Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America

GIST: A brilliant and utterly riveting study of male vanity. A work of supreme scholarship about the cultural factors that have constructed our ideas about contemporary manhood.

DETAILS: Oh, sure, the ancient Greeks were vain guys, too: Julius Caesar wore a wreath to hide his receding hairline. And in the seventh century, a Byzantine surgeon named Paul of Aegina noted that a young man's enlarged breasts "made the man look effeminate and as such constituted an assault on his self-esteem." So it's not like male vanity is such a new concept. But you know what is new? Hair plugs. And liposuction. And plastic surgery, and penile implants. What's happened to men? Has the so-called "women's movement" emasculated everybody? If it were only that simple (and if only there even were any feminists left, but that's another story...).

Lynne Luciano posits that the contemporary Western male's obsession with youth and beauty, the "beauty trap," as she calls it, is less a function of feminism, has less to do with big questions of mortality, but is rather the ultimate triumph of consumerism. After WWII came the Playboyification of malehood, which, according to Luciano, led to the "elevation of personality over accomplishment." ("Personality" being the answer to the question What do the products I buy say about me?) "But consumerism also has another, darker side," Luciano writes. "By creating insatiable desire, it also creates unappeasable discontent." Maybe men think about their bodies so much more now because there's nothing left to think about?

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