Bodies That Haunt Us

James Ferris

Susan Bordo. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 358 pages. Bibliography, index. $25.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).

Bodies. Everyone’s got one. And, oh, how we love them: we dress them up, we show them off, we pamper and pleasure them, we worship them in all sorts of ways.

In fact, everyone has more than one body. And, oh, how we hate them: we deny them, we hide them, we discipline them through diet, through exercise, through surgery.

How is it that we each can have more than one body? The simple answer is that we each have not only the flesh, blood, and bone that we inhabit, the body that allows us to exist but limits that existence, but we also have all those bodies that inhabit us: the bodies that we have known and wanted to know, the bodies that we desire to be, to see, to have, to avoid—the bodies that haunt us. Susan Bordo’s book The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private takes an intriguing look at those bodies we carry around with us, in us. Despite its title, Bordo’s book does not look so much at the male body as at how the male body appears (and does not appear) within Western culture, especially in the last half century. Since, as Bordo convincingly argues, how we think about bodies has a great impact on our bodies themselves, this is an excellent perspective to take.

The body is a hot topic in recent years, especially for theory mavens and those who read the literary-critical tea leaves. This is not altogether a good thing for actual bodies, for the theory body is too often tortured and twisted into positions difficult to recognize, let alone realize. But perhaps actual bodies are safer than that, since theory bodies so often do not come close to the blood and bone, cell and organ bodies we all inhabit. The body becomes an idea, a position, a concept rather than a thing. Maybe this is not something to fear, that "the body" is really "this particular culturally situated idea of the body." But it is certainly not something to celebrate, because the further "the body" gets from our guts, the less useful and the less interesting it becomes. Which is a shame, because if we really pay attention to these bags of nerves and corpuscles we move around in, we can learn quite a bit.

Bordo stays closer to the blood and the bone than many. She uses two sets of data in examining her topic: popular culture, particularly movies, ads, and television shows; and her own lived experience of the male body. This is not to suggest that Bordo has lived life as a man; instead, she writes from her experience of male bodies as girl and woman, daughter and lover. That experience, of course, is conditioned and contextualized by culture, and it is culture that most interests Bordo. This should not be surprising, given Bordo’s well-established credentials as a feminist cultural critic, perhaps most notably as the author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. But what is particularly effective, and affecting, is how Bordo uses her own stories to try to understand and explain how men are embodied in our complex and confusing culture.

Bordo frames the book with stories of her father’s bodies: the trim, dashing young man, the plump, balding middle-aged man, the thin and dying old man. Bordo shows a complicated love for the male body and for those who inhabit it, which brings an engaging sweetness to her tangy analysis. So much of the male body is clearly male, Bordo notes, because it is steeped from very early in the hormonal soup that distinguishes male from female. But she still makes the expected move to the crotch. After all, it is the penis that distinguishes men from women, right? Bordo takes issue with such a simplistic, reductive perspective, but she does not neglect the first thing that seems to leap to the cultural mind when the male body is mentioned. The penis looms large, after all: Bordo cites psychological research suggesting that presence of a penis is the definitive clue in assigning gender to sexually ambiguous figures. The first section of the book focuses on "Private Parts," the penis as presence, absence, and symbol in contemporary culture. Bordo assembles an impressive array of evidence. Barbie’s penis-less companion Ken (the Darren Stevens of the doll world), Long Dong Silver from the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, Lorena Bobbitt, and films including The Crying Game and Boogie Nights are some of the cultural artifacts explored.

Bordo is sharply critical of the ways culture has shaped and straitened us, men and women alike. But she never seems to lose her affection for the men so straitened. In fact, Bordo’s examination of the penis in culture led her to an unexpected connection with what men go through. "It may be that this most male of bodily sites—the penis—holds the most promise for a deeper identification between men and women. [Boogie Nights character] Dirk Diggler’s predicament—shame, exhaustion with cultural expectations, the failure of the body to live up to those expectations—these are all experiences a woman can relate to. I have been amazed at how much unexpected kinship I’ve felt with men while writing this book, and how many old myths I have been led to revisit and revise" (34-35).

Chief among those misconceptions is John Gray’s best-selling pop psychology claim that men are from Mars, women from Venus, which she attacks with vigor, with wit, with (of all things) science. A key flaw of so much of our thinking about sex and gender, Bordo argues, is that we have failed to overcome the split between "the sciences" and "the humanities," between a mechanistic biological determinism and a social constructivism so exaggerated as to suggest that the only differences between men and women are socially constructed. Bordo calls for an attention to both biology and culture, calling on us to "recognize that our biological inheritance itself allows for a great deal of creativity and intelligence both in adapting to new environments and in adapting environments to new goals. This means . . . that there are always repertoires of possibilities, never single paths" (263).

Bordo makes clear that our relationships with our bodies are always influenced and directed by culture. For Bordo culture also provides a number of possibilities for enlarging the repertoires of possibilities. African-American and gay cultures have been playing important roles in changing the situation of the male body. As an example, she offers an analysis of the big Hollywood hit My Best Friend’s Wedding which, she argues, "very deliberately means to ‘queer’ representations of gender and cast doubt on the viability or durability of the fifties version of happily-ever-after" (160).

There are two key ways to test a book by a woman about the male body in culture. First, is it consonant with men’s experience of moving through the world in a male body? And, second, does it help me think better about all the layers of meaning assigned to male bodies? The answer to both is Yes. While Bordo’s book is not a complete catalog of male vulnerabilities in contemporary culture, it deals intelligently and sensitively with a host of crucial issues from size (penis and muscle) to the double bind that suggests that men should be virile, lusty "animals," but that they should still be gentlemen. And the book did help me think about the situation of the male body in culture, not only about how some of the pressures on men work, but also how they are perpetuated. The Male Body will not exorcise all the bodies that inhabit and haunt us. But it can help us to see them, to know them better.