Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Hidden contexts


Men’s underwear has featured in contemporary culture in everything from Tom Cruise’s dancing scene in “Risky Business” to at least one bombing attempt, but the means by which most of us are educated about underwear is through advertisements. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the advertising of underwear has been a surprisingly open-air practice. One might assume that in past eras, public marketing of “unmentionables” would have met with disapproval. But when illustrated advertisements of underwear began to appear in the second half of the 19th century, consumers may have seen underwear merely as a practical garment – and one with a satisfactory amount of body-concealing fabric – that was not always associated with sexuality and ideas about gender identity.

The linking of male sexuality to underwear emerged in popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s, with the eroticization of male bodies in art and advertising. Robert Mapplethorpe’s stylized and confrontational photographs of naked men did much to recast the male body as an object for viewing; at least one image in his oeuvre cleverly and suggestively links underwear with his other works. And whether Mapplethorpe was an engine of change or only an actor in the objectification of men’s bodies, these changes are reflected in his work and in similar icons of underwear advertising, both of which fostered the sexualization of this garment.

Underwear advertising in the 1920s was somewhat lifeless to literally lifeless. By the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the squeaky-clean camaraderie of the locker room emerged as a trope that persists today. Color ads brought to life not only the new, vibrant patterns of menswear in the 1950s but also the model’s flesh. Flesh notwithstanding, underwear ads continued to equate malehood with wholesome versions of fatherhood and were clearly not playing the “sexy” angle although at least one brand urged men to pay attention to their figures. Despite women doing the bulk of the family underwear-buying it wasn’t until the 1970s that body-hugging neon mesh entered the market. Were women not supposed to be attracted to the male form?

Changing sexual mores from the 1950s through the 1980s and the public emergence of gay culture probably helped new underwear styles from Europe find an audience in the United States. Women could be attracted to the naked or nearly-naked male body, as could men. The next couple of decades of underwear advertising cast idealized bodies in an increasingly sexualized role. It is interesting to note that while most advertisements that play to homoeroticized conceptions of the male body will feature a single man in the image, those that show two or more hew to the desexualized “buddy” context of the locker-room setting. Comfort with men’s sexuality has grown, but boundaries seem to have been clearly drawn.

All of this points to an underlying anxiety about underwear that certainly doesn’t come from the cotton-blend fabric. Anxiety about men’s underwear seems to be linked through a series of associations to that which it shields from view – the male anatomy, and the poopy, drippy, farty things that happen under there. A man's choice in underwear is a carefully considered selection based not only on comfort but also on fears and affirmations about male gender roles.


(Click here if you want to see a turkey marching in a Union Suit, circa 1951!)

(And click here to see today's take on underwear advertising.)

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