The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
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<strong>The</strong> Bully in the Mirror<br />
I don't think of myself as culturally squeamish, but the ad struck me as so creepy<br />
that when I screened it at home recently, I became concerned that my<br />
15-month-old son, toddling around the room, might be paying attention. "<strong>The</strong><br />
style, the look, the leering tone, even the 'chicken hawk' voice-over -- Klein<br />
mimicked, closely, the style and tone of cheap basement gay pornography," says<br />
Bob Garfield, a columnist at Advertising Age and a longtime critic of what he<br />
calls Klein's "shockvertising" approach. If it is true, Garfield adds, that these<br />
commercials influence how boys think about their bodies, it reflects in part "the<br />
opening up of gay culture, where male objectification has almost nearly the<br />
effect that the objectification of females has had for time immemorial for<br />
women."<br />
This point is not lost on researchers. "<strong>The</strong> feminist complaint all along has been<br />
that women get treated as objects, that they internalize this and that it damages<br />
their self-esteem," says Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating<br />
and Weight Disorders. "And more and more, guys are falling into that same<br />
thing. <strong>The</strong>y're getting judged not by who they are, but how they look."<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is no way to plug popular culture into an equation and see what effect it<br />
has on mass psychology, of course, but there is widespread sentiment that these<br />
provocative images of buff males have really upped the ante for boys. Writing of<br />
both men and women in her new book, "<strong>The</strong> Male Body," Susan Bordo notes<br />
that "in an era characterized by some as 'postfeminist,' beauty seems to count<br />
more than it ever did before, and the standards for achieving it have become<br />
more stringent, more rigorous, than ever." Some of the research on body-image<br />
disorders in males indirectly makes the connection to cultural images.<br />
Olivardia, who conducted extensive interviews with men suffering from body<br />
dysmorphic disorder, says the patients bring up Hollywood movie stars all the<br />
time. "Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme. And Calvin<br />
Klein -- that name has been brought up quite a lot of times." If you pick up an<br />
issue of Gentleman's Quarterly or Men's Health or Teen People (or even this<br />
magazine), you'll see the trickle-down effect: a boy removes a tank top for Guess<br />
jeans. Firemen drop trou for Jockey shorts. Even the recent ads for "Smart Start"<br />
cereals by Kellogg's feature a naked torso. Consider: a six-pack in a cereal ad!<br />
Indeed, the bare, hairless, ripped chest has become so ubiquitous as a cultural<br />
icon that it occurred to me that contemporary advertising may have completely<br />
reinvented -- or at least relocated -- the physiological epicenter of male<br />
insecurity. Once, the defining moment of terror in a boy's life came in the locker<br />
room at shower time -- the place, as a boy at the Chelsea school put it, "where<br />
there's nowhere to hide." <strong>The</strong>re's still plenty of angst about penis size; many boys<br />
simply don't take showers after gym class these days, but I heard genuine fear in<br />
the voices of older boys when they spoke about the impending horror of going to<br />
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/199908<strong>22</strong>mag-boys-self-image.html (16 of 18) [8/<strong>22</strong>/1999 9:17:23 PM]