The male body Book

The Male Body begins with a moving account of Bordo's memories of her father's body.

After that she charts the changes in culture, especially in the 1990s which have put the male body very much on display. It was written in 2000 and already seems dated. Calvin Klein ads have now been taken over by Armani for example, and the Spawn of Sporno is what we see everywhere we look.

I liked her refs to film in particular with some interesting observations about The Crying Game and Boogie Nights -Dirk Diggler's Dick deconstructed.

But I didn't like her attachment to feminist and 'gay' analysis of men's bodies in culture.

She mentioned my friend and compadre Mark Simpson once briefly, in relation to gay porn. But really the story of the display of the male body in contemporary culture is completely reliant on his theories of metrosexuality to make any sense at all. So without that, Bordo's arguments were incoherent.

www.marksimpson.com

This is an update. Having read Male IMpersonators by Mark Simpson, I think Bordo's The Male Body is a complete rip off of that book. It uses all the same subjects - The Crying Game, Tom of Finland, Gay porn, Calvin Klein, Marky Mark, Bill Clinton, and never references Simpson's work.