The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999

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