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The Sexualized Male: Why Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs is Only Half Right

Pier Dominguez

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Despite the generalized nature of her claims, Levy is only interested in female sexuality, or depictions of female sexuality. Her lack of research on the sexualization of males leaves her stranded in a 1970s mentality, before the cultural gaze became decentralized, fractured and niche-oriented. In focusing on the moments when Levy does invoke the idea of sexualized maleness, usually as part of the rhetorical questions and "ironic" comments that are a trademark of her journalistic commentary, a very different narrative starts to emerge than the one she believes she is creating with her reporting. This commentary's tone ("Isn't this so ridiculous?") assumes a certain sexist attitude on the part of the reader – shock at the fact that not just men, but women(!) are objectifying women – which allows Levy to build her narrative without questioning her own assumptions with facts or analysis.

For example, regarding a group of female Olympic athletes who posed provocatively for Maxim, a racy men's magazine Levy comments,: "Bimbos enjoy a higher standing in our culture than Olympians right now. Perhaps the athletes felt they were trading up... Not one male Olympian has found it necessary to show us his penis in the pages of a magazine." In fact, the first and most famous Calvin Klein underwear ad, unveiled in September 1983, was a forty by fifty feet high Times Square billboard featuring Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintinaus showing the corona of his penis through almost translucently white briefs.

There are interesting questions to pose regarding the rise of the sexualized male as a figure both subtly transgressive and safely scandalous, and the slow decline in the stigma of "homoeroticism" surrounding that figure (most recently epitomized by the massive cultural celebrity of self-proclaimed metrosexual David Beckham) at the same time that the "bimbo" stigma was no longer being applied to women who used their sexuality to advance their careers (a much earlier development embodied, for example, in Madonna's pop career, which, not incidentally, Levy never even mentions because it would complicate her narrative).

For Levy, the sexual cultural stage remains as centralized, hegemonic and heteronormative as it ever was. She writes: "But it's not true that men parade around in their skivvies as a means to attaining power, at least not men in mainstream, heterosexual American culture – they don't have to." This comment requires careful scrutiny because Levy never distinguishes between actual political power and the kind of cultural power enjoyed by celebrities, which has been traditionally feminized. As Ann Douglas, author of The Feminization of American Culture, convincingly noted: "It is easy, I think, to underestimate cultural power, particularly cultural power ... that is grounded largely in religious organizations, beliefs, and practices .... I also believe that conscious and acknowledged cultural influence, however distorting its effects when not backed by full political and economic responsibilities, is indeed power."

On the one hand, Levy's comment implies that, unlike men, women do have to pose in their skivvies to get institutional political power, an idea refuted by the fact that the few women holding genuinely powerful office in this country are desexualized either through marriage (Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Dole) or through the press' respectful silence on their love lives (Condoleeza Rice). No female politician yet has received the kind of coverage that Barack Obama was subjected to when People magazine placed a paparazzi shot of him, shirtless, emerging from the water in a section titled "Beach Babes."

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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).

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