OBJECTIFYING MEN?

OBJECTIFYING MEN?

(The one assignment I really enjoyed writing last semester)

I have often wondered why there are hardly any paintings of nude men, (only Michelangelo’s David stands tall and sexualised) or any Kingfisher calendars with men in bathing suits on exotic beaches. I have contemplated on shooting one such calendar myself. This line of thought has led me to the question: what happens when men are objectified? Is there a homology between women’s objectification and men’s objectification? To look at this question I will take recourse to the work done by Susan Bordo, John Berger and Laura Mulvey and then analyse a film to see how it applies.
Susan Bordo in The Male Body (1999) has written about the representation of the male body in public and private. Analysing Hollywood movies during the sixties, she sees how men are represented on screen. Writing about the ‘beauty’ of the male body, she borrows from the gay theorist Ron Long in distinguishing between the Schwarzenegger type of body and the lean, athletic kind. The former bodies “seem to be surrogate penises- with nowhere to go and nothing to do but stand there and looking massive” while the leaner variety “seem designed for movement, for sex” (Bordo 171).
Writing about men and women on display, Bordo maintains that men are constructed in the manner that they “are not supposed to enjoy being surveyed... its feminine to be on display” (173). How then would we explain those umpteen ads with near nude men, or for that matter the very Gucci underwear ad which Bordo mentions which uncovers a man’s buttocks? Commenting on this ad Bordo states that “women aren’t used to seeing naked men frankly portrayed as ‘objects’ of a sexual gaze” (177). A study done on a series of men and women, who were shown nude pictures of men and women, concludes that women were less erotically aroused by the male nudes than men were seeing the female nudes. Bordo problematises this assumption saying that erotic arousal is subjective and that responses can be learned and are culturally specific.
John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1977) elucidates on how we see images, especially those of women. We never merely look at things, there is always a relation between what ourselves and what we look at and the way we see things. Talking about how we look at ourselves, Berger makes a distinction between how men look and women look. The male gaze has power, while the
woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually almost accompanied by her own image of herself... from earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. So she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. (Berger 46).
What is crucial to a woman is how others see her. Her self-importance lies in the appreciation by another. This is what Berger maintains to be how women are constructed. He is not saying that this is how women should view themselves. Taking his data from paintings and popular visual culture such as advertisements, Berger draws these conclusions of his.
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at... The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight (Berger 47).
Looking at European oil paintings, Berger notes that paintings with nude women holding paintings in their hands condemn women for being vain and naked, while the spectator enjoys her nakedness. But the mirror plays another function. “It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight” (51). Talking about European paintings with supine naked women, Berger comments how women are seen as passive sexual beings, whose sexuality is not for themselves but for the spectator. The woman, painted without any hair (a site of passion and sexuality) is denied all sexuality of her own. Her sexuality is all for the male viewer. Berger compares this with Indian, Persian and other Eastern art forms where the woman is as active in making love as the man is. Commenting on the similarity between advertisements and oil paintings, Berger notes that the nude women look directly at the spectator. “It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man whom she imagines looking at her- although she doesn’t know him. She is offering up her femininity as the surveyed” (Berger 55). Even when there is a male lover in the frame, her gaze is always directed towards the male spectator to whom she ‘belongs’.
By this Berger is elucidating on the male gaze and how the woman in the paintings, in advertisements or on screen is objectified as a person to enhance and cater to male sexuality. In this the woman’s gaze is also denied agency in that she can look only at herself through the man’s eyes, in that she can look at herself only as the male surveyor.
Laura Mulvey in her famous article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema follows Berger’s notions of the woman as image and he man as bearer of the look. She analyses movies to see the concept of fetishism, and how the male viewer in the audience identifies with the hero to render the woman the object of desire: the pleasure of seeing the human form, the female form, scopophilia. Mulvey takes recourse to psychoanalysis to analyse the films.
Taking these categories of the way women and men are seen in visual spheres, what can we say about the objectification of men? Let me take a film as an instance.
Dostana (2008), a film in Hindi directed by Tarun Mansukhani starring Abhisheka Bachchan as Sameer, a male nurse, John Abraham as Kunal, a fashion photographer and Priyanka Chopra as Neha, a 27 year old woman working at a fashion magazine, is about Sameer and Kunal who to get residence status in the US, register as a gay couple. They take up residence with Neha, who lives with her aunt. Falling in love with her, they play the gay couple and yet try to woo Neha, who believes them to be her best friends. Neha meanwhile falls in love with her new boss Abhimanyu Singh. To win Neha, Sameer and Kunal try to impress her and put Singh down. What ensues is a series of comic situations. In the end they declare their love for her, but she only remains their best friend.
