Marc Naimark

What a great subject!

Some questions:

1) At a time when Americans seem particularly interested in athletic and attractive bodies, why is it that there is this phobia among men of showwing their legs? They show disdain for “speedos” and any swimwear that might show that men have genitalia, prefering long baggy shorts. When and why did this change occur?

2) What’s with men and body hair? It’s anathema today. What did men’s body hair mean in the past? Is this part of a general trend for gay men to set the standards of beauty for all men?

3) What have the differences been between notions of the impact of or need for physical activity, exercise and sport between men and women?

Lenore Dukes

Your show topic touched off a whole chain of reflection for me about how perceptions of beauty are influenced by how people have adhered to or broken gender norms and distinctions of the era. I’m interested in how and why those gender norms for physical appearance have changed over time, and especially in why those norms sometimes emphasize and sometimes bridge natural differences between male and female bodies. (I’m also interested in how society treats people who don’t fit neatly into one category or another.)

Perhaps the first characteristic that we notice about people is their gender (and even when we can’t tell by their bodies, such as with babies – or with Pat the SNL character – it’s usually the first question out of our mouths: “is it a boy or a girl?”). And adhering to the various gender norms of the era has often been a criterion of beauty and even of moral character, and women’s beauty routines and fashions have often involved exaggerating differences between the average male and female bodies. Today, women are expected to emphasize their breast size, remove as much body hair as possible except what’s on our heads, and wear brighter clothes, jewelry, or high heels that distinguish themselves from men. Is some of that related to the pressure to be heterosexual and cisgendered? Yet androgynous and queer-identified stars like Lady Gaga and k.d. lang (c.f. photo shoot with Cindy Crawford juxtaposing two extreme forms of female-bodied attractiveness) are seen as captivatingly attractive in part because of they play within or transgress the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. Not to mention the success of transgender or androgynous models like Lea T or Andrej Pejic. What is it in our culture that leads us to both celebrate and punish those gender boundary transgressions?

It also seems that American society has swung between beauty ideals that favor strict gender separation and those that celebrate androgyny or a more fluid gender identity. What cultural tides are animating these changes? Why, in the Victorian period, did women grow their hair out and wear hourglass corsets that forced them into a shape that exaggerated their feminine hips and busts, and what did breaking those dress codes signify about a woman? And what about a historical moment makes more androgynous characteristics more celebrated in either women or men, such as in the 1920s when fashions favored slim, small-busted women and shorter hair, when Coco Chanel popularized a more natural/masculine look, in the 1970s counterculture when men grew their hair out, or now, when men are expected to remove some of their body hair and hipster guys embrace a skinny intellectual look? It seems to me that these trends all began as acts of transgression and then sometimes entered into the mainstream culture (sometimes diluted) as (some) values associated them were accepted.

For myself, I’ve always been rather aware of how my personal standard of beauty is entwined with my gender and political identity. In elementary school I felt like an “anything you can do I can do better” tomboy/feminist, and I enjoyed wearing my short hair as a sign of my freedom and defiance of gender-based limitations. But after some salespeople embarrassed me by calling me “sir” in stores, and as I went into middle and high school, I started growing out my hair with a zeal that most girls who grew up with long hair don’t have. A decade later, I’m proud of how long it’s grown. Rather than feeling like I’ve assimilated into more “traditional” feminine ideals, I associate my long hair with not only beauty but a sort of hippie, natural, female-celebratory, feminist aesthetic. I suspect that a lot of my peers feel like their hair reflects aspects of their identity and personality as well, and that those are probably tied up in gender too.