It only takes a scroll through Grindr to see that a
select few body types reign supreme when it comes to gay men: from oiled,
glistening torsos to slim, hairless bodies, it seems our definitions of
‘beauty’ are fairly rigid within our so called ‘community’. Ideals may have
changed and expanded over the last few decades, but ultimately little has
shifted – and research shows that it’s having a real effect on both our mental
and our physical health.
Crucially, there’s historical context to these standards.
Our desire for muscularity can be traced back to the heyday of ‘physique
culture’, which blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s when censors cracked down on
gay porn. With no X-rated mags to be found, gay men in search of bare flesh
turned to bodybuilding magazines, some of which – most notably Physique
Pictorial and Beefcake – became gay media staples in their own right,
transforming everyday muscle men into objects of desire.
This fixation with physique only grew over time. Artists
like David Hockney preserved the essence of physique culture through homoerotic
paintings; Tom of Finland ramped up the aesthetic exponentially, creating
explicit artwork featuring giant-dicked policemen fucking on the streets. His
aim? To queer the notion that gay men were inherently feminine, something that
was – and still is – weaponised against us.
Finland’s subversion of hyper-masculinity cemented a
radical legacy which lives on today not just in museums and books, but also in
gay porn scenes featuring similarly Adonis-like men. The ‘jock’ isn’t the only
archetype of gay male desire but it’s one of very few, and this narrow scope of
gay beauty is doing us damage. An often-cited 2007 survey found 42% of all men
with eating disorders in the UK were gay despite us making up around 5% of the
male population, whereas LGBTQ+ people of all genders were more likely to binge
and abuse laxatives – which arguably ties into our increased rates of mental
illness.
It’s not just body
image, either; 2016’s #GayMediaSoWhite hashtag illustrated a huge lack of
diversity in gay media which seemed to explain the racism, femme-shaming and
body-shaming so prevalent on LGBTQ+ dating apps.
Gay and Lesbian Studies professor Gregory Woods agrees
that there’s a fetishisation of hyper-masculine bodies in the gay community,
but says he’s unsure that it can be linked back to physique culture. “I guess
it’s still, in part, a reaction against negative stereotypes of campness, which
seem especially common in the context of school bullying,” he theorises. “We go
to the gym and turn ourselves into the tattooed hulks (or hunks?) our bullies
wouldn’t have dared to bully.”
It makes sense that we could be running from stereotypes
by bulking up our bodies, or even by appropriating masculine aesthetics like
the handlebar moustache or the skinhead (both famously popular amoung gay men
in the 70s and 80s). But plenty of men project this pressure to ‘man up’ and
expect it of potential partners. They plaster their dating bios with demands
like ‘don’t be camp’ or ‘be a man!’ and, in turn, insinuate that campness is
bad. But this is untrue; not only is camp a political weapon, it’s way of being
that was openly embraced by plenty of the pioneers that fought most vigorously for
the rights LGBTQ+ folk we enjoy today.
We live in a misogynistic world which stigmatises and
regulates femininity, and this reality is stamped all over gay beauty
standards. I know this through my own experiences of curating dating profiles:
I’ve learned to delete the photos of me in a full face of glitter and hide
pictures of my body at its heaviest. I once heard a friend say that fat gay men
are “outcasts”, and it made me cringe – it sounded like the kind of passé Sex
and the City quote designed to have Woke Charlotte foaming at the mouth. But
over time it’s come to feel upsettingly accurate; even a BBC3 documentary
dedicated to gay body image featured the experiences of precisely no fat gay
men. This erasure only strengthened the feelings already whirling through my
mind: that we’re anomalous or, worse, unwanted.
In terms of what is desirable, it’s helpful to look into
gay apps and their language of ‘tribes’. These are the narrow boxes that
delineate the boundaries of our desires: there’s the ‘twink’, young, hairless
and recently celebrated by The New York Times in a controversial, largely tone
deaf op-ed (Gay Twitter collectively pointed that it’s literally always been
the ‘age of the twink’ in our community); then there’s the ‘bear’ and the ‘cub’,
both categories which insinuate it’s okay to be plus-size if you also happen to
be hairy.
