I loved the photoessay about semeiotics, am464! Everyone everyone everyone should look at that!
Back to Tom's question...There's a good essay precisely on this topic, actually, from a book by Susan Bordo, whom I've mentioned elsewhere on barbelith (the conversation thread about digital manipulation of images). It's from her book, The Male Body; the chapter of particular note in this context is "Beauty (Re)Discovers The Male Body. (Here are excerpts.)
[Another commercial for Bordo: she's a delightful writer. And can be wickedly funny. This, oh, about 7" tall book about male bodies has a ruler printed on the spine...heh heh. (She may not have personally come up with that image, granted, but it's still a pretty good index to her style).]
Bordo traces the appearance of semi-naked men in the mainstream specifically to Calvin Klein and gives very precise dates:
Calvin Klein had his epiphany, according to one biography, one night in 1974 in New York's gay Flamingo bar:
As Calvin wandered through the crowd at the Flamingo, the body heat rushed through him like a revelation; this was the cutting edge....[The] men! The men at the Flamingo had less to do about sex for him than the notion of portraying men as gods. He realized that what he was watching was the freedom of a new generation, unashamed, in-the-flesh embodiments of Calvin's ideals: straight-looking, masculine men, with chiseled bodies, young Greek gods come to life. The vision of shirtless young men with hardened torsos, all in blue jeans, top button opened, a whisper of hair from the belly button disappearing into the denim pants, would inspire and inform the next ten years of Calvin Klein's print and television advertisements.
Klein's genius was that of a cultural Geiger counter; his own bisexuality enabled him to see that the phallic body, as much as any female figure, is an enduring sex object within Western culture. In America in 1974, however, that ideal was still largely closeted. Only gay culture unashamedly sexualized the lean, fit body that virtually everyone, gay and straight, now aspires to. Sex, as Calvin Klein knew, sells. He also knew that gay sex wouldn't sell to straight men. But the rock-hard, athletic gay male bodies that Klein admired at the Flamingo did not advertise their sexual preference through the feminine codes --limp wrists, raised pinkie finger, swishy walk-- which the straight world then identified with homosexuality. Rather, they embodies a highly /p. 181: masculine aesthetic that --although definitely exciting for gay men-- would scream "heterosexual" to (clueless) straights. Klein knew just the kind of clothing to show that body off in too....
Klein transformed jeans from utilitarian garments to erotic second skins. Next, Klein went for underwear. He wasn't the first, but he was the most daring. In 1981, Jockey International had broken ground by photographing Baltimore Oriole pitcher Jim Palmer in a pair of briefs (airbrushed) in one of its ads --selling $100 million worth of underwear by year's end. Inspired by Jockey's success, in 1983 put a 40-by-50 foot Bruce Weber photograph of Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintinauss in Times Square
So, in essence, yeah, your time line seems right. I'll try to write more later about the latter, even more interesting question about the effects on straight and otherwise men and women...although at the moment I'd probably be pretty much repeating Bordo. So I hope people will look at the excerpts on the linked page--which has more pictures of semi-naked men in ads, if that's any incentive... |
