ABSTRACT
In this chapter we attend to the 20th and 21st century mechanisms of nomenclature through which masculinity has been categorised, defined and described across popular culture. Models and patterns of masculinity have become ever more various in the digital age, increasingly as connected to questions of sex and sexuality as they are to gendered roles and identities. We suggest that, far from acting merely as a commentariat, it is the mass media, entertainment industries and primarily journalistic practice that have framed debate and shaped the landscape in which the male body has become routinely an object and site of erotic investment. Popular media have also given shape to anxieties about the condition of masculinity in the modern age which have progressively become more overtly connected to and ‘about’ sex and sexuality during the 21st century.
