Behold the Man: . . .

Edisol Wayne Dotson,
Behold the Man: The Hype and Selling
of Male Beauty in Media and Culture.
New York: Harrington Park Press, 1999.
ISBN 1-56023-953-0. 169 pages.
$19.95, trade paperback.

Availability: http://www.amazon.com

This is a disappointing book in a number of ways. It argues that men are being victimized by media messages dictating what their physical appearance should be, just as women have been before them. Dotson offers an autobiographical introduction that explains how he realized he was being forced to work out in order to present a certain appearance to the world. He has seen the light -- and this book is the gospel of a new faith. What he preaches against is media images of masculinity, particularly in books, magazines, films, and on TV. I wonder why he didn't investigate the Internet, since that is as important an influence as the ones he treats.

Dotson derives his argument from Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth (1991), which asserts that women are victimized by a patriarchal establishment selling them unnecessary products to enhance their appearance, and ruining their self-esteem if they don't conform to a narrow range of looks. Dotson's use of Wolf's argument is numbingly one-note. He makes no adjustments in the shifting of beauty's hype from women to men, who are subjected to exactly the same media forces -- with exactly the same results.

Media images of masculinity have overwhelmed manhood, says Dotson. Men cannot see themselves except through commercialized images most of them cannot live up to. Unfortunately, in condemning the media-ization of masculinity, he comes close to condemning masculinity itself (perhaps a residual influence of Wolf's male-bashing). Anyone who conforms to the media ideal (a youthful, buff, hairless physique) has lost his identity and become interchangeable with others who look like that. Paraphrasing Tolstoy's first line in Anna Karenina, all buff men look alike. While railing against the stereotypes of media manhood, Dotson himself stereotypes the people he considers the media's dupes.

Dotson addresses issues such as eating disorders and cosmetic surgery. My main interest in the book is how he handles men's bodybuilding. A couple quotes will suggest his argument about improving one's physical appearance in a gym:

These passages occur in the chapter, "The Fitness Fallacy: Muscles." Get it? Muscles = a false approach to life. God forbid that anyone might go to the gym for another reason than becoming a sex god, for according to the author, "Like it or not, muscles on men represent sex" (124). They can't represent anything else. If you work out to improve your appearance and health, you're stealing some nerdy guy's self-esteem and making him sit home on Saturday night. You've become a walking advertisement for the media -- in fact, you are the media at that point, transmitting false images of masculinity everywhere you go.

If you've seen one muscular man, you've seen 'em all. The male bodies in contemporary photography are "glaringly, blatantly similar" (15). In his brief march through cinema, Dotson offers up Arnold Schwarzenegger as typifying the "stereotyped male bodies . . . of Hollywood films" (73). Does Arnold look like anyone else, including other bodybuilders? His build is one of the most distinctive ever to appear on a movie screen -- not to mention his vocal style, as easily imitated at Bogart's and Cagney's. Does Zane look like Viator? Or Labrada like Coleman? They do according to Dotson. It's all part of the levelling effect to which he subjects any image hinting of "male beauty." Rather than reporting on the cultural flattening of men's selfhood, Dotson flattens it out himself to reveal its supposed inauthenticity.

Images of men have dangerous effects for Dotson. The kind he doesn't like "stare us down and intimidate us into believing that they are the gods and the rest are not" (19). It's as if the images transmit a zombie signal trying to transform men into their likeness, cursing you if they don't succeed. The feeling the book conveys is an acute uneasiness with the possibility that having a fit, healthy appearance is a good thing. Magazines promoting such an appearance are ripe for the picking. The author reviles Muscle & Fitness at length, attacking its breezy promotion of working out as a means of becoming more successful. What would its readers be wanting -- an investigative report on how working out devalues their lives? That's like expecting a publication on hang gliders to tell you never to use one. The tone Dotson takes with such magazines, and with the other media he discusses, is so hostile that it appears he feels personally harmed by them. If so, that doesn't mean the media inflict the same kind of harm on all men, especially those able to critically examine what they are looking at.

Right now our culture is undergoing a massive transformation in physical and mental self-awareness. It is part of the transition to a new century's perspective. Technology is offering us options that used to be science fiction, and more options will be available in our lifetime. Bodybuilders have been pioneers in self-transformation, at times operating on the cutting edge of what it is physically possible to do and be. Some of that experimentation is perilous, but so were the experiments that led to breakthroughs in the medical use of radiation and anaesthesia. Rather than considering new options in men's self-transformation, or exploring the impact of living inside a transformed body, Dotson refutes any possible value in doing so.

Every society, including those without a massive advertising industry, has standards of idealized manhood. Denouncing those standards because they have become commercialized is pointless. Developing our own view of these standards, and using them to enhance our sense of self, is a better direction for us all.

•	"Muscularity as masculinity is a bad idea for men because it places pressure on them to conform to a false sense of normalcy." (113)
•	"To place muscular bodies in the realm of idealized perfection is elitist and exclusionary, not to mention psychologically and socially damaging to the men and women who do not have such bodies." (123)