if i had someone else's voice
I just finished reading Susan Bordo's The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private and I'm trying to process. (I'm re-reading her Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body now.)

Her point in writing the book is to try, as a feminist concerned with the power (in a Foucualt-ian, post-structuralist sense) culture exerts over women's bodies, to see what result that power has on men's bodies and how we view them. Her thesis is simple: "Male scientists and philosophers have created a nearly unbroken historical stream of tracts -- philosophical, religious, scientific -- on women's bodies and their distinctive maladies and excesses, all linked to our reproductive systems and sexual organs. But they have been remarkably good at forgetting that men have a sex."

Alright, I can see some problems with that, but I'll leave it alone. She supports this with discussion of evolutionists and body-image specialists who ignore the existence of the penis, or at least its importance. She makes an excellent point when she challenges the perception that women aren't as visually oriented as men. Perhaps, she argues, we simply haven't been allowed to be. The uncomfortable truth, as Bordo would have us understand it, is that size does matter. Not just physically, but visually. Why else, she asks, would the human penis be as large as it is? None of our primate relatives have a penis proportionately as big. Why do we assume that the human penis was not meant to act as part some sort of male display?

I don't often get to use my degree in anthropology and so it's a bit rusty, but she's right about this. I remember entire lectures dedicated to rape as an evolutionarily sound strategy, the usefulness/uselessness of the female orgasm and to the evolutionary oddity that is the human penis in comparison to its primate cousins. But never anything about why the penis got to be so big. Again, when polled, women in the US (and some men who shall remain nameless) seem to find the penis unattractive. Bordo asks if this isn't a Western bias, and provides some proof that in other cultures size, appearance and the sensation of a particular penis with or without modifications (piercings, etc.) matters.

In any case, Western society has long been uncomfortable with the sight of male flesh of any kind, let alone below the waist. Although to be fair, Bordo admits, the appreciation (and objectification) of the male body has come in phases. Sword and sandal epics exposed plenty of male flesh in a surprisingly sexualized way: sweaty and bloody, often being whipped or otherwise tortured. Starting in the sixties, though, movies began to represent a new kind of masculinity: androgynous and angsty, reflecting actors' like James Dean and Marlon Brando's bisexuality. The seventies saw a backlash against the feminist movement that would carry into the eighties: angry, silent, teeth-gritting, grunting, gun carrying men like Clint Eastwood and later Bruce Willis, whose characters were defined by a subtle air of misogyny. These men were misunderstood by the women who passed briefly through their lives. The exception, Bordo maintains, was John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

A change occurs, according to Bordo, with the infusion of gay aesthetics into the culture in the early eighties thanks to Calvin Klein and his underwear ads. For the first time there were men on display who weren't muscle bound freaks, squaring off with us in a contest of dominance. These men were reclining, or leaning, or standing with their heads bowed, willing to to be looked at, subjected to the female (or male) gaze.

There is a price to be paid for this. Once men realize they're being looked at, then they have an image to maintain and beauty to preserve. This leads to the same problems, Bordo almost reluctantly admits, that women face (on a smaller scale) in regard to eating disorders and related problems.

She also address male anxiety in regard to women. As culture idealizes/objectifies women, she argues, they become unreal to men and therefore unapproachable and objects of anxiety and sometimes anger or even rage. She uses the case of rapist Eldridge Cleaver and his book, Soul on Ice to dig deeper into this issue, as well as race and sex. This is a dicey subject at best, but she has some good points when she talks about impotence and the fear of impotence that drives the Viagra industry.

(As an aside, Margaret Cho comes at this from a different angle with her comedy, demanding that if insurance companies cover Viagra then they should cover morning after pills. A more realistic analogy I've heard would be to consider addressing or treating women's sexual fulfillment/dysfunction on the same level as men's, but I doubt that we'll ever see that happen. Our society is hyper-aware of male virility and sexual function and completely ignorant of women's. Bordo, I'm sure, would explain this as an issue of fear of female power, and I'm not sure that she would be wrong.)

I agree with her up to this point, and again when she talks about the racial aspects of how we perceive male sexuality (she goes into painful detail regarding Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill), and I also have no problems with her section on phallic imagery. As she closes the book, however, I feel like she loses the plot a little. She spends a great deal of time on literary criticism of Lolita, and then compares the book (unfavorably) to the movies. Her point here is clear: the movie adaptations of Lolita both make Lolita into more of a seductress than a victim and that disgusts her. It's a valid point, but what it has to do with the male body and our perceptions of it, I'm unsure. It feels as if she's reverting and talking about male privilege instead.

Disregarding Lolita, Bordo's arguments resonated most with me when she talked about the myth of women as less visually oriented. This is simply because of my time spent in fandom. The old idea that men tend to judge women on appearance and women judge men on status loses something when dragged through fandom muck. Just consider the appeal of Sam and Dean. They are pretty, first and foremost. They occasionally show skin. Also, they are emotionally accessible. They own nothing but a (phallic) car and have no status as our society reckons it. I've also noticed in SPN fic that there is a lot of attention paid to dicks. Is this the product of trying to write from a deeply masculine perspective? Trying to capture the POV of someone we imagine is comfortable with his body? Or is that we are comfortable imagining his body? All of it. And we find all of it attractive?

I feel like I had more to say about this, but I saw Eastern Promises earlier tonight and I can't get the image of Viggo, covered in vaguely cheesy tattoos but otherwise naked (like, cock and balls all over the place) and bloody on a bath house floor, out of my head. It's not pleasant, but I guess it does relate. Viggo's nude and semi-nude scenes in the movie were meant to shock, not to arouse.

Which makes me curious. What scenes in (straight) movies show you male flesh in a way that is specifically intended to arouse you in the same way that female flesh is almost always shown -- even in death?

Yeah. I'm done.