ABSTRACT
Over the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of images of men in popular culture. Where once images of women dominated advertising and magazines, increasingly men’s bodies are taking their place alongside women’s on billboards, in fashion shoots, entertainment troupes like The Chippendales and large-circulation magazines. However, it is not simply that there are now more images of men circulating, but that a specific kind of representational practice has emerged for depicting the male body: namely an idealised and eroticised aesthetic showing a toned, young body. This, we will argue, is a new phenomenon, which is culturally and historically specific, although we are not suggesting that male bodies have not been presented as desirable before. Clearly they have, and heterosexual women and gay men have swooned over the years about Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, James Dean and a hundred matinée idols. What is new, however, is the ways in which the male body is being presented: specifically, the coding of this body in ways that give permission for it to be looked at and desired. Men’s bodies, it has been argued, are now coded-like women’s-as ‘to be looked at’, to use the awkward but insightful phrase current in film studies (Cohan and Hark, 1993; Jeffords, 1994; Mulvey, 1975; Screen, 1992). That is, the ways that men’s bodies have begun to be represented over the past ten years constitutes a disruption of conventional patterns of looking in which, in John Berger’s famous phrase, ‘men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at’ (1972: 47).
