salvation also of theirbrothers and sisters in God. The cultivation of the body thus takeson a sort of Calvinist approach to salvation, here defined as theachievement of the body to be admired and envied by othersbecause it is a body that has been persistently worked on andworked over—it is another manifestation, as it were, of the Protes-tant work ethic. Within the context of late capitalism, then, evenascetic practice may become something to be consumed, both by theascetic himself and by the onlooker.

The apotheosis of the male body has also created its own fanes andtemples. These are not, as one might have surmised, the gymnasiumand other places of exercise—such sites are really the workshops for

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the creation of man. Rather, the places of worship are the publicplaces—the magazines, the billboards, the television, and so on—inwhich icons of the divinized male body are exhibited to the peoplefor their visual consumption, like a sort of communion that, by excit-ing admiration of, as well as desire and envy for, that body, both cre-ates and defines the community of worship of the body. For men inthe culture, particularly, there is also the powerful pressure to emu-late that body in one’s own, in a sort of profane imitatio Christi.

However, such representations rarely show accurately what it takesto achieve such a figure. Even the wide variety of magazines thatfocus on exercise in its various forms frequently offer images of menwho, despite the fact that they may be shown using exercisemachines or weights, do not appear even to have broken out in asweat, much less to grimace with the sheer physical effort of per-forming the necessary movements. The represented contours of thebody’s musculature thus both signify and conceal the effort requiredto gain them. The idealized male body accordingly appears to us asnatural, effortlessly achieved—even when we know that this is notthe case. Like an haute couture garment, that body is intended to beworn with apparent ease and to excite admiration and envy in thebeholder.

The acquisition of the ideal male body, then, becomes a gesture ofwhat in the Renaissance was called sprezzatura; literally, “dispriz-ing.” That is, what required a good deal of effort, skill, and technicalknowledge—whether in the form of painting, sculpture, or litera-ture—may be dismissed as a mere bagatelle, a paltry attempt of littleintrinsic worth. And so it is, I suggest, with representations of theideal male body: they transform that body into a gesture that simul-taneously draws attention to itself and pretends that it is little morethan the result of youth, nature, and accident. This is one reason thatolder male bodies as gym-built as the more familiar youthful onesare rarely represented in widely disseminated popular culturaltexts: The gesture of sprezzatura becomes harder to accept when theeffort to achieve and maintain the ideal(ized) body of the muscularyouth becomes more palpable and therefore more difficult to dis-guise.

Dutton observes that in mediaeval culture, “the human body ceasedto be a candidate for glorification and became rather a vesseldoomed to condemnation unless supernaturally saved by Godthrough the instruments of grace” (59). Accordingly, therefore, “the

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human body—significantly, in its naked form—is depicted in theportrayals of the Judgment of the Damned which illuminated mis-sals and decorated cathedral facades, whilst the portrayals of theBlessed entering Paradise show them fully clothed in the raiment ofglory” (60). The polarity appears to have reversed itself in our owntime: The body fit to be exhibited in all its nakedness or near-naked-ness is the “saved” body, whereas the one that fails to conform tocurrent aesthetic standards of physique is the one better decentlycovered.

Even when the idealized male body is represented as clothed, thereare often suggestions of the naked form beneath the garments, forinstance, through gratuitous gaps in the clothing. Again, Fight Clubfurnishes a paradigmatic instantiation: We are invited continually tomake comparisons between Edward Norton’s slim and unremarka-ble body and the muscular, heroic physique of Brad Pitt, who notonly persistently exposes his body to our view but, in his habitualwearing of extremely low-slung trousers, barely covering his crotch,often creates a gap between trousers and shirt that in turn invites usto imagine what lies beneath. His looks and his body allow his char-acter Tyler Durden to wear the ugliest and tackiest items of clothingand yet make them appear fashion statements rather than lapses oftaste. Battered and bloody, he still looks better than the narrator andthe other men in fight club. “All the ways you wish you could be:that’s me. I look like you want to look …,” Durden tells the narrator;but he could well be addressing a sizeable number of men in thefilm’s international audience, who all want to look “saved” by theirbodies and their beauty.

