Followers

MALE OBJECTIFICATION






I thought I'd share this blog entry that I found on MORPHOSIS's blog:





Maybe it's all the "True Blood" we've
marinated in this summer, but between Eric and Alcide frolicking half-naked on
the small screen, superhero after superhero displaying their superwaxed
superchests, and the increasingly lascivious casting announcements for Steven
Soderbergh's male-stripper movie "Magic Mike", it's time to notice
that we may be entering a new Golden Age in American entertainment : the Golden
Age of Male Objectification.







For decades, while film and television have
gotten progressively racier, the objects of the camera's increasingly lurid
gaze had largely been women. The reasons for this are so unofficially official
they're like unwritten laws, habits that have been codified into "common
sense" even if they don't make much sense : Hollywood's a boys' club and
male audiences want sex and violence, while women want hearts and flowers. So
women are lusted after by the cameras, while audiences looking for a little bit
of dude to ogle had to be content with tame rom-coms, subtext, and the dreaded
"Comedy Penis".





But no more ! The summer of 2011 officially
became the season that the male gaze was reflected back at itself -and with
enthusiasm ! In the summer's superhero movies, a supremely buff body became
part of what made these heroes so super. The "Captain America"
trailer had Dominic Cooper doing the old look-over-the-top-of-my-sunglasses
move to get a load of the newly pumped up Chris Evans. In "Thor", Kat
Dennings's audience-surrogate character spends half the movie talking about how
nutso everything is and the other half pointing out that this blond god from
the heavens is massively pumped. Fourteen years ago, America lost it when
Batman's costume included rubber nipples. Now we've got a Spider-Man whose
costume lifts and separates. 


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