Suddenly they’re everywhere! Towering on advertising hoardings, bulging pecs
glinting like steel girders in the sun. Smouldering out of magazine pages,
chiselled torsos as glossy as polished leather. Flaunted in movies. Rippled
in stage shows. Glimpsed even on TV.
Yes, we are talking — and talking and talking — about naked or near-naked
male bodies. When Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, emerged from the sea in
those tight little trunks — his manly contours almost demanding a round of
admiring wolf-whistles — he wasn’t setting a trend, but reinforcing
something that has been creeping into mainstream culture for years. As far
as the advertising world is concerned, scantily-clad girls are passé. There
are fewer of them on display in today’s media than 25 years ago. It’s
gorgeous pouting guys who are the current hot thing. Especially with their
kit off. And they are being used to sell everything from posh pongs to
household appliances.
Which is disconcerting. Men spent 50,000 years advancing from bare skins and
bearskins to the impeccably tailored suit — a fine sartorial invention,
since it covers a multitude of fleshly sins. Twentieth-century Bloke had
every reason to hope that personality and brains (or, failing that, a fat
wallet) would count for more in his sophisticated modern world than a
caveman physique.
But in the past 20 years civilisation has crashed into reverse gear. Not only
has the modern girl become ludicrously intolerant of her man’s flabby
physique, and far more vocal about expressing her impertinent displeasure,
but men also find themselves confronted at every turn by images of other
men, more or less in the buff — flawless, godlike hunks with taut buttocks
and improbably honed abs . . . in short, bodies that look as though a drop
of beer or a morsel of carbohydrate has never passed their lips.
What has that done to male self-esteem, already reeling from the relentless
advance of women in society? The answer is that it has sent many men into
disorientating spasms of self-consciousness and self-doubt. And that, too,
has been a shock to the old order. Isn’t it women who are supposed to do
body angst? Aren’t men supposed not to give a damn about how they look?
No longer.American men now spend $5 billion a year on grooming products, and
there’s no reason to suppose that European males lag in the vanity stakes.
This, after all, is a global male crisis. And the booming male-cosmetics
industry is the least worrying symptom of it. There are far more dangerous
manifestations: men killing themselves — metaphorically and sometimes
literally — by pounding too many miles round parks, or pumping too much iron
at the gym; a marked increase in eating disorders such as anorexia or
bulimia among image-conscious boys and young men; and increasing use of
steroids and other dubious drugs to control appetite and bulk up physique.
Of course, Western civilisation has been through several previous epochs in
which its “taste-makers” were obsessed with men’s bodies. The Ancient Greeks
idolised the male nude, and made it the basis of their art. For them it
wasn’t just an embodiment of athletic perfection, it was also an expression
of their philosophical belief in harmonious proportion (in this case the
relationship between head, torso and limbs) as the key to inner truth. Some
1,500 years later, Leonardo revived that notion with his celebrated drawing
of Vitruvian Man, disclosing the “hidden geometry” of the male body.
The Romans inherited all of that, but added a magic ingredient that the
Greeks, in their sweet platonic way, had suppressed: blatant homoeroticism.
To look at the engraving of male bodies entwined on the Warren Cup in the
British Museum is to experience a shockingly explicit expression of a love
that would not dare to speak its name again for another 1,900 years.
When 16th-century artists reinvented Classicism they also revived the cult of
the male nude as the perfect embodiment of human form (indeed, Dolce &
Gabbana’s supposedly startling ads last year, featuring naked males in a
studio, were direct homages to Caravaggio). Even Napoleon had himself cast
as a nude statue by Canova.
But after the 18th century naked men largely disappeared from paintings and
sculpture, and the modern fixation on the female form began. True, an
appreciation of wonderful male physique never entirely vanished from public
consciousness. From Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked by firelight
in Women in Love to the tunic-clad male dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet
leaping ferociously down the stage in Spartacus , a fine display of
manly flesh always attracted a certain sort of admirer.
But these were exceptions to the prevailing early 20th-century feeling that
grown men should keep their knees covered in public unless they were
footballers, scout-masters or naval officers in the tropics.
When did that change?Perhaps in 1987, in a fondly remembered Levi’s jeans
commercial. To the sound of Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The
Grapevine , the model Nick Kamen stripped to his boxer shorts in a
launderette, reducing two goggle-eyed girls to giggles and changing for ever
the face (and other parts) of British advertising.
