QX (British magazine)

Transcription

Good evening, my name is Ben Campkin and I'm director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and it's a great pleasure to welcome you all here this evening for tonight's event, "BEEFCAKE: Gay Men and the Body Beautiful", a panel discussion about gay men and body image. We had two main themes in mind when we started thinking about tonight's event, and they are interconnected themes. On the one hand we want to explore the role that gyms and the muscled body have played in gay culture and experience, and we've borrowed the title 'beefcake' from Tom Fitzgerald's 1998 film which looks at gay subculture around fitness magazines in the 1950s. The second thing that we wanted to address was issues of body image, body idealism and body image anxiety as they relate to gay men, and this is something that I'm sure you're very much aware of as a matter of public debate generally. So we've got a great line-up of speakers and there'll be a chance for you to respond as well at the end, we're leaving plenty of time for discussion. We're very grateful to Professor Michael King, who is head of UCL Mental Health Sciences, for chairing the debate. Michael is a psychiatric epidemiologist and also does work on LGBT issues around stress and stigma that LGBT face, so it's great that he's charing since he has such relevant research. So at this point I'll hand over to Michael and he'll introduce our speakers. >>Thank you all for coming. I'm going to chair this and try and keep some order. This is not a debate, it's more of a discussion, but I'm going to try to keep people strictly to time. As Ben said, I'm the director for Mental Health Sciences here at UCL. We've been interested for some time in Mental Health issues, wellbeing and so forth in gay men and lesbians, and it's interesting to even here your introduction, but this situation has been well known to the mental health field now probably since the early 1980s. We've been aware that there's been body image disturbance particularly around eating disorders in gay men. It first really appeared in the 1980s, or first was recognised, and at that time it was felt that it was a conflicted state of men who were very unhappy about being gay. But as it progressed into the '90s it became clear that the body image was more focused on increased muscularity and the sort of things we're going to hear about tonight. And so it's really morphed a little bit into this situation, but it's been a well known problem within mental health, at least recognition of it, what we do about it of course is a completely different thing. Now I'm going to introduce each speaker as we go so that they've got time to get up here and arrange their audio visuals if they've got them. I'm going to sit over there as I've told the speakers, and I'm going to wave my parliamentary papers if they're getting near time. So we're starting a bit early, so I'm going to be easy on people but generally after about twelve minutes I'll expect people to stop. Okay, it's my pleasure first to introduce - they're sitting the row, we got them to sit in the order in which they're going to come up here and speak. And first of all is Duncan Stephenson, who is standing in for the previously advertised speaker, Rosie, whom we had but Duncan as well is head of external affairs the Central YMCA. He tells me he's been involved in a campaign for body image confidence, and has been giving evidence for what I understand for what is a parliamentary or government enquiry at the moment into body image problems in society. So, Duncan, over to you. >>Central YMCA is part of the Campaign for Body Confidence and it consists of a number of different organisations, but Central YMCA is a national health and education charity. Through our work with young people we've identified body image anxiety and body image obsession as a particular issue and it impacts on their self esteem, confidence and wellbeing. From our work in the health and fitness sector, we know that body image is one of those perennial barriers to participation in sports, physical activity and exercise. We know that body image is influenced by many different factors, many of them are outside the areas in which we work. But advertising, the media, fashion, celebrity culture and businesses such as cosmetic surgery and the diet industry all have a part to play. Within our sector, Central YMCA is doing stuff. Education is key and we're giving young people the space and a place to explore their body image and to counter the daily onslaught of images presented to them in the media, for example. Together with the University of Westminster we're developing resources for schools and in particular for teachers, because our research finds that in particular teachers also have their own body image issues. With health and fitness, it's harder. We all know that looking the part and achieving the body image ideal are part and parcel of gym culture and gay gym culture. But while this appears to some, it also deters a lot of people. About 12% of people in the UK are members of a gym, and between 10% and one third of people meet the recommended amount of physical activity each week. So there's something not quite working. Now we did a naked photo shoot in our gym last summer. And that's the result. I'm not in it, because I have my own body image issues, but what we do know is that two-thirds of the public are intimidated by gyms and the people who use them, and we also know that three out of four people need to do more to attract people of different shapes and sizes. But it's not just about gyms, it's also about physical activity, wherever that takes place. We're working with the government Equality Office and organisations such as Sport England to respond to this. Anyway, now onto the male body image research. Now you might have seen this in the press, in the media. At the YMCA we're uniquely placed to look at this issue from both a male and a female perspective. Many of the organisations involved in the Campaign for Body Confidence look at it from a female perspective. We can actually look at it from a male perspective as well. We know that not a lot of research is being done into male body image anxiety and male body image issues. So we conducted this research to better understand the extent to which body image anxiety is or isn't a problem, and together with