The last of the book reviews! Actual content shall commence forthwith!
Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain As Redemptive Figure is Gender Theory. It has that trait Gender Theory generally has, where about half the time you’re glaring at it going “okay, what the fuck are you even talking about, that makes no sense whatsoever” and half the time you have to make off with their ideas and mate them with other people’s and end up coming up with a horrific idea hybrid no one involved would actually recognize.
Also, fair warning: there is Freud. Honestly, fuck Freud. People who are generally sensible discuss Freud and instantly become idiots; people who are already somewhat disconnected from reality become completely incoherent. I kind of skipped over the Freud chapter, but as far as I can tell it was about Oedipal complexes and castration and sadomasochism and fetishism, although it seems to me Freud ought to have consulted some actual sadomasochists or fetishists before he came up with unwarranted and inaccurate generalizations about our experiences. (Raise your hand, shoe fetishists, if you like shoes because you’re freaked out that cis women don’t have penises! Thought so.)
You know, if Freud was right re: the whole men freaked out that most women have vaginas thing, you’d think that you’d see trans women being considered as universally the most sexysex and all those frat boys instead of making stupid “trap” jokes would be like “fuck yeah! It is a woman, AND I don’t have to cope with my castration anxiety!”
Anyway! This is not a review of Freud, mostly because I would refuse to read that book, because Freud sucks. Seriously, I have dropped classes because Freud was on the syllabus.
The recurring motif of the book is the theme of the crucifixion and different perspectives on Jesus’s sacrifice. Hence the title: Ecce Homo, or Behold the Man, is the Latin translation of Pontius Pilate’s words when he presented Jesus, scourged and crowned with thorns, to the crowd. The author’s thesis is, as far as I can tell, that the male-body-in-pain, as depicted in art and myth, serves as an almost religious, erotic sacrifice that elevates the viewer. Throughout the book, they negotiate the complications of eroticism, sacrifice, and transcendence in discussing All Of The Art.
My favorite bit of the book was the first chapter, which discussed the action movie (and The Passion of the Christ, which it argues fairly convincingly is an action movie in structure). Their thesis is that the action movie lingers over the conventionally attractive male body– arms and legs and zero-body-fat chests, youth and hairlessness and muscles, muscles, muscles. Certainly, action movie heroes quite often tend to lose their shirts; the plotlines generally highlight the male body’s ability to cope with pain, suffering, and violence. The overarching question of most action movies is “will the hero prove his manhood by surviving?”– that is, through his ability to endure pain.
Male pain in the action movie is also fundamentally redemptive: the men endure pain, which enables them not only to defeat the villains but to take revenge on them. In exchange for surviving an increasingly ludicrous number of henchpeople, robots, explosions, and mysteriously nuclear-bomb-proof fridges, the action hero is able to mow down his enemies, thus not simply winning but also destroying the root of evil in the fictional world. (Or at least until the sequel, anyway.)
I think a weakness in this section is that it ignores the reality of female desire. I mean, Hugh Jackman’s propensity to lose his shirt is pretty clearly directed at the heterosexual female demographic. A lot of more modern action movies are fairly clearly directed at the female gaze; in fact, I was a little uncomfortable at some points in (say) X-Men First Class, because of how obviously the film was made out of Fangirl Id. (Look, even that asshole Freud made up some good words sometimes.) I think there’s a somewhat distressing tendency to assume that shirtless men are necessarily homoerotic, which just isn’t true.
Speaking of homoeroticism, my other favorite chapter was about the works of Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer who concentrated heavily on gay male BDSM. I’m a fan of Mapplethorpe, even if I usually think of him as That Dude Patti Smith Was In Love With Once: his pictures of kinky men are well-shot, well-composed, often hot, and quite human; the people in them strike me as real people, and not objectified kinky people who are OMG SO TRANSGRESSIVE. (You can see a very, very NSFW sample of his works here.)
The author theorizes that Mapplethorpe’s big thing is being honest: a fuckton of Great Art is masochistic and erotic (ask any Catholic teenager who got off on St. Sebastian), Mapplethorpe is just the one who is willing not to draw a veil over it. He confronts the viewer by depicting the male body as attractive (which is extremely challenging to the male gaze and the Myth of Men Not Being Hot) and pain as being pleasurable (which is challenging to pretty much everyone except masochists, and even us sometimes). His artwork exaggerates to the point of parody racial and gender fantasies and shows that they are, well, fantasies. Through the emphasized masculinity and emphasized pain of his subjects, Mapplethorpe points out that masculinity is fundamentally artificial.
The male-body-in-pain challenges ideas of hegemonic masculinity: where hegemonic masculinity requires that a man eternally have power, the male-body-in-pain is, by definition, weak. Paradoxically, that’s the source of its strength. Ecce Homo examines how various artworks negotiate the male-body-in-pain and cope with both making it masculine and highlighting the fundamental unmasculinity of it all. It’s cool. If you like gender theory and don’t mind Freud, check it out.
