Bordo, Susan -- The Male Body
2. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private
Susan Bordo (332 pages)
10/10
I finally can say I have a favorite non-fiction book! Joy! I started this book quite awhile ago, almost three weeks, but I wanted to read it at my own pace and not rush through. From the moment I read the first few pages, the book had me hooked. It had me at hello, I suppose you could say. Susan Bordo is a relatively well-known feminist critic whose work has mostly centered around women. Yet here, she switches teams, so to speak, and starts batting for the men. Before, when I was naive and ill-educated, I thought masculinist studies was a reaction to/against feminism, but this book helped me to see that masculinist studies works hand in hand with feminism. Both are trying to fix the same thing (culture), but they're doing it from different sides. Imagine two people trying to mend a wall or a fence; one's on one side, the other's on the other, and there you have the situation between masculinist studies and feminism.
Enough of my ludicrous comparisons. Basically, this book explores a whole bunch of topics about men: men's relation to culture, men's relation to women, men's relation to other men. Bordo's prose is unlike any other critical prose I have read, insofar as it is actually enjoyable. She seems to have found the trick to removing whatever stick most critics have shoved up their asses in preparation for writing their books, and it works quite well. She infuses humor and personal anecdotes into her extremely insightful thoughts on men, and it is this infusion that also breathes life into the book. Bordo has a knack for pulling support for her arguments from the strangest places -- this woman analyzes everything! She covers My Best Friend's Wedding, Calvin Klein ads, feminist theorists, Sex and the City, biometaphors, Marky Mark, and Soloflex commercials, among everything else under the sun. It's quite nice to read intellectual criticism that refers to things that have actually been consumed by the general public, and this adds to the readability of the book. Truly, Louis Bayard could not have said it better when he claimed that The Male Body is an "unqualified pleasure: thoughtful, funny, unusually engaging." (Apparently, Bordo's publishers would agree with my judgment of Bayard's quotation, as they plastered it across the book's cover.) Needless to say, there are very few nonfiction books that I would agree are an "unqualified pleasure." In fact, this is the only one I can think of.
Bordo separated the book into three main parts, with an introduction and a coda acting as bookends and taking as their main topic Bordo's father. The first section, entitled "Private Parts," addresses various facets of men's physical bodies -- the relative hesitation in depicting nude male bodies (as opposed to female ones), the social repercussions of being hard (in both senses of having a well-muscled body and having an erection) and being soft, the brouhaha over size of the penis, and the fallacies of the phallus = penis equation. "Public Images," the second section, addresses the way men appear to the public eye, as seen in the depiction of men in films from the 1950s, the "celluloid closet" of gay men in films, and the recent trend to eroticize the male body (thank you, Calvin Klein!) in addition to the female. Finally, "The Male Animal, Revisited" addresses different sorts of issues involving men, like culture's asking men to be a gentlebeast (which is, obviously, a paradox), the ways in which the idealization of female beauty presented by culture negatively affects men as well as women, the problems with equating sexual harrassment with an overactive sex drive, and an interesting analysis of Humbert Humbert of Lolita fame. (Personally, I found the first two sections much more interesting than the last one.)
As a man struggling with feminism and the negative view as feminists-as-men-haters, it was quite reassuring to find a book that had a feminist not trying to eradicate the male species but to validate it, to say "Hey, it's not so easy for you, either." With that, I am going to leave you with a quotation from the end of the first essay in the book. As I read this, I actually had shivers go up my body, and they are still possibly the most encouraging and the most hopeful words I've read in English (or any other language, for that matter!) yet:I have been amazed at how much unexpected kinship I've felt with men while writing this book, and how many old myths I have been led to revisit and revise. In the process, I've come to see that the pop psychologists [i.e., John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus hypotheses] are dead wrong. For all our differences, so entertaining and lucrative to emphasize nowadays, men and women do not come from different planets. One of my goals in writing this book is to demonstrate that.
You go, girl.
A taste of Susan Bordo's humor:
[Paragraph that talks about the way in which women have been eroticized for a really long time, and so for men it's no big deal to see a picture and get sexually excited, but eroticization of the male image is a new development, so it's quite a shock for a woman to get turned on by an image. Then she shows this picture.]
"It was the Spring of 1995, and I was sipping my first cup of morning coffee, not yet fully awake, flipping through The New York Times Magazine, when I had my first real taste of what it's like to inhabit this visual culture as a man. It was both thrilling and disconcerting. It was the first time in my experience that I had encountered a commercial representation of a male body that seemed to deliberately invite me to linger over it. Let me make that stronger -- that seemed to reach out to me, interrupting my mundane but peaceful Sunday morning, and provoke me into erotic consciousness, whether or not I wanted it. Women -- both straight and gay -- have always gazed covertly, of course, squeezing our illicit little titillations out of representations designed for -- or pretending to -- other purposes than to turn us on. This ad made no such pretense. It caused me to knock over my coffee cup, ruining the more cerebral pleasures of the Book Review. Later, when I had regained my equilibrium, I made a screen-saver out of him, so I could gaze at my leisure."
