Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

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to be more overtly sophisticated. This effort toward creating an
urbane tone is related to the magazine’s brand differentiation
strategy. GQ, for instance, procures more advertising from luxury
brands than FHM. According to Sean Couves, 7 a former marketing
manager for GQ South Africa, this is due to the fact that GQ is
considered to be less laddish. Nevertheless, these differences are
marginal and GQ, thus, forms a purposive sample of glossy men’s
magazines as a genre.
In a sense, this study has failed before it has even started, for by
investigating GQ and then capturing this process in writing, one is
removing the magazine from the very real context in which it is made
and distributed (the studio, factory, newsagent, home, and so on).
Language, nevertheless, plays a critical role in invoking public
awareness and responsibility (in terms of the content of popular
culture). In order to stress this role, the emphasis of this chapter is
firstly on the process of defining the new, hybrid form of pornography
that is glossy men’s magazines. Towards this end, the term
‘gentlemen’s pornography’ is proposed as an rhetorical gimmick to
emphasise the manner in which GQ aesthetically borrows from
canonical erotic art in order to disguise its objectification of women.
Secondly, this chapter comprises a semiotic investigation of the
stylised aesthetic veneer that typifies glossy men’s magazines.
Feminist discourse is divided on the potential harmfulness of
pornography. This analysis builds on the assumptions of feminists such
as Laura Mulvey 8 who have highlighted the potential for
objectification contained within the artistic or mechanical process
employed in art, photography and popular magazines. This chapter,
in other words, builds on the assumption that novel strains of
aestheticised objectification are worthy subjects of investigation
because of their stereotypical representation of gender.
2. Gentlemen's pornography
In the nineteenth century, Alphonse de Lamartine commented: ‘One
feels, one knows, one lives and at need, one dies for one's cause, but
one cannot name it. It is the problem of this time to classify things
and men... The world has jumbled its catalogue’. 9 Into the ‘jumbled
catalogue’ of visual rhetoric this article introduces yet another tag,
namely ‘gentlemen's pornography’. It is an awkward, ambivalent
phrase that is an inadequate signifier for the irony that defines this
taxonomy, but it is nevertheless useful in the absence of a more
erudite (or politically correct) one. Gentlemen's pornography is a
7 S Couves, personal interview (2002).
8
L Mulvey Visual and other pleasures (1989).
9 N Harris Beliefs in society (1968) 24.