On Masculinity: The spectacle of the human body
Kevin Arnold
It sort of goes without saying that Man does not have a body.
The “goes without saying” part is telling since men, of course, do have bodies. They simply would prefer to forget them. It’s why men often resist going to the doctor, because to have one’s body examined is to be reminded of oneself as an object, and a potentially flawed or broken one at that.
Woman is particular in her body: voluptuous, visceral, fleshy. Man, on the other hand, steps outside his body and bends it to his will; his body is an implement or a tool that disappears in use and in action.
This traditional vision of masculinity as abstract will or ego is continually unsettled by another vision of masculinity, man’s spectacular display of his body. Masculinity is, at the same time, a dazzling and magnificent exhibition of the male form, from the ancient ritual of the hunt, to gladiator fights, to fraternity or military hazing. If conventional wisdom connects the ostentatious, showy display of the body with femininity, this corporeal flamboyance is, in a strangely contrasting way, also indicatively masculine.
I don’t think the chiseled, shirtless warrior venturing into the wilderness or onto the battlefield was “getting in touch with his feminine side,” and, for that matter, I don’t think the frat boy showing off his chest and arms at a party is either.
If the spectacular display of the male body is indeed a very “old,” primal concept in masculinity, one of the best examples of this in the modern world is sports. With twenty-four hour media coverage and a virtually endless stream of video and photography, athletes’ (and men’s) bodies have never been more visible than they are today. Cellphone and social networking have taken this one step further, as every fan can now get in on the business of capturing, documenting, and consuming the male physique.
Strange as it might sound, it seems that men can’t get enough of looking at other men’s bodies.
We tend to actively forget the visibility of the male body in sports, coding it in masculinized language (a player looks “jacked” in lieu of more specific, colorful language) and technical jargon (“glutes” instead of “ass”). These strategies and languages by which men talk about and relate to other men’s bodies are interesting for masculinity in their own way, but the reality is that through sports, your average guy spends a great deal of time thinking about, watching, and discussing other men’s bodies.
If you look at it out of context, the idea of men getting together to watch other men in (sometimes egregiously) tight pants and postgame locker room interviews starts to look, well, a bit peculiar.
At the same time, however, sports are perhaps the single most defining arena of masculinity in American culture. The extreme visibility of men’s bodies in sports then demonstrates three characteristics of masculinity, characteristics that might seem like a radical departure from our vision of “traditional” masculinity, but that have actually long been central to it.
1) Men enjoy being on display. It could be objected that all of this attention paid to the male athlete’s body is extraneous to sports itself: athletes are focused solely on their performance and are not at all aware of the way their bodies appear to outsiders. It’s difficult to speak authoritatively about someone else’s awareness or intentions, but it seems to me that regardless of whether or not they reflect on it, athletes do take a great deal of pride and even pleasure in the way their bodies appear.
2) Men enjoy being on display for other men. Even as the culture of sports is changing, it continues to be dominated by men. If you can acknowledge that sports are, at least in part, about enjoyment in the spectacle of the male body, then you must also acknowledge that this enjoyment is addressed to and experienced primarily by other men. Being an athlete might get you laid, but probably not because the girl is impressed with your off-speed pitch or ability to drive the ball to the opposite field.
3) Men enjoy seeing other men on display. Just listen to the way that a guy will describe his favorite athlete. Wading through all of the stats and history, what you have is an expression of genuine appreciation and admiration not only for another man’s abilities and character, but also for his physical being. Men relate to masculinity through the ideal of their sports heroes’ bodies, and they also relate to each other by watching and discussing these displays together.
Even if norms are changing and the line between genders is becoming more and more blurred, the spectacle of the male body is really nothing new. The point is that our contemporary obsession with the visibility of the male body is not about a so-called feminization of masculinity, and is actually about something much older and even traditional, something already long within masculinity itself.
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