Quick to imitate, Calvin Klein, Armani and Gucci all devised advertising that
showed off beautiful, slim young men lounging moodily in various degrees of
ungirt disarray. A male stripper — or, better still, five of them — suddenly
became the must-have accessory to any girls’ night out (a fad fabulously
satirised in that quintessentially self-mocking British comedy The Full
Monty ). Pirelli included naked men in its celebrated calendar for the
first time in 2001. A year later the final frontier was crossed. An Yves St
Laurent magazine ad for the male fragrance M7 featured a full-frontal male
nude — a martial arts champion, no less. British and American publishers got
cold feet (as it were) and refused to carry it. But French Vogue had
no qualms, and Yves St Laurent reaped a whirlwind of worldwide publicity.
All of which has set up a dangerous loop of circular logic in the minds of
suggestible men. Advertisements and films such as Casino Royale link
the trappings of success — material, social, sexual — with a fine physique.
Indeed, if you subscribe to the theory advanced by the American sociologist
Marian Salzman in The Futureless Gender , advertisers are knowingly
cashing in on the low self-esteem of men who feel usurped by women —
deliberately plying them with images that reinforce their disquieting sense
of threatened masculinity, and then offering what appears to be the answer.
Significantly, a study comparing magazine photos of male models in Men’s
Health and Fitness magazine with those in Cosmo showed that men
have a far more muscular male body marketed to them than women do. And in a
recent survey of 140 British men, more than half said they felt
“intimidated” by the male models strutting their stuff in Calvin Klein and
Armani underwear ads.
At the same time, the rise of male grooming products, sophisticated fitness
regimes, health foods and cosmetic surgery all contribute to an illusion
that men can attain any physical condition they desire, provided that they
work hard enough at it. But of course, the perfect bodies displayed in the
media are way beyond what most men can realistically hope to attain. So any
obsession with reaching this goal is bound to end in failure. And because
this ideal physique has already been psychologically linked to success in
other fields, a failure to match up physically can have catastrophic
repercussions for insecure men in the bedroom, the office and every other
area of their lives.
All this is exhaustively examined in a book called The Adonis Complex —
a study of the “secret crisis of male body obsession” by three
American doctors (Harrison Pope, Katharine Phillips and Roberto Olivardia).
They identify in growing numbers of men an obsessive compulsive illness
known as body dysmorphic disorder: excessive preoccupation with an imagined
imperfection. In its mildest form it is merely time-wasting, leading men to
spend hours of every day worrying, exercising or grooming themselves. But at
its most severe it destroys careers and marriages — and is often incurable.
Paradoxically, many dysmorphically challenged men who embark on ferocious
fitness regimes because they want to become more attractive to the opposite
sex (or to their own sex) find that the obsession eventually compels them to
forgo any sexual contact at all, lest it sap their energy. Tragically, the
means becomes an end in itself. One case study in The Adonis Complex “wouldn’t
even kiss his girlfriend, fearing she might transmit calories through her
saliva”.
So what is going on? Is traditional female anguish about body shape being
transferred to men? And if so, have women finally emerged from a long, dark
tunnel of self-doubt? Not according to Marian Salzman. “I don’t think this
generation has reduced the neuroses on one gender, just because we have
piled them on the other,” she says. “Women still have many hang-ups about
their physiques. It’s a law of nature, for instance, that a woman is
incapable of going into a supermarket and buying a piece of fruit that’s
bigger than her own breasts.” Gosh. One fears for courgette sales in
Sainsbury’s if men also start applying that “law of nature” to their
anatomies.
Perhaps the answer is to go back to the Greeks. After all, they started this
fetish for naked blokes. First, let’s remember that their idealised statues
were never supposed to be role models, or blueprints for exhausting workouts
in the Athenian equivalent of LA Fitness. They were more about an
intellectual or spiritual striving for inner harmony.
And second, let’s think again about the useful motto “moderation in all
things”, to which all civilised Ancient Greeks aspired (except when
slaughtering the Trojans, obviously). In earlier, flabbier ages, that was
taken as an injunction against excessive boozing, feasting and fornicating.
But in our crazy, body-infatuated era, it should surely be recommended to
men who beat themselves up in gyms, or starve themselves into invisibility,
in pursuit of some hopeless dream of perfection.
Guys, let it go! Yes, it may seem defeatist and unglamorous to settle for a
moderate physique, moderate health, a moderate sex-life and moderate
contentment. But compared with the alternative — becoming so fixated on your
shape that it consumes all your thoughts and energies — does that seem so
bad?
Besides, you know full well that none of those impossibly bronzed, perfectly
muscled, fabulously endowed male models in magazines has an ounce of
personality or intelligence. Otherwise, why on earth would they want to
spend their lives being photographed in their pants?
