Tori Amos once sang, "Sometimes, you're nothing but meat."
To springboard off of last week's column dealing with the issue of male body image and its relation to consumerism, I'd like to focus this week on male objectification as it relates to the advertising world. Traditionally, this topic has held much more weight within discussions of women and femininity, but we have all witnessed the proliferation of male objectification in the advertising world. The ubiquity of the sexualized male image cannot be ignored and thus should be addressed.
First, a historical context provides a lens that establishes a parallel shift in advertising in terms of female and male bodies and can perhaps explain the current state of affairs. In a similar way that the women's liberation movement shaped consumerism, the gay liberation movement had its hand in influencing marketing. In relation to the former, companies co−opted values and concepts dear to feminism and applied them to their advertising practices as evidenced in the exploitation of the ideas of women's liberation and freedom of sexuality. As for the latter, enterprises wanted to tap into the classist and racist mainstream notion of queer affluence, which has undoubtedly shaped the representational world of advertising.
In our generation, ads do not shy away from using male bodies to reach a larger market. As a wink to the queer community interested in male−bodied persons, marketers often will display one or more male bodies in a sexually ambiguous or androgynous frame that doesn't negate homosexuality but will not crystallize its existence either. This method allows the viewer to project his or her own interpretations and understand the ad in his or her own way. Furthermore, the subtext and codification can still speak to the niche queer market without an explicit message and exclusivity.
In this way, even for the heterosexual consumer, this approach functions just as effectively for the following reason: The male body is conceptualized as the site and locus of a gendered identity, the tool that engenders masculinity (a claim Judith Halberstam disputes and tries to destabilize in her 1998 work "Female Masculinity"). Thus, ads do not need to go beyond putting on display a certain type of the male body, an entity that self−reifies, for masculinity becomes its extension through physical form and musculature. (We also should not forget the intersectional issues of representation in these ads that often exclusively feature the white male body.)
The aforementioned movements have changed our cultural climate, resulting in the diminishing need to strictly adhere to traditional gender roles. The objectified male in advertisement, inextricably tied to transforming men into consumers, is able to transgress gender. The image of the metrosexual is then nothing but a legitimizing tool for men's style and beauty. It functions as a reclamation and reframing of a homosexual masculinity into the acceptable context of a virile heterosexual masculinity.
As last week's column mentioned, the idealized male body, now with the sexualized, erotic component, established an ideal related to the rise in low self−esteem, body dysmorphic disorders, cosmetics use and plastic surgery. Another important component is that gay men in particular suffer from body issues. The International Journal of Eating Disorders in 2002 reported that 14 percent of gay men seemingly had bulimia and over 20 percent seemingly suffered from anorexia, statistics higher than the overall 10 percent for men in general.
Under our regime, none of us are safe from becoming an object of the male gaze — to be put on display, manipulated, disciplined and, most importantly within the context of this column, to become commodified. As a last note, I want to acknowledge the systemic and unjust body policing that has plagued marginalized bodies, such as intersex and transsexual ones, but that discussion — perhaps problematically — was not a part of this column's scope.
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Elisha Sum is a senior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
