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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This book deserves attention,
By A Customer
This review is from: Uneasy Pleasures: The Male as Erotic Object (Hardcover)
When Laura Mulvey wrote her essay on 'Virtual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' she put down what was common sense in the 70s and 80s: In dominant narrative cinema and in society woman is constituted as image, or the looked-at, while man is the bearer of the look. The 'spectacle' is feminine or at least 'female', whereas the 'spectator' is masculine or at least 'male'. In contrast to this thesis Kenneth Mackinnon encourages attention to the very possibility of a male object. Tentatively written the book directs the reader's eyes to the eroticisation of the male which is offered within current media, by considering three social categories as spectators: women, gay men and non-gay men. And by considering various media-stars as sexual objects (examples are ranging from Valentino to Sylvester Stallone and Don Johnson, from Robert Mapplethorpe's photography to the Chippendales and British football-star Paul Gascoigne). Being shown, being seen and being considered as a 'spectacle' they all can gain and re-gain new forms of self-consciousness and self-expression. And yet a lot of 'uneasiness' has remained: distancing devices counteract the possibility of too frank an exhibition, penile erections, if ever shown, have to be 'pallic' etc. Though the author seems to be a bit too pessimistic about current consumer society which now sells male objects as commodities (thanks to that) and though he sometimes seems to intermix 'passivity', 'masochism' and 'penetration', I would strongly recommend this book. It goes beyond some sort of 'frontier'.
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