The aforementioned ‘jock’ is still arguably the most
popular category, but the options for anyone that doesn’t fit these boxes are
limited. The porn industry is exemplary of these limitations: people of colour
might get fetishised by problematic porn labels like ‘Ebony’ and ‘Asian’,
whereas trans men remain largely invisible in porn (although studios like Pink
& White and stars like Buck Angel rally against this). For context, porn is
the one category in which trans women have been historically over-represented
in equally problematic ways – the online category ‘Shemale’ is proof of this.
Arguably, none of these subcategories are as culturally
dominant as the palatable white gay norm, established when advertisers
earmarked gay men and lesbians as a lucrative market as early as thirty years
ago. Sitcoms like Will & Grace centred ‘aspirational’ white, middle-class
men, whereas Queer Eye – the original, not the heartwrenching remake –
positioned us as fairy godmothers willing to makeover hapless straight blokes
in return for superficial acceptance. Corporations engaged in ‘pinkwashing’ –
offering us the bare minimum and rinsing us for cash in return. In the same way
that companies play on the insecurities of women to flog them diet pills, our
beauty standards were narrowed so that we’d spend to keep up appearances.
Woods describes these standards as a “taxation”. “Being
compelled to look good – perfect body, perfect haircut, perfect taste in
clothes – is a kind of cultural taxation like the pink pound itself, which lots
of us seem cravenly willing to pay in exchange for straight people’s
acceptance.” In fact, if we follow the Queer Eye logic that straight men
overwhelmingly accept us when they want to look more like us, we’re actually
forced to overcompensate.
It’s also worth highlighting that the focus on health
wasn’t just driven by a desire to sell us gym memberships and supplements. In
the context of the AIDS epidemic, it was also politically-charged. The illness
and its homophobic coverage still loomed large over mainstream media, and I’ve
talked to men in the past that feel it shaped beauty standards – that there was
a pressure to look physically fit and healthy as opposed to skinny and frail in
order to attract partners. Some even say that hairlessness was particularly
desirable, a way to display a body free of lesions. These are oral histories,
but they’re valid - especially given the generation of voices and testimonies
the epidemic took from us.
Issues around gay male masculinity and femininity have
gone underexplored, but the pressure to fit into rigid beauty standards is
collectively punishing us. I remember being scarred when I was jokingly told
that fat and feminine gay men were particularly marginalised, and for years I
internalised the idea that I could be too fat or too queer to be desirable. I
policed my masculinity and abused my body, drowning it with alcohol and using
food limitation tactics to shape it into something more conventionally
attractive.
Unfortunately, research indicates that too many of us are
still doing the same. But gay beauty standards become easier to disentangle
when you realise that they’re rigid for a reason: because they’re largely a
byproduct of capitalism, discrimination and internalised homophobia. We’ve been
packaged and sold as fairy godmothers, pretty boys and muscle men, but there
needs to be room for those of us who don’t fit those stereotypes. We all walk
through life differently, but ultimately we can be a community; the more we
dismantle and disrupt archetypes of gay beauty, the more we can strengthen the ties
that bond us.
Unpicking the history of gay male beauty standards. By
Jake Hall. Dazed Digital , January 14, 2019.
Prepare yourself for a cold hard fact: the average
erect penis in Britain is five-and-a-half inches long. It’s not six or seven,
as some men might suggest when quizzed about it in front of their mates (only
to make a joke about theirs being “waaaay bigger than that!”), but a perfectly
adequate 14 centimetres.
We have, whether we’re straight or non-straight men,
become a generation of size queens obsessed with magnifying our own junk, and
it’s fuelling a culture that has lead us down a dangerous path when it comes to
our body image. We might not admit to it, but so much of our time is spent
adding phantom inches when bragging about our bits on various dating apps or
finding the perfect angle for a dick pic that makes it look just a little bit
more impressive than it does IRL. We’re living in a fantasy, with pretty much
every earth-dwelling man experiencing a certain level of body dysmorphia when
it comes to the size of their members. But where did that notion of bigger
being better come from?
