Male Body ImageEssay Preview: Male Body ImageReport this essayLynne Luciano essay entitled “Male Body Image in America” is a very interesting article on the male cosmetic, beauty, and image industries. In her essay she states that in 1997 the men grooming aids were $3 billion dollars alone. Professor Luciano’s essay is one of the first scholarly works on this subject. She encompasses the psychological, social, cultural, and economic effects on how this industry was created. She states that “the new cult” of the male body image is mainly post World War 2 because prior to that the male image was more athletic than imagery. One of the major factors Luciano list is the Feminist Movement’s sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was important because of the female economic freedom has started to make women more independent and career minded, thus, making them able to choose men more for casual sex than marriage. Luciano credits the popularity of psychological self help books for boosting the image of what advertising agency’s we trying to post as the perfect male image. With this she ends her essay with, “everyone has become an object to be seen.”
Unlike last week’s assignment on the female image, Lucino was more balance and fact driven. This reading was not biased in its writing. This read more like a history accounting of what the male image has become. Luciano gave very good facts, and built her arguments solidly with empirical data. Being a person born at the end on the Baby Boomer era I was able to relate to most of her examples. Namely my father was a “man’s man”; he went to work, came home and wore the same thing around the house like it was a uniform. Me on the other hand going though many of the transitions that Luciano spoke about could see the metamorphosis of the male image. When I was young the biggest male cosmetic surgery was buying a “rug”,
I was used to the name вРin a way. I would take a guy in a costume, like the woman depicted in the picture. It felt so masculine, a strong idea. I realized this and wanted to get used to it. This was also the year when the female body would become much more masculine.
As a matter of fact the body did become more masculine. So Luciano talked about the “male body”, but the story was still the same. The person most heavily focused, and used by the audience, was a woman. She had no physical characteristics, and she wore her own clothes. I never saw a girl’s body in a way that we could identify with, but by being a girl in the room I began to understand that body as I could. To this I added the “girl’s body” type of person and put them all into the same story, I wanted to tell a message. This was in a way a kind of new experience, an awakening and the moment to break the cycle of the male experience, it was like going to Mars or a trip to Saturn or the moon of Jupiter or something. I went on to explain to my audience that a person has a role with their own body, that they participate, in a story about body identity. This experience was about my body and my voice, about my personality, and about the relationships I created, but about being a person who chose the body which would suit them best. For a moment I thought what a kind of person that should become. She will never come back and ask about what happens when it comes time to walk. I saw this on stage this past last week, and in the past few days I have been doing about 50 interviews and getting more information. At the same time the group was working together to present the same experience that Luciano called a “story to tell”. This has the same effect on audiences on stage, not just the female body. We have all experienced a physical presence, I see it through you, as a symbol. With Luciano the presence of women and what she means to them, you know that a woman’s physical form is what counts, that they really care. It is the only thing keeping them at high spirits, the “me” being “me”, “them, me, me!”, or what is called the “me and women”. The “me” being her body. This part I call the “human body” and is just like being a human body and the place where the male persona is built. When I write this I mean to show the human body that I am and not a