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Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina Monologues

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from: Christopher Caldwell

"It ain't easy being a sex object ..."

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001, at 11:57 AM ET

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

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the book club
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12345678910111213
from: Christopher Caldwell

"It ain't easy being a sex object ..."

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001, at 11:57 AM ET
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Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina MonologuesThis week, Chris Caldwell, Jodi Kantor, and Erik Tarloff examine three books about body image: Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina Monologues. Click here for a word on our format. To read this discussion from the beginning, click here.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: All right, calm down everyone. Let's just say, the Fray reflected the Book Club. Strong words, strong feelings, and a lot of comment on sex, relationships and vaginas. And on childbirth, some of it from those who are never going to experience it. Yes, that Natalie Angier post (below) did provoke comment. Yes, the views held were somewhat, but not wholly, gender-predictable. Yes, having an opinion on what women think during childbirth is apparently a valuable debating skill. Yes, we at the Fray keep remembering how much we enjoyed those tips on making grilled cheese sandwiches that came with the John Le Carre Book Club a few weeks back.

Some nice posts below. A good discussion on phallocentric writing started here. And it was a relief that all Goatgut wanted to tell us tell us was that it's Visa which is 'everywhere you want to be'; whereas Mastercard is 'priceless'.]


Chris Caldwell says:

"Or that poem about being in a room when a baby was born--which has nothing about a baby being born. The poem is all about the vagina--a really demented perspective, for anyone who has ever watched a delivery."

Demented perspective?!? Demented perspective??!! For the nearly two hours of delivering my kid, the only goddamn thing I thought about was my vagina, and my anus, too, because they felt like one and the same conduit throughout the ordeal. As Shulamith Firestone put it, childbirth is "like shitting a pumpkin," and for the average heaving vagina in labor, the baby counts for nothing until it has been expelled, ejected, dumped! Which takes forever! And then you still have to push out the placenta! Eve Ensler has it exactly right:

Childbirth is really about vaginas. Except when it's about assholes.

Chris Caldwell must have been watching a C-section

--Natalie Angier

(To reply, click here.)


I think the Adonis complex is lodged firmly (excuse the pun) in the upper-middle class. The upper class can woo and succeed on money and collections alone. The upwardly mobile, however, need an extra edge. Or perhaps I'm completely wrong, but has anyone ever studied whether non-college college-aged women are as susceptible to eating disorders as those in college?

Btw: what's the problem with the Vagina Monologues? They may not work as literature, but I don't know of anyone who's ever seen them (I haven't) and not enjoyed it. I also understand that a couple of rapists and Bob the Curious are the only males that show up, but isn't the whole point that it is not about men? I mean, who but the most cynical of Hollywood producers would insist that some vagina-loving men be inserted to counterbalance the vagina-hating ones?

--Fletch

(To reply, click here.)


Christopher Caldwell asks, "And what kind of sad person prefers power to romance?" Well, any person who has no power, or any person who has only a very indirect kind of power. Frankly, the power versus romance thing sort of smacks of the ethics versus a full stomach. Only the people who have the basics (and power is a basic for a human being, regardless of gender) have the time to focus on the nice things like romance. Is it sad that people lack these basics? You bet.

--Dea

(To reply, click here.)


Jodi Kantor and Katha Pollitt seem to see The Vagina Monologues as simply a female counterpart to something that men have always done--publicly exploring their sexuality and taking pride in their bodies. But where exactly do they see all this male celebration of male anatomy and male physiological functions? (That's why I've always thought Steinem's "If Men Could Menstruate" essay was the height of silliness. After all, men can masturbate, but it's hardly something that has been traditionally celebrated in our culture.)

Yes, one can find some passages in D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer exalting the generative and creative powers of male genitalia. (In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett cites a hilarious Lawrence passage on the mystical powers of balls.) Still, this is fairly marginal stuff. Kantor cites Portnoy's Complaint and There's Something About Mary as male parallels of sorts to Monologues. But these works, in facts, are expressions of sexual shame, not of "penis pride."

Since I haven't seen or even read The Vagina Monologues, I don't know whether or not it has a lot of male-bashing...I have to wonder, however: doesn't it bother Kantor and Pollitt that the play celebrates an adult woman's seduction of a 13-year-old girl? The girl is even shown saying, "if it was rape, it was a good rape." No need, I think, to ask anyone to imagine what the reaction would be if this was an adult male seducing a 13-year-old girl...

--Cathy Young

(To reply, click here.)


I take issue with the writers' assertion that women do not like the bodybuilder's body. The pictures to which the women so negatively reacted probably were of professional bodybuilders in full contest mode. Most men would never think that this level of size would attract many women. But show those same women pictures of professional fitness models, or Chippendale dancers, and the reaction would be quite different. These are men who are in reality very large and very defined, just not as much as the guys who do anabolic steroids for the whole off-season. Think Brad Pitt in Fight Club and you know what most men in the gym are trying to achieve. Please do not tell me that women do not find it attractive. Since I have been working out significantly, my dating prospects zoomed through the roof.

Oh, by the way, the female orgasm plays can play a role in impregnation: the woman is more likely to be inseminated after an orgasm, so don't say that it has no reproductive function

--Bruce Garrison

(To reply, click here.)





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