Between 2013 and 2017, the International Society of
Aesthetic Plastic Surgery recorded over 45,000 penis enhancement procedures
taking place worldwide; past figures were so low that they didn’t even warrant
being recorded. “It’s important to acknowledge the scale and complexity of the
issue,” Giulio Garaffa, a consultant uro-andrologist from International Andrology
London tells Dazed Beauty. Figures provided by them show there’s been a
considerable spike in penis enlargement procedures in his own clinic over the
past half decade.
But this cosmetic phenomenon wasn’t born out of
narcissism or insecurity: the initial phalloplasty surgeries for cis men were
produced to help those living with micropenises, a dick that’s roughly two and
a half times smaller than average for a man their age. In order to cure it and
increase its functionality, surgeons would use liposuction to remove fat from
the pubic area to give the penis more girth.
A more common, excruciating sounding surgery is
ligamentolysis: severing the ligaments that attach the shaft of the penis to
the pubic bone, letting it hang anywhere from 1-4 centimetres longer when
flaccid (though it has no effect on the size when erect). The latter – paired
with an injection of fat from the body to increase girth – is the method used
by cosmetic surgeons for the locker room shy nowadays. It might not require an
overnight stay in most cases, but the procedure isn’t cheap; you’re expected to
shell out anything from £1500 to £5000, depending on how big you want to go.
The surge in interest in the procedure leads back to a
problem few are willing to discuss out of fear of being ridiculed. According to
research completed by International Andrology London, over 45% of men are
dissatisfied with their size – despite the fact that almost all of them have a
completely healthy, normal-sized and functional penis. “Although it can be
dismissed by some people, even in the medical profession as trivial, our
experience after consulting and treating many men in our network of clinics, is
that size issues can cause significant distress,” Giulio claims. “Anxiety about
size can affect their self-confidence, sexual life and even prevent them from
everyday social interactions such as being with a partner and using public
bathrooms.”
Marcus* from London was one of the handful of men who
decided to go through with the procedure with International Andrology London.
“Since I was young, I always felt that I had a small penis and was too shy to
shower with other people,” he said, of his reasons for plucking up the courage
to go under the knife and enlarge his penis, but it wasn’t something he jumped
into easily. Instead, Marcus said he was pretty apprehensive. “There’s a lot of
information online of the pros and cons of this procedure,” he adds. “I was
worried about the appearance after surgery, and if my erection and performance
would be the same.” Luckily for Marcus, the procedure went well: he’s now a
proud owner of a bigger willy.
Marcus’ initial anxiety is more widespread that most
men would like to admit, and Hugo – a 24-year-old man from Stockholm who now
lives in London – knows all about it. The laissez-faire attitude towards male
nudity he experienced while growing up with saunas, steam rooms and skinny
dipping in lakes lead him to be conscious of being exposed in front of his
peers. “It would always be the same guys
who would instigate getting naked,” he recalls. It was a certain kind of
showboating that men who were comfortable with their penises would indulge in;
a try-hard attempt to assert their masculinity. The ones who felt they didn’t
match up size-wise were obvious: they diligently kept their clothes on.
It’s worth mentioning that, despite being a so-called
“late bloomer”, Hugo convinced himself that his above average penis wasn’t
anything to flaunt after encountering pornography for the first time. “It’s
interesting how far cultural conditioning can actually affect how our bodies
work,” he adds. “Western culture makes money off our lack of self-esteem, so
it’s not a surprise that we have so much anxiety about our appearance. In
regards to porn, we’re led to believe that if we consume it we’ll become it –
regardless of how realistic [in this case, penis size] that really is.”
It’s a learned behaviour to scrutinise your own dick;
there’s no evidence to suggest that there’s anything biological about it. A lot
of it, as a study conducted by IAL shows, stems from our increased consumption
of porn. Their study showed that half of men and nearly 40% of women who
watched porn daily wished that their or their partner’s penis was bigger. That dropped to less to a third of men and
11% of women when a group who didn’t watch porn were surveyed.