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Intriguing — I’m thinking about Die Hard, which is totally a “survive your pain while shirtless” kinda movie.
Oh hello there 19th slash early 20th Century Psychiatry, what was that? You weren’t well established yet with the codes of practice we associate with the modern practice of it?
Oh so we should keep bashing Freud just because some of his ideas reflected the limited pool of knowledge and paradigm of the time, even though some of those concepts have been made immortal.
Well I guess we’ll just go back to reflexively hating Freud, because that’s what the cool kids do.
@IDiom: I recognize that freud was in a new field, but his tendency to just decide things as True For All People was a questionable method even at the turn of the century. And love him or hate him, many of his ideas are incorrect. I give him credit for getting the ball rolling in psychoanalysis, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth the time to read his ridiculous body of work (since that’s not my thing, I mean. By all means, read Freud if that’s what you like).
“where hegemonic masculinity requires that a man eternally have power, the male-body-in-pain is, by definition, weak.”
Eh, not seeing it. The ability to endure pain without complaint, to “suck it up and be a man”, is an important part of hegemonic masculinity. Now, I haven’t read it, but going by your description, it sure sounds like “male-body-in-pain” as expressed in eg, action movies, is reinforcing, not challenging, hegemonic masculinity. The man suffers injury, but does not complain or withdraw from his task, and thereby proves his masculinity.
I think the semi-naked men in action movies are MUCH more of a male power fantasy thing than a “female gaze” thing. Action movies being famously targeted at men, and all.
Sure, the whole “shirtless Hugh Jackman” bit is a *bonus* for women who find men attractive (which is a much wider category than just the “heterosexual female demographic”!); but I’d say it’s more a side effect than the central concern of the filmmakers.
http://thegamesofchance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/feature-sexism-in-character-design.html <– a pretty good article on male power fantasies in videogame character design. Illustrates the point nicely.
As an exercise, try and imagine what a male actor in an action movie made to cater to the "female gaze" would look like on a poster for said hypothetical movie, which would never get made because hahaha, what studio is going to risk millions of dollars making a film in a genre that has been marketed at men, overwhelmingly men, for decades and decades? Would this hypothetical poster look anything like male action stars as they are usually portrayed in action films (say, Arnie in Predator, JCVD in Universal Soldier, Stallone in Rambo…)? I don't think so.
So, yeah, I found your premise unconvincing and illogical.
@Jo: I think the Marvel movies are actually pretty damn female-gaze friendly. I dare you to say with a straight face that Thor was made for hetero men and no one else. I dare you.
“male-body-in-pain” full stop isn’t the masuline ideal. If your looking at stoicism, enduring pain is part of being virtuous i.e. manly, but the goal is to dominate and protect. Also, our ideas about the kind of bodies straight men in the West should have is heavily influenced by cultures and artists that also found male bodies erotic. You can almost always satisfy the female gaze and the male power fantasy at the same time. The tension is in how blatant you want to make the homoeroticism. One tool you have is to make the male hyperdominant.
I have abandoned thousands of “‘re”s in my abuse of the English language.
@Matthew Swank
“…but the goal is to dominate and protect.”
Well, yes, those are the goals that the ‘ideal’ male endures pain in order to achieve. In fact, that’s pretty much the prototypical action movie: a man, despite suffering pain, perseveres to dominate and protect. But the pain, and the appropriately masculine response to the pain, is very much a part of the ideal.
@L
Well, from what I remember of Thor (which is a bit fuzzy ‘cos we drank rather a lot of beer while watching it because jaysus that was a terrible film!), I’d say – still – any benefits to the “female gaze” accruing from that film were still, totally, a side effect of Thor being a male power fantasy.
In fact, I find the very term “female gaze” pretty ridiculous and redundant, given the power differentials between men and women which exist in patriarchal culture, and which are reinforced a million million times a day by the mainstream media. Action stars (male ones) are usually attractive, because filmmakers understand the desires of their – mainly male – audiences. Ever heard the phrase, “men want to be him, women want to be with him”? I’d argue that the second part of that is far less important than the first, and is indeed reinforcing the male power fantasy, part of which is that the male action star is effortlessly sexually appealing to women.
Your oh-so-subtle attempt to make a false equivalence between the “male gaze” and the “female gaze” is actually pretty ignorant, not to mention insulting. I refer you to “The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck”: http://www.shakesville.com/2009/08/terrible-bargain-we-have-regretfully.html
From that link:
“There are the persistent, tiresome pronouncements of similitude between men’s and women’s experiences, the belligerent insistence that handsome men are objectified by women, too! that women pinch men’s butts sometimes, too! that men are expected to look a certain way at work, too! that women rape, too! and other equivalencies that conveniently and stupidly ignore institutional inequities that mean X rarely equals Y. And there are the long-suffering groans that meet any attempt to contextualize sexism and refute the idea that such indignities, though grim they all may be, are not necessarily equally oppressive.”
