Male bodies on display
Have you noticed the proliferation of advertising billboards featuring glamorous young men with gleaming biceps, tight buttocks and big pecs bared, all "trim, tanned and terrific"?
Whether it is selling male underwear, aftershave or sun-screen, the advertising industry seems to have decided on a new approach to marketing many products for men: sell sex.
Of course, this is not a new approach; sex has been used to sell just about every imaginable product for women (and men) for over a century. What is relatively new is the use of semi-nude male bodies to this end.
"It's about time", said one woman — a feminist — when I raised the issue. "Women are getting even at last. We're actually being encouraged to ogle, to unashamedly express the fact that we enjoy looking at sexy bodies, just like men always have."
While a big step forward in sexual politics has been the acknowledgment that as many women as men get a buzz out of seeing naked bodies, this "equal treatment" argument is spurious. It is also very dangerous for feminism.
An "equality" based on the commodification of men's, in addition to women's, bodies is hardly a great leap forward in a society which encourages people to inflict pain and suffering on themselves and spend huge amounts of time and money in the pursuit of an utterly unreal body "ideal".
The use of steroids by growing numbers of young men striving for unnaturally big pectoral muscles is no less unhealthy than the eating disorders which now affect one in every two North American women at some time in their lifelong pursuit of a size 10 figure. The surgical implantation of hair into bald scalps is no less torturous than the facelifts that thousands of Australian women have every year.
Whether this use of men's bodies is a direct pitch to male consumers or to women (most of whom now have an income of their own to spend on men in their lives), advertisers believe it will increase sales. That's because they know they can rely on sex-role stereotypes to influence buying patterns.
This does not mean that these ads are "sexist". While sex-role stereotypes limit, distort and dehumanise both men and women, they are effective because they are based on real and systematic inequality between the sexes.
Sexism, by definition, gives men power in relation to women. While the packaging and presentation of men's bodies as desirable, even purchasable, objects does reinforce sex role stereotypes, men are unlikely to be refused a job or sacked because of their body size and shape; they are unlikely to be blamed for having been assaulted because of the way they dressed.
The rise of the male model is not an instance of women "getting even". On the contrary, it further legitimises and entrenches the centuries-old commodification of women's bodies and sexuality by capitalism. The last thing that feminism needs is another "new age" justification for the abuse of women.
The "equality of exploitation" argument leaves us wide open to attack from the backlash brigade: "Now that advertising companies also objectify male bodies and sexuality, it is once again OK (even sexually liberating) to do it to women".
Rather than rejoicing in the illusion that women are "getting even", feminists should be building on the progress made by the women's movement in raising consciousness about the need to liberate women's, and men's, body image and sexuality from destructive stereotypes.
By Lisa Macdonald