Susan Bordo (332 pages)
10/10
I finally can say I have a favorite non-fiction book! Joy! I started this book quite awhile ago, almost three weeks, but I wanted to read it at my own pace and not rush through. From the moment I read the first few pages, the book had me hooked. It had me at hello, I suppose you could say. Susan Bordo is a relatively well-known feminist critic whose work has mostly centered around women. Yet here, she switches teams, so to speak, and starts batting for the men. Before, when I was naive and ill-educated, I thought masculinist studies was a reaction to/against feminism, but this book helped me to see that masculinist studies works hand in hand with feminism. Both are trying to fix the same thing (culture), but they're doing it from different sides. Imagine two people trying to mend a wall or a fence; one's on one side, the other's on the other, and there you have the situation between masculinist studies and feminism.
Enough of my ludicrous comparisons. Basically, this book explores a whole bunch of topics about men: men's relation to culture, men's relation to women, men's relation to other men. Bordo's prose is unlike any other critical prose I have read, insofar as it is actually enjoyable. She seems to have found the trick to removing whatever stick most critics have shoved up their asses in preparation for writing their books, and it works quite well. She infuses humor and personal anecdotes into her extremely insightful thoughts on men, and it is this infusion that also breathes life into the book. Bordo has a knack for pulling support for her arguments from the strangest places -- this woman analyzes everything! She covers My Best Friend's Wedding, Calvin Klein ads, feminist theorists, Sex and the City, biometaphors, Marky Mark, and Soloflex commercials, among everything else under the sun. It's quite nice to read intellectual criticism that refers to things that have actually been consumed by the general public, and this adds to the readability of the book. Truly, Louis Bayard could not have said it better when he claimed that The Male Body is an "unqualified pleasure: thoughtful, funny, unusually engaging." (Apparently, Bordo's publishers would agree with my judgment of Bayard's quotation, as they plastered it across the book's cover.) Needless to say, there are very few nonfiction books that I would agree are an "unqualified pleasure." In fact, this is the only one I can think of.
Bordo separated the book into three main parts, with an introduction and a coda acting as bookends and taking as their main topic Bordo's father. The first section, entitled "Private Parts," addresses various facets of men's physical bodies -- the relative hesitation in depicting nude male bodies (as opposed to female ones), the social repercussions of being hard (in both senses of having a well-muscled body and having an erection) and being soft, the brouhaha over size of the penis, and the fallacies of the phallus = penis equation. "Public Images," the second section, addresses the way men appear to the public eye, as seen in the depiction of men in films from the 1950s, the "celluloid closet" of gay men in films, and the recent trend to eroticize the male body (thank you, Calvin Klein!) in addition to the female. Finally, "The Male Animal, Revisited" addresses different sorts of issues involving men, like culture's asking men to be a gentlebeast (which is, obviously, a paradox), the ways in which the idealization of female beauty presented by culture negatively affects men as well as women, the problems with equating sexual harrassment with an overactive sex drive, and an interesting analysis of Humbert Humbert of Lolita fame. (Personally, I found the first two sections much more interesting than the last one.)
As a man struggling with feminism and the negative view as feminists-as-men-haters, it was quite reassuring to find a book that had a feminist not trying to eradicate the male species but to validate it, to say "Hey, it's not so easy for you, either." With that, I am going to leave you with a quotation from the end of the first essay in the book. As I read this, I actually had shivers go up my body, and they are still possibly the most encouraging and the most hopeful words I've read in English (or any other language, for that matter!) yet:I have been amazed at how much unexpected kinship I've felt with men while writing this book, and how many old myths I have been led to revisit and revise. In the process, I've come to see that the pop psychologists [i.e., John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus hypotheses] are dead wrong. For all our differences, so entertaining and lucrative to emphasize nowadays, men and women do not come from different planets. One of my goals in writing this book is to demonstrate that.
You go, girl.
A taste of Susan Bordo's humor:
[Paragraph that talks about the way in which women have been eroticized for a really long time, and so for men it's no big deal to see a picture and get sexually excited, but eroticization of the male image is a new development, so it's quite a shock for a woman to get turned on by an image. Then she shows this picture.]
"It was the Spring of 1995, and I was sipping my first cup of morning coffee, not yet fully awake, flipping through The New York Times Magazine, when I had my first real taste of what it's like to inhabit this visual culture as a man. It was both thrilling and disconcerting. It was the first time in my experience that I had encountered a commercial representation of a male body that seemed to deliberately invite me to linger over it. Let me make that stronger -- that seemed to reach out to me, interrupting my mundane but peaceful Sunday morning, and provoke me into erotic consciousness, whether or not I wanted it. Women -- both straight and gay -- have always gazed covertly, of course, squeezing our illicit little titillations out of representations designed for -- or pretending to -- other purposes than to turn us on. This ad made no such pretense. It caused me to knock over my coffee cup, ruining the more cerebral pleasures of the Book Review. Later, when I had regained my equilibrium, I made a screen-saver out of him, so I could gaze at my leisure."