In the economy of the typical action film, female-coded bodies are objects of exchange passed around between the male protagonists. The heroes are constructed primarily to appeal to men as fulfillments of typical patriarchy-approved power fantasies (“You are strong! You are fearless! You are a free agent! Women find you attractive!”).
There is absolutely room to discuss the problems that male power fantasies – as constructed in mainstream action films – cause to the psyches of boys and men. This is probably even a good place to do it! But ascribing the damage and the aftereffects of such power fantasies to that mythical beast, the “female gaze”, is laughable and unrealistic. It veers uncomfortably close to MRA-style point missing, where they find an instance where Patriarchy Really Honestly Does Hurt Men, Too, and they blame those eeeeevil womenz for it rather than the true culprit, i.e. the aforementioned patriarchy.
I hope my argument is a little clearer, now. And let me reiterate that an action film which was designed PRIMARILY to appeal to some sort of idea of a “female gaze” would bomb, no question.
@Jo: Twilight, ’nuff said
I’d generally agree though that men aren’t objectified in terms of nekkid bodies. Where men are objects of the female gaze in films they’re usually buying something (Pretty Woman).
“In the economy of the typical action film, female-coded bodies are objects of exchange passed around between the male protagonists. ”
In the economy of the typical romance film, male-coded bodies are objects of providership to be passed around between the female protagonists.
Wee, can we play some more?
We don’t live in a patriarchy, or if we do, it’s not actually beneficial to most men. Unless you count getting trampled by the system *and being told you should like it dammit* or else you’re a pansy…well I don’t see that as a positive. NO ONE cares about violence against men, except in as much as it affects the national economy and/or the national image abroad. No one wants to protect men from violence, from poverty, from being destitute, from being sick, from themselves when mentally ill. A man who doesn’t provide is better off dead according to society…and you tell me it’s a benefit to be male. Let me laugh. It’s a benefit for GEORGE CLOONEY to be male. For GEORGE BUSH, for OBAMA…but not normal Joe Average.
@Schala:
If you deny the existence of patriarchy in Western society, there’s no way I can realistically have a productive discussion with you, as we can’t establish a common ground. We most certainly do live in a patriarchy, and it definitely Hurts Men Too, but it inarguably Hurts Women More. Hence feminism. (And you’re wrong about men in rom coms, too; they’re treated with respect, allowed independence, and given agency, unlike the “love interests” in your typical action flick, who are there as ‘rewards’ for the male protagonist.)
@Peter:
I only saw bits of the first one with a Rifftrax on, but it didn’t feature (m)any male bodies in pain IIRC – which is, after all, the point of this post. But you’re right that it does showcase the physical beauty of its male leads – and just look at the vitriol it received as a result from every corner of the nerdiverse, while a soaped-up Megan Fox washing a car in Transformers is completely unremarkable…
Twilight isn’t exactly an action film!
I did a bit of reading on the Female Gaze, and found this good article (and good discussion thread) on the topic:
http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2010/06/061410defining_the_female_gaze.html
The piece pretty much argues what I have argued, that the overwhelming cultural heft resides with the male gaze, which is more or less unavoidable. The article gives some examples of films made from a more “female gaze”-y standpoint, but they are fairly isolated examples in a sea of objectified female bodies served up for the assumed male, hetero/bi (although bi men are catered to more as a side effect than as a primary target) viewer’s pleasure. To attempt to equate the two is a false equivalency. To argue that any mainstream action film uses any form of “female gaze” is – frankly – utter BS. Female visual pleasure derived from Arnie flexing his muscles is an unintended and unimportant side effect of the male power fantasy that Arnie films (his classic action films, anyway) propagate and popularise.
Addendum/correction to the above: Having not seen “Transformers”, I mixed up the story about Megan Fox washing Michael Bay’s Ferrari to audition for the role with a scene from the film. Apologies – although jeeeez what a skeezy thing for him to make her do. Washing a car – what a test of her acting abilities. So instead of Megan Fox washing a car, please replace with Jennifer Garner in “Elektra” (and her oh-so-practical outfits – a silk bustier which provides no protection whatsoever!), Erika Eleniak emerging from the cake in “Under Siege”, Jessica Biel in the shower in “Blade: Trinity”, and basically all of “Sucker Punch”. Thanks!
