Anyone driving into London from Heathrow Airport will have noticed the gigantic poster of a muscular, semi-naked male. He is advertising Abercrombie & Fitch, that great retail feast of homoeroticism. I am not sure when it was that we replaced the slender, round-shouldered figure of the English male with an ancient Greek version but this model is now ubiquitous and triumphant.
Abercrombie & Fitch is his temple. The staircase at the shop is decorated with colossal portraits of athletic young men in Edwardian sporting scenes – tennis, fencing, cricket, rugby. All are in degrees of disrobing.
The sexual worship of men rather than women is a cultural phenomenon. In 2003, Germaine Greer wrote a book called Beautiful Boys, which claimed a woman’s right to ogle boys. Greer described her pleasure in the young male form as a “western taboo”. I see no taboo. This season’s fashion photography makes Robert Mapplethorpe look prudish.
Dolce & Gabbana has a magazine advertisement showing a man in briefs sunning himself with an enormous python crawling over his body. Diesel has a bare-chested man with his head on a woman’s lap, begging for a glass of water. Both men look sensational and sexually vulnerable. Female fashion ads are about clothes, male ads are about the contours of the male torso. The bodies on show are Olympic ideals, strong, athletic and without blemish. The girls, by contrast, are strangely sexless.
The question is: do male youths want to be sex symbols? Until recently, they had to be gay and exhibitionist to attract that kind of attention, whereas girls received it passively. It is an unfamiliar experience for boys to be adored merely for their looks. Yet if men, rather than women, have become society’s sex symbols, they have been complicit in the change. Young men are visibly more narcissistic than a generation ago. The big money in the beauty industry is in male toiletries. Men such as David Beckham have consciously appealed to both sexes with flirtatious changes of hairstyle and experimentation with thongs and sarongs.
The beautiful boys of ancient Greece exhibited themselves in gymnasiums. Men – and not only gay men – are now doing the same.
The open admiration of young men in ancient Greece was part of a culture of manliness where women played a subservient role. In modern Britain, it looks like the reverse. Young men are flaunting themselves peacock-style because they are no longer necessarily the economic providers. However, beautiful boys may discover, as many beautiful girls have done, that being a sex symbol is a limited kind of existence. Once those Abercrombie & Fitch men notice the first sign of jug handles and sprouting body hair, they will need a second string to their bow.
Advertising for airlines concentrates on the fantasy of sleep. Chairs that are beds, soft white pillows, a soothing bedtime smile from the stewardess. What the ads do not show is the volcanic snoring of every third male passenger. Curiously, long-haul day flights are not much better than night flights. Is it reflex that makes men reach for socks, eye masks and – oh the unmanliness of it – the complimentary blanket? The daylight is dazzling outside the emphatically closed window shutter.
No matter. Even watching Casino Royale with the headphones at full volume, I cannot escape the sleeping, snoring giants around me. I do wish that supple, outstretched hand of the stewardess would clamp shut some jaws or, if necessary, pour a drink over the passenger’s head.
The use of e-mail has disturbed the axis of power. The point of telephoning a big shot in the office was to see if they would take your call. It signified priority and urgency. E-mails can be exchanged between times, filling up the spaces of a working day. So I was delighted to hear of the fashion for “double calling” as a way of demonstrating power rather than eliciting information. One particular Hollywood producer has refined a system of getting assistants to phone a number of key industry figures. As soon as the phone is picked up, they ring off. At the moment the assistant’s call is connecting, the producer can phone and be sure of getting voicemail. He leaves a message asking the engaged callee to phone back. A note is then taken of who calls back and how quickly. Deals stand or fall by the respectfully swift response. When they get through to the producer, he says it was nothing in particular, just a social call.
We have become used to music as a background accompaniment to our lives. Does this affect our minds? A liberal-minded GP that I know casually observed the other day that he was astonished by the number of teenagers who listened to music while revising for exams. He calculated that it lessened the brain’s ability to absorb information by about 30 per cent. Yet schools did not seem to think it worth mentioning. Isn’t this worthy of study?
I am mounting a campaign to save Freema Agyeman, who plays Martha Jones, Dr Who’s assistant. She replaced Billie Piper, who was popular for being blonde and working class and for having a messy, tearful private life. Martha is black, cool-headed and training to be a doctor. Audience focus groups are wobbly about her and the BBC is said to be considering dropping her. Is psychodrama essential for popularity? I remember Nigella Lawson telling me that she feared envy rather than pity from other women. Have we lost the capacity for admiration? Will only victims do in public life?
Sarah Sands is a journalist and broadcaster and former editor of The Sunday Telegraph