For gay men, the casual attitude towards swapping
nudes and dating apps sees that exposure increase two-fold. Darren from Essex
is a 21-year-old make-up artist who looked into enlargement procedures, both
pumps and surgery, after feeling sized out by the penises he was seeing in porn
and on Grindr. “Historically, I think there’s a notion that the bigger the dick
you have, the more masculine you are,” he tells us. Darren’s comments reflect
the femmephobia that’s prevalent in gay culture: that having a smaller dick and
a more agile frame somehow makes you less of a man. It’s led him to join the
gym and gain more muscle mass: an easier and cheaper way of asserting his
masculine aesthetic over penis enlargement surgery, and something that
undoubtedly carries much less of a stigma. “I don’t feel desirable to myself,
so I question why anyone else would want me,” he says. To try and reverse his
psychology, he’s deleted all of the dating apps on his phone.
But this isn’t only an issue for cisgender men:
there’s a whole community of trans men whose inclusion in this narrative is
underwritten; overlooked in favour of a more salacious and tongue in cheek kind
of conversation. 27-year-old Archie is a trans man whose decision to forgo
phalloplasty was affirmed by the fact he had no qualms, unlike a large
percentage of cis men, over flaunting his masculinity. “I don’t feel like what I
have between my legs defines me as a man,” he tells us. There was also the
issue of the surgical procedure – more complex than the elongation techniques
for purely cosmetic purposes – which felt like “a lot of hassle, a lot of
money, and really not important to [him]”. The trend amongst cis men looks like
narcissism fuelled by anxiety: “People are too worried about what they consider
to be perfect,” Archie adds, “ or what society thinks is perfect.”
That too is an issue that bleeds into trans bodies,
though. The expectation for all men to look like men and all women to look like
women has wrongfully forced many in the trans community to assimilate into the
traditional ‘aesthetics’ of the gender they identify with. Sometimes, that’s
purely for the purpose of avoiding violence and scrutiny from the outside
world. When you consider that there’s a whole generation of trans men out there
who can’t afford bottom surgery, but who desperately strive to have genitalia
to match their gender, the idea of shelling out thousands for the sake of a few
inches of girth and length feels fickle. Surely there’s an easier solution, and
by helping cis men to overcome these anxieties the benefit will be greater and
far more widespread. By quashing the idea that a bigger penis means somebody is
more masculine, the expectations for trans men to affirm their ‘maleness’ by
undergoing phalloplasty will be quashed too.
But for now, the desire to have a bigger penis is
still attracting up to 200 men a day to Giuilio Garaffa’s London surgery. “It's
about personal confidence and looking good naked,” he stresses. The numbers
going through with it are significantly lower than that – just 10-20% – but the
dozens who do are apparently pretty happy with the end product. According to
Guilio, reported results include “significant improvements in self-image and
self-esteem, and a reduction in body dysmorphia”, but whether or not surgery is
still the most sensible answer is still a question that requires a little more
research. Is jumping straight on to the operating tables of Harley Street the
best way to solve our own anxieties, or should we be rooting out (sorry) the
problem that’s leading us down that path in the first place?
We suppose the same could be said of all kinds of
plastic surgeries, but as the stigma starts to lift from flaunting your nose job,
lipo and lip fillers, the idea of a man publicly professing how content he is
with a penis enlargement feels like a dystopian concept. Marcus, who’s gone
through with the surgery and is happy with the end result, is still a firm
believer in it being a sensitive topic. “I don't know if I would tell my
friends and family about it,” he admits.
So what will it take for men to be happy with the bits
they have? Is a wider conversation surrounding the sexy and visceral, if
damaging nature of pornography and hook-up culture required for us to see a
future that considers below average more than adequate? Or perhaps we should
just all start to talk more honestly to each other. It might not be the big
future we’re hoping surgery will build for us, but it will help us stop
bullshitting to impress others, and to find a killer angle for our
(consensually shared) dick pics that captures the beautiful, normal and pretty
much perfect reality of what the modern man is packing.
Why (and how) are men making their dicks bigger? By Douglas
Greenwood. Dazed Digital , January 28, 2019.
