/ornaMENtation
Men Clothed, Unclothed
Article by Chelsea G. Summers
I once fucked a man solely because I saw him changing from his civvies into his bartending clothes and caught a quick and dashing sight of him in his purple low-rise bikini underwear. It was 1984, and at 21, I had never seen a man in anything but either my previous boyfriends’ white Jockeys or my dad’s frighteningly ugly flappy boxers. That bartender’s provocative grape bikini undies got him laid, if only that once.
And yet even as these grape bikini manties held a magical power over my jejune erotic imagination, they also neatly represent a paradox, and that is this: It’s simply easier to be half-naked and hot as a woman than it is to be half-naked and hot as a man.
I aver that statement as a woman with great love for male bodies. Their naked sloping chests with their vulnerable nipples. Their V-backs with the spine running like a river to the foothills of their ass. Their hard, sweeping thighs and Henry VIII calves, tight and high as a greyhound’s testicles. Their cocks, of course, and their testicles, their mossy pubic hair and their mushroomy scent. I have a great appreciation for male bodies of a vast sweep of landscape—long and flat as Nebraska skyline, round and succulent as New Hampshire hills. I can see the beauty in a man’s instep. And yet I recognize that in showing their physical beauties men are at a loss.
There is one distinct advantage to being a woman, and that is our ability to be tasty in dishabille. We women look good stripped of practically everything. We’re hot with our socks on. We’re hot with our shoes on. We’re hot with our skivvies on. We’re hot with an undershirt and nothing else. We’re hot, in short, in varying states of undress, and men, sadly, are not. Ok, there is one more: our shocking array of interesting undergarments. Women’s lingerie, like women’s sex toys, are just unequivocally better.
For these reasons, I feel for male strippers. As a chick who has stripped, I understand how so little shiny Lycra and so much Lucite can make or break a nearly naked outfit. A pink whisper of a g-string and a pair of six-inch platforms does a female body good. A male body has to work inordinately hard to overcome the faint taint of ridiculousness that wafts around his g-string-and-shoe-combo. And while a chick has many permutations of g-string and footwear from which to choose, a dude does not. Pretty much he’s going to rock some flavor of boyshorts or (a more iffy choice) jock-strap and combat boots. That’s it. Maybe motocross boots. There’s just not much to choose from.
The unprofessionally naked men have it yet much harder. Tom Cruise’s Ray-Banned, popped-collar white shirt, tighty-whitey Risky Business look is, in fact, for the average dude, risky business. Part of the issue is that the vast majority of men’s underwear looks absurd. To my aesthetics—and I admit that beautiful unmentionables are as much in the eye of the beholder as any other kind of beauty—there are exactly two sorts of male underpants that are attractive. One is the very high-end, old-fashioned, buttons and all British-style boxer; the other is the modern boxer brief (and even those have some serious ugly from time to time). That’s it. I wish there were more, dear god, I wish there were. There aren’t.
Indeed, in terms of ornamenting the male body, pickings remain mighty slim. There is the gorgeously cut suit; there is the rough-and-tumble of denim and a t-shirt in all its full spectrum of cowboy to biker to slacker to rapper to rocker and all their attendant masculine glory. There are uniforms (firefighter, soldier, cop or USPS) for those who love a man in one. There is the panoply of jock beauty—surfer, skier, footballer, or Norwegian Olympic curler. There are preps and there are perps, and both archetypes have a dress code, and they each glow resplendent. De gustibus non est disptundum, in clothing as in all other matters of taste, and yet there remains a problem—a very narrow corridor for men to walk and be beautiful, at least in mainstream culture.
Cocks, it appears, are hard to dress and even harder to undress. Moreover, this cultural stricture narrowly bound as a cock-ring is not merely problematic, but telling.
(Permit me the whimsy of a slim digression. I do love the cock-ring. The cock-ring is one accessory whose function outstrips its form. Nothing makes a cock stand out so loud and proud and blood-bursting as a cock-ring. The lift and conquer power of a cock-ring makes a Wonderbra look like a slacker. Cock-rings defy more than gravity; they defy biophysics. I take my hat off to cock-rings, metaphorically.)
