Dear Jodi, Erik, Katha, Marjorie,
Since I devoted much of Monday’s posting to summarizing the two books on male body image, and since no one else has said “boo” on them, I’ll just add a few desultory thoughts. (Noting, before I do, that Katha forgets I didn’t actually see The Vagina Monologues; my source for the Glenn Close cheer is Ensler’s introduction, page xxviii, where the chanting gets done by 2,500 women. Where she gets the idea that I was “excited” by this experience, I don’t know.)
As Erik says, and pace Marjorie, men don’t talk much about their organs, even (or perhaps especially) in unmixed company. That they do is a feminist superstition. Lynne Luciano, for instance, writes in Looking Good, “From earliest childhood, the connection between having an erection and being a man is hammered into boys.” No, it isn’t. Among boys, I remember a lot of locker room joking, but without any serious undercurrent of measuring up. And I suspect a majority of fathers are too embarrassed to address these things at all. (“Dad? What’s an erection?” “Nothing! Nothing!“)
Luciano has a nice eye for detail. She describes one woman’s preference for health clubs (over singles bars and bookstores) as a man-meeting locale: “At the gym, a man could quickly be disqualified as a potential mate purely on the basis of his body, whereas ‘under other circumstances you might take an interest in his mind … or fall under the spell of his humor’ before discovering flab, fat, or other physical horrors.”
It ain’t easy being a sex object, as one or two feminists may once have remarked. “Until World War II,” Luciano writes, “how a man behaved and what he achieved were the true measures of his worth.” And still are, of course. So it’s nice that Luciano notes the added pressure that was so paradoxically placed on men in the 1960s by the “de-emphasizing [of] work.” The introduction of the concept of “stress” was itself extremely stressful, serving only to convince the country that “the more successful a man was at passing the tests of masculinity, the more likely he was to die prematurely.” (It was in the 1960s that the word “workaholic” entered the language. Before then, it would have made about as much sense as “breatheaholic.”) So was the stress idea a political tactic? Was it mere jealousy–on the part of feminists and their allies among loser males–masquerading as science? I don’t necessarily think so, and Luciano doesn’t either, but it’s an intriguing line of thought.
A shoe that doesn’t drop in Luciano’s book is homosexuality, to which she devotes just one paragraph, but addictive weight lifting and steroid abuse are hard to understand in the context of heterosexuality alone. “Many women,” Luciano writes, “consider extremely muscular men, like body builders, vain and disgusting and find it annoying that men work so hard to cultivate this body type even though they know women don’t like it.” The Adonis authors are even more precise: 94 percent of women call the bodybuilder’s physique “extremely repulsive.” Very little of the bodybuilding being done today is for boy-meets-girl purposes. (Neither was the bodybuilding of the Charles Atlas era, perhaps, but it was marketed as such.) The Adonis authors add that bodybuilders and body dysmorphic disorder sufferers are disproportionately gay. They shy away from drawing any link, but the evidence is not negligible that male ideas of beauty are responsible for some of the most destructive low personal image complexes in both sexes.
These books include stories of self-punishment to match anything in the literature of the oh-how-these-high-heels-hurt school of feminism. Hair implants, for instance, would appear to be a really bad idea: “When the implantation business finally went under, leaving him without maintenance, Bernie surrendered to the inevitable. By this time, the wires had fused together with masses of scar tissue and grown into the bones of his skull …” Then there’s “penile augmentation,” as practiced by Dr. Melvyn Rosenstein of Culver City, who, before losing his medical license, sliced men open and stuffed them back up like so many bass. The most chilling sentence in Luciano’s book: “Operations became testing grounds for the doctor to see if he could beat his own speed record.”
I cannot resist finding this a bit funny. A would-be macho bounds into the operating room, his mind fed with fantasies from the catalogue he’d been leafing through (for surely the reception area has a catalogue in a three-ring binder with snazzy model names: “The Corsair” … “The Anaconda” …) and says, “Gimme the Hindenberg, Doc!” while the doctor whispers to his anesthesiologist, “Twenty bucks says I can break four minutes with the Black and Decker electric vegetable chopper.”
You know, looking over that last paragraph convinces me that my most productive thinking for this “Book Club” has already been done. So a fond au revoir. Each of you is, as Warren Zevon used to say in a different context, a credit to your gender.
Chris
