Jon Stratton

This book argues that, during the last half of the nineteenth century, as a result of the increasing scope but diminished visibility of governmental and financial concentrations of power, western society reacted with the "phallicization" of girls' bodies, "fetishization" of the male body, and "spectacularization" of the display of physical objects, principally in the fields of marketing, art, and photography. This thesis is, to me, neither intuitive nor readily understandable. The book's show more arguments are largely couched in Freudian and Marxist terminology. Its leaden prose is dependent on psychobabble and the abstruse terminology of art, photography, and deconstructionist literary criticism. It isn't an inviting book.

All of which is not to say that the book is useless. A great deal of the jargon is frontloaded into the first two chapters, so that individuals used to reading and speaking in English should be able to follow his thinking reasonably well. Many of the issues which he raises are worth pondering even if one doesn't agree with (or totally understand) his conclusions. It's a stretch to call this book an entirely enjoyable read, though. show less