viz. - sexuality

Calendar Boys, Beefcake Girls: Photographing the Bodies We Want

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

My favorite way to take a break from dissertation research is to visit Facebook. Some days, I’m lucky enough to be entertained by my friends, as when Melanie Haupt posted a provocative link to an article about male pin-ups.

As linked by websites like The Huffington Post, The Daily Dish, and Jezebel, photographer Rion Sabean has captured a series of men in pin-up poses similar to those captured by photographers like Alberto Vargas and models like Bettie Page. The pin-up, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a photograph or poster of a glamorous or attractive person.” However, pin-ups historically have been women, and women engaged in poses like the one below.

Image Credit: Fine Books and Collections

Sabean’s intent appears to have been to play with the gender roles here by making men adopt these kinds of poses, as he said in an interview with Jezebel:

"The imagery of showcasing the feminine/masculine ideals in one single image just struck me as something that could really work. Hilariously enough, and beyond my fascination with gender binaries and their inherent nature to be completely incomprehensible to me, I first began tinkering with the idea, because I will at any given moment strike very specific poses that would be defined as feminine by society; more specifically, the pointed toe. Haha. From there, it was completely obvious that pin-ups and all the associations with them would be the right choice in moving forward."

Comparing the images above already reveals similarities; both guy and gal have pursed lips and are posed in ways which are probably uncomfortable to hold but which highlight aspects of the physical form like the shapely leg and curvy body. The sporty paraphernalia in each scene only contrasts the deliberately inactive pointing fingers and splayed hands. Another group of images, this time in nearly the same pose, points out what Melanie acknowledged: these poses are very ridiculous and not a little degrading.

Image Credit: Acidcow.com / Rion Sabean

In these pictures again we see the juxtaposition of the masculine objects (the shovel, the military hat) and the highly feminized pose. The placement of the hands not only allows the subject to stay nearly vertical but also draws attention to the model’s assets. The reveal of undergarments (the underwear, the stockings) tantalizes the viewer. While these images serve to comically point out the problematics of the pin-up pose, I find myself as a viewer wondering if these can be read in a different way—can these men be sexy, too? Or can we find poses for women that wouldn’t be degrading?

To keep thinking about the sexualized posed body, I’d like to think about two other image collections I’ve seen this last week: the Men of the Stacks calendar and ESPN The Magazine’s just-released Body Issue.

Image Credit: The Men of the Stacks

In the case of the Men of the Stacks calendar, these gentlemen have collected together to rebrand the idea of the librarian:

"We know what people think: Dewey, glasses, shushing, books, hairbuns, Party Girl and card catalogs. Yes, we know what people think. We know that the American library profession is approximately 80% White and 72% female; and we know that tens of thousands of librarians are expected to reach age 65 in the next 5 years. We also know that this is not us.
"There is an entire population of professional librarians out there who disagree with the way the library profession is perceived in contemporary media outlets and in the historical consciousness of the American mind. Different people and different associations will use different means to try to change those perceptions. This is ours."

While not all of the photographs are as revealing as Mr. January’s, several of them use shirtless (or shirtless in aprons) men to spice up visuals of a profession whose sexualization in pornography stands in stark contrast to how it is perceived in popular culture. While the various poses—doing yoga, on a beach, cooking—attempt to make the idea of the male librarian as a lived experience palpable to the viewer, the fact that several pictures feature shirtless men makes it very similar to a straight beefcake calendar like the yearly NYFD Calendar of Heroes, which features actual New York firemen posed provocatively with hoses and other paraphernalia, or even the beefcake magazines of the 40s-60s. In other words, if the female form has frequently been sexualized by artful poses, the male has experienced the same treatment, though one with more arm-flexing.

Image Credit: ESPN The Magazine

However, if both The Men of the Stacks at Sabean’s Man-Ups are engaging in social commentary, ESPN the Magazine’s Body Issue appears to be a marketing ploy. While Ryan Kesler here is posed next to a block of ice to nod to his sport, this pose does more to show off his physique than his athletic skills. On the other side, Julie Chu's pose harkens less to the pinup and more to Greek statuary.