The tendency in recent years to regard the body, and especially themale body, as plastic matter to be moulded in deliberate ways—what is often called body sculpture—bespeaks a desire to surpassthe body, both in the traditional way of Christian asceticism, as acontempt of the natural body, and in the way of an artist taking aformless lump and fashioning it into something of aesthetic value.These two views are, of course, mutually contradictory; nonetheless,they coexist almost without interrogation, as the slogan of the gym-nasium makes clear: “No gain without pain.” This motto implies asubordination of the body to the will of the subject and, at the sametime, a re-creation of that body according to that will, not the tradi-tional disregard of the body of Christian asceticism.

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The now widespread practice of depilating the male body also hasinteresting ramifications. Once employed chiefly by men in sportslike weightlifting and bodybuilding in order to make the muscula-ture and the play of muscles under the skin more evident, the now-popular practice of removing body hair from the male body invitesus to view that body as “legible,” undisguised or blurred by anydegree of hirsuteness. In an age of HIV/AIDS, this takes on addedmeaning: The depilated body is the one that can be scanned for evi-dence of disease (not an infallible means of avoiding infection, ofcourse, but nonetheless one that works powerfully in the culturalimaginary). Moreover, the depilated muscular body simultaneouslyrecalls classical sculpture and identifies the body as youthful, pubes-cent. Above all, it marks the body as somehow morally innocent—a“saved” body, once again.

In this way, representations of the male body are elided into self-rep-resentations by men. The pursuit of that body by the individualmale desirous of shaping his own in emulation gives the practice acertain religious intensity. It also has entailed men’s disengagementfrom their own bodies, so that they have come to view them asobjects to be re-created until they come within range of the desiredideal. In this sense, therefore, the male body has become a fashionitem; and like clothing fashion, it bears both on its surface and in itsdepth the pressures, influences, and actions that have brought it intobeing. Yet, at the same time, it seeks to conceal and transcend them,appearing nonchalant and natural; a simple, integral given—hautecouture worn as prêt-à-porter (“ready-to-wear”).

“I look like you want to look”: Brad Pitt’s is the male body simulta-neously idealized and enfleshed, detaching itself from the squalor,the contestations, and the uncertainties of its social context. Thatbody resolves, in its own physicality, all the difficulties and ambigu-ities that men feel they face in our current historical moment. Is thathow a man looks? I think that, for the present, it very well may be.Moreover, I suspect that men’s bodies will continue to be worn taut,muscular, and unblemished, for this season and for some seasons tocome.

Notes

1 Presented at the Making an Appearance: Fashion, Dress and Consump-tion conference, hosted by the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,University of Queensland, in association with the Creative IndustriesFaculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 10–12 July2003.

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2 Indeed, if the proliferation of advertisements and commercials for “off-road” vehicles is any gauge, the male body is fast becoming a rival tothe female body as a metaphor for the landscape: rugged and rough ter-rains engage in a symbolic relationship with the ridged abdominalmuscles and defined biceps of the idealized male body. Unlike thelandscape-as-female-body, which traditionally has been represented asthere for men to conquer and penetrate through exploration and exploi-tation, these “masculine” landscapes are so represented as to suggest,rather, a desirable and untouchable wildness. The off-road vehicle andthe landscape–male body are, therefore, often shown to be complemen-tary and appropriate to one another, even when no actual male body ispresent or visible in the advertisement.

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Buchbinder, David. “Unruly Age: Representing the Aging Male Body.”Manning the Next Millennium: Studies in Masculinities. Ed. Sharyn Pearce andVivienne Muller. Bentley, Western Australia: Black Swan Press, 2002. 11–28.

Humphries, Barry. Interview with Andrew Denton. Enough Rope withAndrew Denton. Episode 11. Australian Broadcasting Corporation—TV. 26May 2003.

Dotson, Edisol Wayne. Behold the Man: The Hype and Selling of Male Beauty inMedia and Culture. New York: Harrington Park–Haworth, 1999.

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Head On. Dir. Ana Kokinos. Perf. Alex Dimiatriades and Paul Capsis. Aus-tralian Film Finance, 1997.

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