THE FEMALE GAZE
Posted by Deirdre | Filed under Blog
You’ve probably stared. Go on. Admit it. That beautiful face, that luscious body. It was the billboard image of the summer and it certainly stopped traffic. And who was the belle du jour? Correction, the beau du jour?
That sex thang was none other than Tyson Beckford, the hunky black model featured introduced to the world through a series of provocative Ralph Lauren Polo ads. Overnight, the American model and actor became not only a sensation; he became emblematic of a new ideal of male beauty — a tight rippling torso, big soft eyes and a mouth to make you shiver all over.
It used to be that pulchritude was a woman’s domain, but now the pinup is an equal-opportunity pursuit. Men are increasingly featured in popular culture as objects of desire.
Blame it on Sylvester Stallone. When the munchkin actor peeled off his shirt to run topless through the jungles of his Rambo movies, he triggered an avalanche of images of erotic males as dormitory decoration. Calvin Klein pushed the envelope even further with his risque underwear ads, which made a star out of Marky Mark (Wahlberg).
In The Man of Fashion: Peacock Males and Perfect Gentlemen, author Colin McDowell writes: “Klein’s achievement was to take the male body out of the gay closet and give it a much wider application than the jock locker room. He did this through his underwear, formerly the most unerotic item in the male wardrobe. Klein brought to underwear a gloriously flamboyant new life and changed attitudes by doing so.”
Klein was following the G-strings of the Chippendale dancers, male strippers who made their name shaking their booty before multitudes of screaming women. The Full Monty took the strip act one bold step further, and the surprise success of that hilarious 1997 film demonstrated that beefcake definitely has mass appeal.
Women’s growing independence as an economic force have made them view men as more than just sources of security.
“It used to be that men offered power and women offered beauty,” Judith Langer, head of a N.Y. market-research firm, told The New York Times. “Now, men have to be on their toes and in shape. They can’t allow themselves to go to pot.”
Reverse sexism is the mantra in today’s advertising. Most products are featuring men as sex objects to sell their goods to female consumers.
A popular spot for Diet Coke shows a group of female office workers rushing religiously to the window to watch a buckish construction worker doff his shirt to drink a Diet Coke. A print ad for Gucci underwear features a young Adonis tugging on his togs and flashing some cheek.
Are men comfortable with this reverse sexism?
Jason Jones once played the male lead in a Toronto production of Ladies Night, the 1984 New Zealand play on which The Full Monty film was based. The role required him to perform a striptease, something he had never done before, at least not in public.
When he first flashed an audience of 500 squealing women during a preview performance, he was blown away.
“The force knocked me back a few feet,” he said at the time, adding that he had no idea women could be so sexually aggressive.
The female gaze intimidated him — at first.
“I’m not used to being a sex object,” he confessed. “It’s been a bit of a go. Baring your ass is a little difficult. It was tough at the start.”
But just like with sex, the more times he did it the better he got: “I’d call it an adrenalin rush.”
Meow.