The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private

Male bodies in popular culture, especially visual culture. It's commendable that Bordo keeps her primary relation to the male body (love both familial and sexual) in the foreground, but her awed rhapsodizing on the nature of the embodied penis gets really tiring, a little embarrassing, and frustratingly heteronormative. The writing is distinctly aimed at the bestseller crowd, which makes a usually academic topic (gender and embodiment) frankly readable, though she sacrifices nuance to achieve it. The non linear relation between male bodies and masculine identities floats away into an overarching historical narrative where men have become more sexualized while, paradoxically, resisting that vulnerable flavor of objectification visited show more upon women.

I'm probably being a bit harsh, but my final feeling after finishing it, my sense of "the takeaway" is that over here exist men who have men's bodies and, thus, masculine identities, and over there exist women who can relate to all that by loving it, fucking it, or fruitlessly coveting or aping it, but women must of course remain estranged and exotic from its source: dicks.

P.S. The spine of the book is a ruler. That pretty much sums up the "saucy" garbage that coats the interesting stuff. show less

I liked it. It seems that the only thing Americans fear more than a sexually aggressive woman is a naked penis ( especially an erect one ).

I did not know Marlon Brando, the first self-consciously sexual, male sex symbol, wet his jeans and then let them dry while he was wearing them so they would be extra tight. I learned lots of fun facts like that.