Masculinity, Sex and Popular Culture

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When Calvin Klein launched his men's underwear campaign, in 1982, shot by Bruce Weber with the now iconic image of a muscular male model (and ex-pole vaulter) wearing nothing more than a pair of y-fronts he created a storm of publicity. The billboard images, displayed in 25 bus shelters in New York were all stolen in the first night. Three years later Tim Lyon's advert for Levi's 501 jeans featuring the model Nick Kamen stripping to his boxer shorts in a launderette was similarly met with a media furore and a public reception veering between amusement, excitement and embarrassment.Sexualised representations of the male body were to become key to the success of the advertising campaigns and pillars of the marketing strategies of both companies (and several imitators) from that moment onwards. These images presenting masculinity as sexual spectacle were beginning to emerge within a wider culture where, what was then described as, 'body consciousness' was gaining popularity and becoming a mainstream interest. Nonetheless, these eroticised, and in some cases overtly homoerotic, images were still something of a rarity, indeed their scarcity was key to their frisson and appeal.Now in the 21st century images of sexualised masculinity that were relatively unusual less than 30 years ago have become part and parcel of media culture from the margins to the mainstream. Gossip magazines to charity calendars, pop videos to cosmetics commercials, Soap Opera to Reality TV, Hollywood cinema to internet pornography all routinely present images of men and masculinity as invitations for sexual pleasure. Images that might once have been described variously as homoerotic, pornographic or obscene are now routinely deployed in media products and inform the way that men think of their bodies and represent themselves online. Whilst such images have become increasingly commonplace and the rapid shifts in media technologies that have taken place in the 21st century have meant that access to representations of sexualised of masculinity have become ever easier there remains a paucity, or at least an inconsistency, in the extent of scholarly research in this area. In part this is to do with a perennial embarrassment that can often overshadow the discussion of sexual materials more generally, especially those that represent men. It is also perhaps that such representations are often regarded as seeming so obvious in their intent that they are beneath critical attention. This absence has meant that important questions around the evolving cultural construction of masculinity, aligned to debates around the so called 'sexualisation' of culture remain unanswered and this is precisely why this topic is of crucial importance and needs to be investigated.This 24-month research network, emerging out of a recently commissioned Routledge book series edited by the PI and CoI, will bring together scholars of international standing, early career researchers and experts and commentators from outside of academia to explore the debates around the contemporary sexualisation of masculinity and to set an agenda for subsequent research. The network will organize three meetings across three European cities with an associated public engagement event at each site. We will develop a website to share the findings of our research and to foster dialogue, we will commission new monographs and an edited collection and will prepare and publish a report on sexualized masculinity that can be used by cultural industries, educators, health professionals, policy makers and the media.