Enhancing Male Bodies

The body is a critical link between hegemonic masculinity, male self-regard, and overall self-esteem. Men have long been encouraged to believe that the natural male body is a strong and aggressive machine. This aggression is continually rewarded, though a series of cultural perks, scholarships, community adulation, and romantic attention ... administrative leniency when boys will be boy. People reinforce the link between male privilege, hegemonic masculinity, and the body, suggesting that a man's physicality is the locus of his cultural power and sense of self-esteem. Ironically, as they demonstrate through the case of a professional athlete, the need to preserve the signifying values of the powerful body through abstinence often curtails men from participating in the very behaviors that mark the hegemonic, which underscore the inherent instability of the hegemonic position.

Given the body's centrality in signifying male strength, intelligence, and virility, men are increasingly critical consumer base for industries that cater to
athletic body makeover. These industries consist of typical male activities, such as bodybuilding, but now include traditionally female preoccupations like Healthy Weight Loss, fashion, and plastic surgery. Indeed, according to the American Society for Plastic Surgery, between 1997 and 2005 there was a 9 percent aggregate increase in athletic body makeover procedures for men. During the same period, men increasingly sought out non-surgical procedures at a rate of increase of 749 percent. In Beyond Plastic Surgery, a documentary on
athletic body makeovers that often verges into cautionary tale, the message is clear: men are equally obsessed with self-observation and body perfection, underscoring similar claims made in academic and medical circles. Plastic surgeon Richard Fleming, interviewed in Beyond Body Makeovers, observes, "If you had asked what percentage of men came into the practice seeking plastic surgery about ten years ago, I would have responded about ten percent of our patients were men. Today it's fifty-fifty."

The reasons for this increase are varied, and as with most sociological and representational phenomena, there is not a clear cause and effect relationship. We can, however, see the ways in which women's increasing social and economic power have, in many ways, reconfigured a cognitive landscape that historically gave men automatic rights of entry into culturally dominant positions.

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