This film has a light hearted take on homosexuality[i]. But at the same time what is interesting for us is how the male body is objectified in this film. The toned, six pack, muscular body of John Abraham is seen in the beginning scenes in just an underwear which is about to slip off, revealing more than it should. The camera travels during another song sequence over his muscular chest, his narrow waist and his big biceps just like it would over a woman’s body. We often see him without his shirt, and even when he wears a t-shirt (which is often sleeveless to show the biceps), the bulge of the biceps and the enlarged chest is visible through the fabric. There are beach scenes where he is seen running in a swim suit. His eye candy figure has the proportions of the current normative male body with gym toned, hairless, muscular and tall with fair smooth skin. Gone is the hairy chest and limp arms figure of Anil Kapoor, or the round figure of Shammi Kapoor. It is not a coincidence either that John Abraham is also the endorser for male fairness cream advertisements. Yet, he is neither the Schwarzenegger type nor the lean, athletic kind. He is not the action man of James Bond, rather he fits into the metrosexual man category who preens and poses. At the same time Abraham is constructed as the normative and hegemonic male in opposition to the bulky (read not toned body), hairy yet feminine figure of Abhishek Bachchan which presents the subordinate masculinity.
The figure of John Abraham when it reaches objectification also tends to approximate the female figure. There are certain points of similarity: for instance the absence of clothes- the near nude status (as opposed to naked a la Berger), the absence of hair, the smoothness of the skin, the direct gaze at the audience (which is there in any of the posters of the movie). His pose in the posters are also inviting like those described by Berger for women in advertisements. This absence of hair, clothes, is there a certain note of castration which ensues when men reach objectification level? Does it mean that a male figure which is objectified loses its power and domination, its penis metaphorically, all the time being transformed into a sexual object for women to look at? Or is it because the men are gay that their subordinate masculinity is making them lose their power and domination?
How then do we see the figure of John Abraham? Is there a female gaze in Dostana? Can there be a female gaze at all, in the sense can there be an agency of the female gaze which is not informed by the norms of the male gaze? Can women stop seeing like men do, can there be a subversion of seeing like a man? When the male body is objectified, is it done by adopting the same principles that men adopt when objectifying women? Can there be a female way of seeing?
The techniques used to objectify the male figure- camera movements, near nudity- are the same in women as well as men. The figures of the men stare at the audience. They are portrayed as sexual objects. But there doesn’t seem to be a correspondence between the way men are viewed and the way men view themselves. There is no surveyor and surveyed duality inside the male sex object. Nor does the man ‘belong’ to the female viewer. The objectification of the male body seems to be more of a narcissist activity. But then how do we see this symbolic castration in terms of the lacks mentioned earlier? Is there really as loss of power when men are objectified?
Objectified women are seen to be desirable. Are powerless objectified men equally desirable? Does the objectified male still retain his status of hegemonic masculinity? Coming back to the movie, it is the hero and the desirable male who gets the woman as the reward. Neither Bachchan’s nor Abraham’s character get Chopra’s character in the end. It is the regular, normative, heterosexual male (though the other two are also heterosexual) who gets the woman. If we follow this logic, then the objectified John Abraham slips from his hegemonic position since he does not have any sexual access (nor potential to have access) to the woman.
Is it time then, as Bordo writes in her reading of a Calvin Klein advertisement (which depicts a bare-chested man leaning against a wall, looking at the audience, with the copy saying ‘take me’) for the man to escape from the burden of pursuing, of having the pleasure of “feeling one’s body caressed by another’s eyes” (190)? Is the figure of Abraham up for grabs and to be looked at, as an escape from the previous active man figure? Is there then a homology between women’s objectification and men’s objectification? We can say that there is a partial homology, especially in the case where the man is leaving behind his power status to want to escape and to occupy the position of looked-at-ness. But if one looks for a one to one correspondence between the way women are perceived (in the sense that Berger describes it) and men are seen, then the homology breaks down since such notions as surveyor surveyed are not applicable to male objectification. Thus to answer the question posed at the beginning, one can say that the homology between women’s and men’s objectification is partial.

References
Berger, John. 1977. Ways of Seeing. London, BBC and Penguin Books.
Bordo, Susan.1999. The Male Body. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
[i] I will not look at the homosexual aspect of the film. That would be another paper.