The Sexualized Male: Why Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs is Only Half Right
Pier Dominguez
At the same time, if Levy is simply speaking of power through cultural influence, then there are many examples of male figures who used their skivvies to launch themselves into stardom. In 1982, Tom Cruise was launched into a long movie career by parading around in his skivvies in Risky Business. In 1992, rapper Mark Wahlberg, launched his own media career by dropping his pants for Calvin Klein in a massive television and print ad campaign that threatened to overtake his entire career.
Most interesting are the implications behind Levy's use of the phrase "mainstream, heterosexual American culture." It assumes the outdated notion that women are not really interested in seeing naked or sexualized men, presumably because the only market for this figure is among other men who like looking at men. Either way, like Laura Mulvey before her, she leaves this question about female desire unasked and unanswered in any overt manner. In its circular reasoning, the phrase "mainstream, heterosexual American culture" suggests that the sexualized male is a marginal figure in American culture. Yet the "ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up" that Laura Mulvey believed prevented the patriarchal, heteronormative cultural gaze from turning inwardly have fractured.
Susan Faludi, who partly chronicled the sexualized male phenomenon in her problematically broad book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, concluded: "The invasive, prying gaze that so unsettled men didn't really emanate from female eyes. It came from ornamental culture itself, from corporations and advertisers and publicists with their one-way mirrors and tabulations of you and your purchases." Faludi thus reduces the sexualized male phenomenon to a marketplace frivolity or fad, sidestepping the question of female desire and failing to explore the idea of a "female gaze" or the fractured sexual cultural stage.
As in "Backlash," Faludi uses a feminist framework that assumes a vulgar Marxist position suspicious of sex, art and consumerism, none of which it can deal with appropriately or explain textually.
Interestingly, the simplistic framework of a journalist like Faludi and a public intellectual like Wolf has influenced not only other popular feminist tracts, like Female Chauvinist Pigs which its own publisher promoted as being "in the tradition" of both books, but it has impacted at least one female academic historian, who uses it to create an almost teleological narrative about the "history of male vanity" starting with fifties manly men, passing through Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism – which she seems to view as an interesting and applicable theoretical text which does not itself require historicization-and ending with Calvin Klein models and Viagra. In the endnotes to Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America, Lynne Luciano writes, unproblematically placing sexualized maleness within the "male gaze" framework: "Male body image mirrors women's body image, about which there is an abundance of excellent information ... Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth: How Images of Women are Used Against Women, and Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women have been essential in shaping my thoughts about the pervasive culture of beauty in America, which for so long was the special burden of women – until now."
Indeed, in her introduction she poses the oddly ahistorical queries: "What has caused American men to fall into the beauty trap so long assumed to be the special burden of women? Does men's concern about their bodies mean they've become feminized? Have they been so added by the women's movement that they are responding by becoming more like women?" The epistemological violence inherent in these questions, the facile use of the word "cause", which should reek of positivism to any contemporary historian, could easily be traced back to the argument of Wolf's "beauty myth," which is supposed to be "caused" by patriarchy. As the art historian Rosalind Krauss once wrote, paraphrasing Foucault: "Cause is a very special kind of motor that drives an argument in fixed directions. Once we define historical problems in terms of cause, there will always be fragments lying about on the scrap heap of history."
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).