@Jo: I read that Shakesville article a way long time ago, and my point still stands. Granted, there are probably some guys out there was would have loved to have been Thor in that movie, just as there are actually tons of women who would have loved to have been Baby Doll from Suckerpunch, but I didn’t get any of the vibes from it that you did. The male character doesn’t have to be reduced to an object of desire in order for it to be female-friendly. Natalie Portman’s character (whatever the hell her name was) doesn’t have to be the next Ripley for it to be a female-gazey action film. Basically every shot of Thor in that movie was designed with the female (and gay male) audience in mind. The guy winds up shirtless in practically half the scenes that have nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with building intimacy with the love interest.
And yeah, blah blah blah patriarchy, it exists, but female gaze also exists. Sorry to burst your bubble. It’s absolutely ludicrous to think otherwise, really– thanks for denying the existence of half of the creative works of women that have ever been made ever.
“But you’re right that it does showcase the physical beauty of its male leads – and just look at the vitriol it received as a result from every corner of the nerdiverse, while a soaped-up Megan Fox washing a car in Transformers is completely unremarkable…”
There are plenty of feminists who are willing to criticise the objectification of women. If you compare the number of people who criticise one thing with the number of those same people who critizise something else then of course the former will be the bigger group, but it isn’t an honest comparison
Hahahaha, what? No, really, what? I’m “denying the existence of half of the creative works of women that have ever been made ever” because… nope, don’t follow at all. And how patronising of you that you assert that half of all “creative works” by women are examples of the (assumed heterosexual) “female gaze” – that half of all *creative works* (not just mainstream action films, no sirree!) by women sexualise and objectify men. WTF?
Please can I reiterate that we’re discussing mainstream action films here? Quoting myself: “In fact, I find the very term “female gaze” pretty ridiculous and redundant, given the power differentials between men and women which exist in patriarchal culture, and which are reinforced a million million times a day by the mainstream media. … But ascribing the damage and the aftereffects of such power fantasies to that mythical beast, the “female gaze”, is laughable and unrealistic” – I probably shouldn’t have used the adjective “mythical” in that last sentence, but otherwise, unless you lack basic reading comprehension, I think my base meaning is pretty clear: if the “female gaze” can be said to exist in the same way the male gaze demonstrably does, in no way can it be said to cause the same amount of damage (to women AND to men) as the male gaze, and male power fantasies. And in no way do makers of mainstream action films care PRIMARILY about the “female gaze” – they’re MUCH more concerned with presenting their presumed MALE viewers with a MALE POWER FANTASY. If women get visual pleasure from portrayals of such male power fantasies, great – but it’s a side-effect, and certainly NOT the main concern of the filmmakers.
You keep referring to “Thor”, like it’s the only action film that matters. From what I remember of the film (as I said, I was prettttttty tipsy when I watched it!), I recall Thor wearing his fancy armour and his big red cloak and doing lots of fighting more than anything – and Google Image Search results for “Thor 2011 movie” seem to agree with me.
Counterpoint to your tiresome obsession with “Thor”:
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/11/27/what-if-the-male-avengers-posed-like-the-female-one/
Aaaand with that, I’m done.
“@Schala:
If you deny the existence of patriarchy in Western society, there’s no way I can realistically have a productive discussion with you, as we can’t establish a common ground. We most certainly do live in a patriarchy, and it definitely Hurts Men Too, but it inarguably Hurts Women More. Hence feminism.”
You do know that saying women are hurt more/worse, and denying that men are hurt AT ALL, is also part of this society you call patriarchal and this DESPITE the evidence.
VAWA will pass like butter, because “Let’s protect women!” is a good patriarchy motto. “Let’s protect men too!” or even “at all!” wouldn’t EVER pass, apparently. The patriarchy is way too concerned with squashing those men into oblivion to care about their pleas for help. Hence suicide stats (and those work in places where owning a gun is a process most wouldn’t go through – like say, Canada – lethal means regardless of gun access, because a cry for help won’t be heard).
People who are generally sensible discuss Freud and instantly become idiots;
Gee thanks. ((scribbling hasty notes, suddenly figures out why the college kids have always dissed me)))
Do I have to explain Freud’s influence on the 20th century? (Is this a passe argument now, or do you really not know?) I bet you anything, most people have heard of Freud and not Mapplethorpe. (But then, they aren’t trendy folks, so fuck them.)
WE: but that doesn’t mean it’s worth the time to read his ridiculous body of work
Well, for some of us, that was how we first became educated and learned about philosophy and other things. To understand Freud is to understand much of Western Civ.
Not everybody is a hip, cool college student. Really. Stop chastising us for not having your sensibility and seeing how **obvious** your cool sensibility is and how dumb people are for not agreeing with you.
Thor, worth discussing, Freud, total shit. Got it. (shakes head in amazement) As Joey Ramone famously said, things sure have changed since I got kicked out of high school.
To be fair, Thor is also total shit.