the Centre for Appearance Research, based at the University of the West of England and the Succeed Foundation, we undertook an online survey to better understand men's attitudes to body image and their appearance and the extent to which they engage in conversation about bodies. Before I show you some of the results there are a few caveats. It is a small sample, just under 400 men. The average age is 38, the youngest is 18, the oldest is 70 years old. The average BMI was 25.7, so tipping into the overweight category, for whatever that means, and ethnicity and educational attainment were fairly representative. We deliberately recruited a high number of gay men to take part in the survey because we know from previous research that gay men are more sensitive to this issue. Half of the people who took part were members of a gym, and again that is higher than the norm. So bearing in mind that, we looked at the extent to which men engage in what's called 'body talk', conversation about your appearance which reinforces or endorses the western ideal, the dominant western ideal of male attractiveness. We looked at men's satisfaction with their appearance and influences on their appearance, taking each in turn. Body talk: we found that four in five men engage in body talk, and gay men are significantly more likely to say they use body talk in comparison to straight men. Gay men are also significantly more likely to say that their friends and family members use body talk in comparison to straight men. Now what's wrong with that? In terms of the effect, around 60% of people say that body talk affects them personally, and most of them in a negative way. Some of the quotes that we had from the research: "causes feelings of regret and self disgust," "makes me aware of imperfections in my own body," "I despair of the images gay men are meant to adhere to." However, body talk does motivate a smaller number of people who feel that it recognises hard work in the gym. Men engage in body talk for a variety of different reasons. For gay men, the main responses were hearing another man talk negatively their appearance, or, after seeing another man with the ideal body image. The second area that we looked at with the research was men's satisfaction with their appearance. Now the headline grabbing stat was that one third of men would trade a year of life to achieve their ideal body. The figure is half as half for gay men; half of gay men would do that. Possibly, what's quite concerning is that 10% of gay men would trade a decade of life to achieve their ideal body, much higher than for straight men. But digging beneath that headline grabbing stat, I think the overwhelming finding from the research is the extent to which men, and remember that half of these are men who use gyms, are unhappy with their level of muscularity. Four in five men want to be more muscular, two-thirds don't believe their arms and chest are muscly enough, over half would be more confident if they had more muscularity. And maybe this explains why one-third of men take protein supplements. One-fifth are on a high protein diet, and one in eight would consider taking steroids. And that actually mirrors research we did last year with young people, where young guys average age of 14, about 10% would take steroids to achieve their ideal body shape or size. We finally looked at the influences on male body image, male body image anxiety, and I've just got one slide that sums it up. One in four gay men said that media messages about body shape and size were extremely important to them. Two thirds of gay men would like to look like the models on the front covers of magazines. So what conclusions can we draw from this research? Bearing in mind the small sample size, it does provide a useful snapshot and reinforces or confirms previous research that it's not just women who suffer from body image anxiety. For the YMCA this is useful to know. Anyone who knows the YMCA knows that we're about health in mind, body and spirit. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make the best with what you've got - of aspiring and working hard, but we also know that when concern with body image becomes obsession and can prompt unhealthy behaviours, whether that's overexercising, disordered eating, or undertaking quick fixes, there may be a problem. Body image is a very complex subject. We're not lecturing people, that's not what the YMCA is about. But we do want to raise awareness of this subject, and prompt a debate and discussion, and we welcome tonight's discussion. Having said that, we are a health and education charity, and when one in four men say that body image anxiety stops them from exercising or going to the them, then we think that's a problem. When about 10% of men say they'd consider taking steroids to achieve their body image ideal, then we think that's an issue. And when body image anxiety causes men to feel depressed, particularly gay men to feel depressed about themselves, then we want to address this. Do any of you know Central YMCA club? We run a program there called Positive Health, which is an exercise referral program for people living with HIV, and back in the day people living with HIV, the medication would sometimes lead to side-effects, such as lipodystrophy, a visible stigmata that you're living with a condition, and some of the men on the program really welcomed the nonjudgement and diverse environment that Central YMCA Club provides and welcomes this campaign. There will always be health clubs, including YMCA - we are one, we don't represent the whole YMCA movement, but target men and women who want to achieve 'the body beautiful', and there's nothing wrong with that. But for us, the benefits of exercise and activity go way beyond that, and actually there's plenty of academic research that shows that if you exercise for reasons other than the body beautiful you're more likely to sustain your interest. So where do we go from here? As Michael said, Central YMCA is involved in a parliamentary group. We actually established an all party parliamentary group on body image and we're currently conducting an enquiry into the causes and consequence of body image anxiety. We've heard from people such as Matthew Todd, who kindly came along last week, some of the country's biggest advertisers, youth organisations and the diet and cosmetic surgery industry. Later