The Sexualized Male: Why Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs is Only Half Right
Pier Dominguez
There are many fragments, or moments, of "sexualized maleness" lying in the scrap heap of history. As visual studies theorist Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes in her brilliant book about male nudes in pre and post-revolutionary French culture Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation: "The historical point of departure for such an inquiry begins with the observation that the ideal male nude for centuries occupied the place that we currently assume belongs by rights to the female body. The visual evidence of Western art history, beginning with the Greek invention of the nude as an aesthetic category, seems to justify the view that the dominance of the female body in nineteenth – and most of twentieth century iconography – was a historically specific mutation, one tied to the particular determinations of modernity, and to the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois ideologies of gender."
Solomon-Godeau broadly notes three moments of sexualized maleness: fifth century Greece, revolutionary France and contemporary America. In the few paragraphs she devotes to contemporary sexualized maleness, Solomon-Godeau acknowledges that there are contexts in which the male body has always been on display, including sports, rock concerts and movies, but she still finds it "fair to say that the unclothed and conspicuously 'developed' body on visual offer in so much contemporary mass media constitutes a quantum leap in the recent history of masculine self-display."
Importantly, mass spectator sports, rock (or pop) music concerts and "the movies," are all contexts that became fully institutionalized around the Post-War II period. I would add that television played perhaps the most important role in re-sexualizing the male body at that point. Two of the most iconic sexualized males of post-war America, Elvis Presley (whose career-launching hip-shaking presentation occurred on the Ed Sullivan show) and John F. Kennedy (whose tousled, youthful good looks gave him an edge in his television debate with the scowling Nixon and made him a star in the influential women's magazines) were clearly products of the television boom. But even then, the very idea of sexualized maleness was often treated as an apolitical joke, not least of all by men.
In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, banning sex discrimination in employment along with race discrimination. (The sex discrimination part had been tacked on as a joke and a delaying maneuver by a Southern Congressman, Howard Smith of Virginia.) At the first press conferences after the law went into effect, the administrator in charge of enforcing the law joked about the ban on sex discrimination: "It will give men equal opportunity to be Playboy bunnies." The comment worked as a "joke" because the administrator, wanting to trivialize the idea of labor equality, inverted what the law was supposed to achieve: not the role of sexualized maleness for men, but an equal role in the labor force for women. Why was that the assumption? What does it mean when men choose to present themselves as sexual objects? Is taking seriously what the culture deems laughable perhaps the most politically "radical" move of all?
Popular culture has consistently presented sexualized maleness as laughable and preposterous: the Right Said Fred song "I'm Too Sexy" which was a hit in 1992, or Ben Stiller's 2001 film Zoolander both mocked the idea of men posing, modeling and being self-conscious about their presentation. But at other moments, both pop music and cinema have embraced the sexualized male: Rod Stewart's 1982 hit "If' Ya' Think I'm Sexy," which put the male body up for grabs, Jim Morrison's personal aesthetic and presentation – but not his lyrics – in his late sixties career, and Richard Gere's iconic semi-nude cavorting in American Gigolo in 1980 are all examples of commercially successful work that took sexualized maleness seriously. Why are there cultural moments that allow for, and others that disavow (usually through humor), the sexualized male?
Most recently, Viagra, the erectile dysfunction drug that places the penis as an object of scrutiny, began, explains Meika Loe in The Rise of Viagra, as "a joke. You must have heard them. Viagra has been a big boon to stand-up comedians." Yet the joke ended, partly, when the pill became the fastest-selling drug in American history and grossed $1 billion in its first year on the market. Feminists like Faludi and Wolf have placed the Viagra phenomenon in their narratives about sexualized maleness as mirroring female "objectification." Yet isn't Viagra simply another blip in the usual narrative of male sexual subjectivity? Does Viagra really place the penis itself as an object of aesthetic scrutiny?
Despite Levy's book, which promotes outdated feminist binaries, the sexualized male poses important questions regarding the commodification of sexuality and the legitimization of desire.
Pier Dominguez is an M.A. candidate in American Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the author of Amy Fisher: Anatomy of a Scandal (2001), Christina Aguilera: A Star is Made (2002), and "From Art Criticism to 'Art' 'Criticism': Susan Sontag to Rosalind Krauss" in States of Art Criticism (forthcoming).