Last year, the beauty industry finally got the wake-up
call it needed. Leading by example, pioneers like Fenty Beauty, CoverGirl and
Illamasqua called time on gendered, racially-biased beauty standards, ushering
in an age of inclusivity. We saw cosmetic giants diversify palettes to cater to
over 40 skin tones, transgender models fronting major campaigns and male
ambassadors stepping up to the makeup chair. This recent rejection of the
one-size-fits-all approach to beauty is indicative of a wider cultural shift in
values. In a long-overdue act of inclusion and acceptance, the world of beauty
is becoming more representative of the real world. By arming everyone with the
same tools for self-expression, our conversations on beauty can now be painted
in broad, authentic strokes.
As the mainstream catches up and the beauty becomes
more inclusive, there has been a steady emergence in ‘male beauty’ trends.
Venturing beyond the grooming basics, men around the world are beautifying.
This new generation is taking a stand against conservative visions of
masculinity and reclaiming control over their own image; from the surge in male
beauty salons in Pakistan to the brave, beautiful youths in Moscow who shade
and contour. Reporting from Seoul, the “epicentre of beauty”, David Yi,
Editor-in-Chief of the male beauty editorial ‘Very Good Light’, joins the
conversation. We discuss the people, products, and movements that are
championing diversity in the industry and ask, why platforms for male beauty
are needed now more than ever.
The men of South Korea are leading the beauty
revolution; from the K-Pop heartthrobs of the big screen to the guy on the
street. Taking up the tools once reserved for women, these men have joined the
pursuit of perfection, spending more on skincare than anywhere else in the
world. Yi explains, “today you won’t spot a guy in Seoul without perfect skin.
He wears B.B. cream just as easily as he washes his face.”
In a country celebrated for its progressive beauty
culture, wearing makeup “isn’t about being gender-fluid- it’s about being a
better version of a man”. In a recent interview, SokoGlam’s co-owner David Cho
explained that the male beauty obsession is endemic to the nation’s value
system. In a competitive job market, appearance is power and youth equals
ability. As Naomi Wolf once wrote, “beauty is a currency system like the gold
standard” and in Korea, it’s big business.
Regardless of the motives behind the makeup, the
importance of the male beauty movement lies at, its core. It is not just
changing how we view beauty but, also how we view gender. It dares to defy the
socially constructed male identity and explores new, liberated ways of being.
Whilst the young men who step out with enviable skin and flawless makeup are
still met by heckles and threats in conservative cultures, the next steps of
big beauty brands are crucial. Playing to a captive audience, they can help to
educate the public and set the stage for a global refusal of the beauty
standards that have ignored individuals for too long.
Blurring the lines between the genders, releases from
brands like M.A.C, Milk MakeUp, and Charlotte Tilbury state that beauty is for
all. This burgeoning unisex cosmetics market is a response to the younger
generation’s disinterest in gender identification. Yi adds, “makeup and
cosmetics are genderless, they have no sexuality. They are the tools we use to
improve self-esteem and self-empowerment.” And, although it is making the
headlines, men wearing makeup is nothing new. Modern culture is responsible for
attaching the stigma to displays of masculine beauty, seeing it relegated to
the LGBTQ+ community. But, Yi explains, “Historically, this wasn’t the case;
men in 17th century Europe wore wigs and powdered their faces; Pharaohs in
Egypt wore kohl around their eyes and Romans painted their faces with red
blush.”
In a return to a more expressive vision of manhood,
communities of young men worldwide are connecting through Youtube and social
media to rally against the stoic hypermasculine ideals of their fathers. By
going public, the men at the frontiers of the beauty movement add their voices
to the wider outcry to break the cycle of toxic masculinity. Yi adds, “generationally, this suppression
has had real repercussions. It’s important to make room for men and allow them
to be who they want to be, which is why we need beauty now more than ever.”
As our understanding of gender undergoes a
renaissance, men are free to transform themselves in new, exciting ways.
Whether they choose to invest in the products they need to keep skin healthy
or, opt for a full-face of makeup, the tools for reinvention are becoming
readily available. Now that the choice is there, as a community, we now have a
responsibility to lend our support and bring male beauty firmly into the
mainstream.
Pretty boy : the rise of male beauty. By David Yi. The Bod Edit , March 10, 2018.