A modern dandy by Alexander McQueen
In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence gives this sartorial gendered dilemma—along with so many other issues—to his Gamekeeper to articulate in his painfully dialect (I can’t help it, but when I read the Gamekeeper, I hear the voice of Willy the Groundskeeper; I cannot imagine that Dan Castellaneta is what Lawrence had in mind). The Gamekeeper, frustrated with “modern” gender roles points to the hydra of industrialization and emasculation. He imagines telling the men of the world, “Take yer clothes off an' look at yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead.”
He continues his manifesto: “I'd get my men to wear different clothes: ‘appen close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women 'ud begin to be women. It's because th' men aren't men, that th' women have to be.”
Typical Lawrence gender essentialism aside, you have to give the British bastard his due. History is on the side of dandies. In the eighteenth century, men sported fantastic wigs, baroque brocade coats and shiny sateen trousers. They swept through rooms trailing snuff and sword-knots. Renaissance men wore giant, stuffed codpieces. The world revolved around their needy, greedy, genial genitals. Medieval men were, when not abject penitents, brightly colored as their simple fabric dyes would allow them. And don’t even get me started on religious figures, their purples and their scarlets. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that men in the West started to go as dull as female songbirds.
And many cultures have celebrated the male body in all its partially draped pulchritude. Somehow only ours has made it—all unbuttoned jeans, coy smile, fake-fur rug, and Playgirl soft lighting—a thing of faint ludicrousness.
I wonder if we haven’t been trained to see men’s bodies as somehow either silly or stark because to see them as exciting upsets the bourgeois applecart. We angels in the house can’t be walking about with lust in our heart, not if we’re going to be properly focused on self-abnegation and hard Protestant work ethic. Likewise, to give men the permission to wear red trousers is to give them a blank check to sexuality. Boardrooms run on sublimation (and rock ‘n roll, pop, and hip-hop all bank on it). No one ever writes guides for men on why and how not to dress too sexy for work. Unless you shop at International Male, you’ve nothing to worry about.
I never thought that I’d say I agree with Lawrence on anything, but I too would like to see men in red trousers (they can ditch the little white jackets). I’d like to see more men celebrate their legs, their asses and their cocks, though that may be a purely selfish desire. I’m fond of my boyfriend’s body; he looks swell in his t-shirt and jeans. I just wish his manties weren’t so, well, heinous. I’m beginning to believe, however, that the issue lays less in his panties than in my brain. It’s time to put the “men” back in ornamentation.
May I suggest beginning with a basic black cock-ring? They go so well with every occasion.
He continues his manifesto: “I'd get my men to wear different clothes: ‘appen close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women 'ud begin to be women. It's because th' men aren't men, that th' women have to be.”
Typical Lawrence gender essentialism aside, you have to give the British bastard his due. History is on the side of dandies. In the eighteenth century, men sported fantastic wigs, baroque brocade coats and shiny sateen trousers. They swept through rooms trailing snuff and sword-knots. Renaissance men wore giant, stuffed codpieces. The world revolved around their needy, greedy, genial genitals. Medieval men were, when not abject penitents, brightly colored as their simple fabric dyes would allow them. And don’t even get me started on religious figures, their purples and their scarlets. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that men in the West started to go as dull as female songbirds.
And many cultures have celebrated the male body in all its partially draped pulchritude. Somehow only ours has made it—all unbuttoned jeans, coy smile, fake-fur rug, and Playgirl soft lighting—a thing of faint ludicrousness.
I wonder if we haven’t been trained to see men’s bodies as somehow either silly or stark because to see them as exciting upsets the bourgeois applecart. We angels in the house can’t be walking about with lust in our heart, not if we’re going to be properly focused on self-abnegation and hard Protestant work ethic. Likewise, to give men the permission to wear red trousers is to give them a blank check to sexuality. Boardrooms run on sublimation (and rock ‘n roll, pop, and hip-hop all bank on it). No one ever writes guides for men on why and how not to dress too sexy for work. Unless you shop at International Male, you’ve nothing to worry about.
I never thought that I’d say I agree with Lawrence on anything, but I too would like to see men in red trousers (they can ditch the little white jackets). I’d like to see more men celebrate their legs, their asses and their cocks, though that may be a purely selfish desire. I’m fond of my boyfriend’s body; he looks swell in his t-shirt and jeans. I just wish his manties weren’t so, well, heinous. I’m beginning to believe, however, that the issue lays less in his panties than in my brain. It’s time to put the “men” back in ornamentation.
May I suggest beginning with a basic black cock-ring? They go so well with every occasion.
- 03/02/2010