Image Credit: ESPN The Magazine

While this pose hints at her feminine features, it's also fairly aggressive—the eye wanders as much to her muscular arms as the breasts her pose conceals. The tensed shoulder and stomach also make it clear that what is (at least nominally) on display here is her strength. Julie Chu isn’t a pin-up, she's a warrior. However, it’s also legitimate to ask if we can see a naked female form without sexualizing it. The tagline, "Bodies We Want," can be read ambiguously either as the desire to have a muscular physique, or to have a partner so built.

As I’m thinking about these different poses together, I'm left questioning what kinds of viewers are being imagined here. ESPN the Magazine clearly offers some titillating interest for a straight male readership, but the photographs of individuals like Apolo Ohno and José Reyes are either intended for a gay male readership, or a straight female one. The audience for the Man-Ups is one that knows and has reflected on the original pin-ups that have inspired the poses; it’s an audience who gets the joke and can return the wink. However, can man-ups be as sexy as these other poses? If we understand the female body to be always sexualized, is there room for a female gaze to re-read these poses?

Of course, I don’t want to argue that women’s sexuality looks any different from men’s sexuality. I remember here the xkcd cartoon that responded to the Porn for Women book, where the female character asserts: “I wanted to clarify: in my porn, people fuck.” Women or men can be titillated by all sorts of different things, and we can’t essentialize that. Sexy is definitely in the eye—or the brain—of the beholder. Perhaps I just want to invite further discussion considering how we think or choose to think about the gendered body in photography. Theory has much to say about the power of the subject viewing the object/body—but how are the powers of the viewer limited by hegemonies? And how can we talk about bodies while allowing and acknowledging all various forms of sexuality that might approach them?

Girls Just Want to Party in the USA (and Boys, Too!)

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:21:09 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

As everyone reading this blog knows, I love random bits and pieces of pop culture. Jezebel is one of the websites I visit to indulge this love, and they did not let me down last week. I’ve been saving this since then, and though I know it may be a bit late to write on this, I couldn’t resist bringing this to everyone’s attention as a kind of alternative archive in its own right.

Marisa Meltzer, in a blog post called “Video Vixens: Spice Boys and Barbie Men,” groups together several YouTube clips that feature young men lip-synching to songs made by women. Meltzer wrote a book called Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, which claims that bands like the Spice Girls helped popularize the empowering message of riot grrrls for both men and women. Speaking of clips that include covers of artists like Shakira, Taylor Swift, and Aqua, she writes:

There's something very joyous and celebratory about girlhood in all of these songs. They can express, in a kind of candy-colored way, excitement, heartache, and pride of being a girl. I don't think boys who film themselves lipsynching are making fun of us girls, though. I think this is a way of expressing some kind of homage to us and our music. I'm not sure there's an equivalent for boys—that is, music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy, which is perhaps why so many guys are so happy to post themselves singing along.

Watching the clip of the young men lip-synching to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” does make me feel quite a bit of joy:

However, I’m not sure I can totally accept Meltzer’s reading here. Homage may be a part of the Taylor Swift cover, for example, but this version isn’t acknowledging Lauper’s popular song (and its own memorable video) so much as re-envisioning it. The shirtless male bodies rolling around in the bed enact a kind of queer performance of which the gay icon Lauper would probably approve. We as an audience see the singer hump a car and a friend put a whole banana in his mouth to perform a sexuality that the song insists is for “girls,” but which the male performers co-opt for themselves. The men here look manly, but not manly in the heterosexual way of the Abercrombie-attired boys who lipsync and dance their way through Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”

The same queer aesthetic seems to be part of the semi-famous lip-synch cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” which Meltzer did not include in her post:

These men here lay on the beach here in their highly colored bathing trunks to purposefully camp up their performance of the Disney teen’s song. As they try to surf in their blow-up swimming pool while wearing colorful Ray-Bans, I can’t help but want to take part in their fun. The fact that they tag it as “Party in the FIP” makes the queer connection explicit (as Fire Island is a notorious gay vacation spot) as well as its intent to be a transformative performance.

The homemade aesthetic that these videos share, whether filmed on Flip cameras or in front of iMacs, incorporates a call for authenticity of a particular kind. Each of these artists attempts to construct himself for his YouTube audiences by following the common models of other viral videos, but in these works each works to condition that performance through girl’s pop music. This isn’t to say that this qualifies the kind of masculinity, but draws our attention to the process of its construction in lo-fi and high-fi ways.

