Seen And Consumed
There is a difference between being seen and being looked at. I noticed this in my massage room, repeatedly, over thirty years. A man who was being looked at—who was aware of himself as an object of another person’s attention, being assessed from outside—was in a different condition from a man who was simply present in the room and being attended to.
The first man was performing, or managing, or monitoring. The second man was somewhere else—somewhere more interior, somewhere that had stopped requiring the performance because the conditions of the room were not requesting it. The distinction sounds simple. In practice, the gap between the two states was everything.
I find myself returning to this distinction when I think about what has happened to the male body in the visual culture I have lived in and have been watching change, not abstractly but in the specific form of the men who arrived with what that culture had made of them.
The male body has never been more visible than it is now. The screen presence of the male body—in cinema, in pornography, in the amateur and semi-professional content of digital platforms—is orders of magnitude larger than at any previous point in history. The action star whose abdominal definition was achieved through months of specific training and then photographed with specific lighting and then processed through specific post-production is available to anyone with a screen.
The amateur video produced by a man with a phone and an OnlyFans account is available to anyone with a subscription. The algorithm that I have read delivers bare-chested male images at a measurably higher rate than clothed ones—a European study I came across suggested a 28% boost—ensures that the economy of the male body’s visibility operates at a scale that has no historical precedent.
And yet what I have read about men’s relationship to their bodies, and what I observed in the room, suggests that all this visibility has not produced a proportionate increase in ease. The men who came to me in the later years of my practice—the years when the digital visual economy was already operating at the scale I have described—were not more comfortable in their bodies than the men who came in the earlier years. Some of them were less comfortable. They had more images to measure against, and the images were more curated, and the curation had made the distance between the image and the actual body more precisely visible rather than less.
What I’ve read about early cinema suggests that the male body was present in ways that the subsequent regulatory history tried to contain. The physique performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Eugen Sandow being the most famous example—were photographed in poses that invited exactly the aesthetic contemplation of the male body that the broader culture simultaneously treated as problematic. The photographs were sold. The exhibitions were attended. The looking was there from the beginning. What the regulatory frameworks produced was not the elimination of that looking but its channelling into specific forms that carried specific justifications—the athletic context, the artistic context, the classical alibi.
The Golden Age cinema managed the male body through a specific set of conventions. The matinee idol was strong, chiselled, visibly capable—a body that performed its own competence through its appearance. The sensuality was present, and various observers have traced it in the specific kinds of camera work, the specific angles and lighting, the specific situations that placed the body in states of undress that the narrative could justify. The body was being looked at. The looking was managed through the narrative’s plausibility.
What happened in the 1960s and 1970s with what film historians call the Porno Chic period removed, briefly and then incompletely, the narrative justification requirement. Films like Deep Throat brought explicit sexual content into something approaching mainstream distribution in America, and for a period the male body in its sexual function was available to cinematic viewing without the usual alibi. This period ended—was ended, through legal and commercial pressure—but it left a residue in the visual culture, and what the residue contained was the explicit association of the unclothed male body with its sexual function, in a context of legitimate commercial distribution.
What I find interesting about the subsequent history is how that association hardened. A USC study found that the hyper-sexualisation of the male body in mainstream cinema increased dramatically from 2007 onward—action stars presented through specific camera work that emphasised the body’s sexual charge alongside its physical capability. The male body in mainstream cinema had been objectified for much of the Golden Age, but with a new intensity in the recent decades.
The body was being looked at with an increasingly explicit awareness that it was being looked at as a sexual object. And the men who were buying cinema tickets and eventually streaming subscriptions were watching themselves, or a version of themselves, or a version of themselves that had been specifically assembled to exceed what any actual self could achieve, being responded to as a sexual object for a particular kind of audience.
I noticed men had absorbed this—the awareness of being potentially a sexual object—without it having reliably produced the ease that being desired might theoretically produce. The awareness was anxiety-generating in ways that parallel what I have described about the Augustinian inheritance. The body made available for looking carries the charge of having been looked at in a specific way. The man who has grown up knowing that the male body in cinema is presented as sexually charged arrives in his own body with the awareness that his body too might be perceived in those terms, and that the perception might or might not correspond to the reality, and that the gap between the two is what the assessment he is conducting on himself is attempting to measure.
The pornography industry has a distinct and important role in this history that I want to address briefly. I have read about its evolution from the studio-based production of the 1970s and 1980s, with professional performers and something approaching a narrative framework, through to the amateur content explosion of the 2000s and the creator economy of OnlyFans. What this trajectory has produced, as far as I can observe it from outside the industry and from what it deposited in the men who came to me, is a situation in which the male body’s sexual function is available for viewing at almost unlimited scale and variety, but in which the predominant grammar of that viewing remains one of performance rather than experience.
The male body in pornographic content is not primarily a body having an experience. It is a body being watched having a performance. This is a distinction that matters enormously to what I was doing in the room, and that matters to the question of what men learn from the visual culture about what their bodies are for. The body performing for a camera is the body in the condition I described at the start of this essay as being looked at rather than simply present. It is the body monitoring itself, managing itself, producing the expected output for the audience. Everything about that body is directed outward. The question it is answering is: am I doing this right? Is this what is expected? Is the performance succeeding?
What I was offering in the room was the opposite condition. Not performance for an audience, but experience for the person inside the body. The camera was not there. The metrics were not there. What was there was the body and the work and whatever the body found in the conditions the work created. Whether the body’s experience was photogenic was irrelevant. Whether it looked like the pornographic ideal was irrelevant. What was relevant was what the body actually felt.
The digital platforms have added a layer to this that was not present for most of the three decades I worked. The algorithmic governance of male body content—the 28% boost for bare-chested images I mentioned, alongside the moderation systems that flag nudity in body-positive contexts, that apparently flag non-white creators’ bodies faster than white creators’ with identical content—suggests a system that has extended the long historical pattern of managing the male body through institutional authority into an automated form.
The authority is no longer the Council of Trent or the Lord Chamberlain or the Comstock office. It is a recommender system and a content moderation algorithm, making decisions at scales and speeds that no human authority could match, with consequences for what men see of other men’s bodies and what they therefore understand their own bodies to be.
What the algorithm favours is the curated body—the body that has been prepared for the platform’s visual economy, that generates the engagement the platform monetises. The ordinary body, the body that simply exists without having been assembled toward a specification, is not the body the algorithm amplifies. The algorithm is doing, at vast computational scale, what the naturist magazine’s photographer was doing with strategic poses and a paintbrush in the 1930s: producing a version of the male body from which the problematic parts have been managed, while profiting from the body’s visibility in the process.
Is digital visibility liberation or commodification? This seems to me to dissolve, on examination, into a more specific question: visibility for whom, in what conditions, on whose terms? The man who controls his own image and its distribution, who chooses what to show and to whom and for what purpose, is in a different situation from the man whose image is harvested by a platform that profits from it while subjecting it to automated moderation that reflects neither his culture nor his intention. Both men are more visible than any previous generation of men. Whether visibility and liberation are the same thing depends entirely on who is doing the seeing and what is being done with what is seen.
I find myself returning to the massage room. The men who came were not visible to anyone else. What happened there was not recorded, not shared, not subjected to algorithmic assessment. The body in that room was seen by the person doing the work and by the person inside the body. The seeing was attended by attention rather than by assessment. The body was not being consumed. It was simply being given the conditions in which it might find something out.
Whether that was liberation I cannot say. What I can say is that it was different, in character, from everything the visual economy outside the room was providing. And the difference mattered to the men who came.
You are here: Uncovered