I can agree with Meltzer that this is all in good fun, but this seems to be more than just tribute. There may not be “music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy,” but it’s not like popular culture lacks an attention to teen boys (see: Harry Potter). These clips instead seem to be doing another kind of cultural work, hopefully one in which we can all join in.

For Your Oral-tainment or Not?: The Politics of Adam Lambert’s AMA Performance

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:39:58 +0000

Image Credit: Towleroad

H/T: Noel Radley

While usually I’m good at keeping up on my pop culture news, I’m grateful to Noel for giving me a tip about American Idol star Adam Lambert’s performance at the American Music Awards of his new song “For Your Entertainment.” As can be seen in the above image, Lambert aggressively performed his homosexuality in the number, including simulated oral sex, men on leashes, and an unplanned make-out session with one of the members of his band.

(I’m including a link to the video, with apologies if it’s pulled from YouTube before you can view it.)

While Lambert denied any explicit political intent in an interview with CNN after the performance, he did describe “a double standard in the entertainment community … I feel like women performers have been pushing the envelope sexually for the past 20 years. And all of the sudden a male does it and everybody goes, ‘Oh, we can't show that on TV.’ For me, that's a form of discrimination and a double standard.” Certainly a brief search on Google provides evidence for this argument: artists like Janet Jackson and Madonna have engaged in sexy performances of the same kind as Lambert’s. While I’m not trying to suggest that the Madonna-Britney kiss wasn’t controversial—far from it—part of the negative reaction surrounding Lambert’s performance is in all likelihood related to the fact that he is a gay man simulating homosexual acts on broadcast television, where Glee’s Kurt hasn’t even managed to get a boyfriend.

Image Credit: Towleroad

What I find particularly interesting about the performance in terms of defining Lambert as sexual is that it occurs within a larger controversy about how Lambert has not represented his homosexuality. The controversy surrounding his recent photo shoot in Details and his inclusion in the OUT100 have both centered around what has been seen as Lambert’s refusal to be “too gay” in the media. Lambert is involved in constructing a sexualized image for himself, but one whose orientation is unclear. However, as a popular media figure and as a gay man, what is Lambert’s responsibility to perform his sexuality in the public sphere? Does he have the right to claim privacy for his sexuality at the same time as he flaunts sex? Perhaps the AMA performance can be read as a rhetorical reaction to OUT Magazine editor Aaron Hicklin who asked Lambert to follow “a path that’s honest and true” as a gay pioneer—or maybe it’s just only for our entertainment.

One of these things is not like the others

kathrynjeanhamilton — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:23:24 +0000

This photograph ran in a photo essay accompanying a September 12 The New York Times story about Chile's recent "sexual revolution."

The article chronicles the sexual revolution in one of Latin America's most conservative countries by describing, in titillating specificity, a network of urban partiers among Chile's young elite. The Chilean teens attend gatherings at which making out with as many people as possible is the goal. The power of an image is one of the more significant engines driving Chile's sexual explosion. The teenagers, explains the Times, come together because of the social-networking site Fotolog, on which they post provocative photographs of themselves and engage in digital flirtations with their peers. In its online version, the Times ran a photo essay along with the article. Predictably, most of the pictures were somewhat lurid and voyeuristic: close-up shots of writhing teenage bodies, hands, tongues, bellies, legs. This last one, though, was what caught my eye. The photograph provides a visual counterpoint to the liveliness and, one could say, hedonism of the others. A young girl sits in what looks like a kind of antechamber. The room is bathed in red light, and Beethoven looks over her, forebodingly, from the wall behind her. The girl is sitting alone on a couch. Is she stunned? Scared? And what's going on with that floating male head on the right? The red, black, and gold tones, combined with the austere framing of the photograph, create a frightening, almost Gothic, image. A frightened woman awaits her fate. Though the text of the article does not take a stated position on the explosion of teenage sexual activity in Chile, could this photograph be functioning as a kind of warning? And what might it suggest about the dangers of unleashing female sexuality, specifically?