this month we'll hear from the fashion and fitness industries. There is a public consultation, and if you'd like to make your voice heard then please go to that website and there is a consultation form there. Once the consultation closes we'll produce a report with a number of policy recommendations for government, industry and others. In terms of gay men and body image, I'm sure you'll hear a lot tonight, the situation is complex, but I certainly believe that insecurity about the way we look isn't helped by the endless parade of unattainable and unrealistic images in advertising and the media. It seems there's a growing trend to judge people against these benchmarks, and that's not healthy, particularly for young gay men. We need to crack down on industries that make a fast buck out of supposedly helping people feel better about themselves. Thank you for inviting us to take part, and it's nice to be hear talking about the YMCA and not talking about the Village People song. >> Our next speaker, Mark Simpson, who's a journalist, writer and broadcaster, he's contributed to many leading periodicals and newspapers, but most famously probably, he's attributed to have been the first to use the term 'metrosexual', which was in the '90s. So Mark, over to you. >> Thank you. I want to thank Duncan for his presentation, which highlights the downsides of what we might call 'obsessive body image'. I'm going to highlight the upside. Well, not really, but in a way. More to the point, actually, I'm going to try and outline what role gay men have played in indoctrinating the culture, and actually kind of redesigning the male body. And it goes back at least to 1980, the YMCA, but further really, you can go back to AMG Physique in the 1950s, and one of the contributors, one of the most famous contributors to those physique pictorial magazines was somebody called Tom of Finland, who you might have heard of. I'm going to read from an article I wrote a few years ago about an exhibition of Tom of Finland drawings. "The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a well-thumbed seven pound issue of Fiesta, a top shelf favourite of schoolboys in the 1970s. The image, buried at the back, was in a small ad for more specialised publications, probably missed by most of my school chums who had thumbed the issue before me. But it jumped out at me like an outsized erection. It depicted a pair of muscular, butch young men with big chins and broad grins, grabbing each other's bubble butts and straining packets, while winking at the reader. I immediately rushed out to the post office to buy as many postal orders as I could afford. Although I was sorely disappointed with the lame, biker boy leather fetish magazine with no Tom of Finland drawings which turned up, I spent much of my adult life, and a fortune on gym membership, trying to recreate that Tom of Finland image that I glimpsed as a teen. Not very successfully. I needn't have bothered, however, because as it turned out, the whole world was going to become a Tom of Finland drawing. His sensualised, cartoonish uber-male body and its endless potentil for pleasure and pleasuring have become as common as, well, shameless male hussies. Think of the rugby player Austin Healey pulsating on BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing in a tight pants and a sleeveless top, or all those footballers keen to strip off and show their assets on the side of busses. But notes for artists' retrospectives usually make extravagant claims and those for a major retrospective of Tom of Finland in Liverpool's Annual Homotopia queer cultural festival make some very extravagant ones indeed. I quote, 'Tom had an effect on global culture, unmatched by that of virtually any other artist,' we are told. But for once, there's something to that hyperbole. Despite the debatable artistic merit of his drawings, Tom was born Touko Laaksonen - sorry about my Finnish - in Kaarina, Finland in 1920, and his work is literally the masturbatory fantasies of a young homosexual Finnish boy. He began drawing in his locked bedroom in the 1940s, pencil in one hand, penis in the other. His fetishised, over-observed, long-distance gay appropriation of masculinity has, in a mediated, long-distance world, become masculinity. It's often said that Tom's greatest achievement was in drawing gay men who were masculine, happy and proud at a time when they were supposed to be effeminate, neurotic and shameful. This is certainly the reason why so many gay men are Tom devotees, wittingly or not. Today's gay porn is merely filthy footnotes to Tom, endlessly replaying the narrative of regular guys with very irregular sized penises and pectorals, having spontaneous, shameless sex, at the drop of a monkey wrench. But when you look at Tom's drawings, it becomes apparent that his achievement goes much further than just making gay men feel good about themselves or love the snugness of leather harnesses. Tom, who worked as an illustrator in the Finnish advertising business until the early '70s, when he became a full-time gay propagandist, sold the male body as a pleased, pleasuring and pleasured thing, several decades before Calvin Klein thought of it. In the middle of the 20th-century, Tom was effectively sketching the blueprint of 21st-century man, and boy, was he blue. Before Tom, almost no one drew men like he did, making them such unabashed sex objects and sex subjects, giving them such exaggerated male secondary and primary sexual characteristics: big chins, strong jaws, full lips. Masculinity and virility end up looking so nurturing, buxom, busty. Tom's men have round, firm breasts, saucer-like areolas, and nipples you could adjust your thermostat with. One picture from 1962 shows a young man strutting down the street, biceps bulging, chest literally bursting out of his shirt - let's see if I can actually find that. Yes, and dressing very much to the left. [Laughter] No wonder he's being followed. His saucy, curvaceousness is a testament to the way in which aestheticised hyper-masculinity is oddly androgyne. While Tom's men may have had their tits out for the lads, the kind of Tom-ish male body he helped to invent is nowadays getting them out for the lads and lasses, gay or straight, online or in realtime. I'll show you a picture of a contemporary figure, also with his tits out. I don't know if you'll recognise this chap, Mikey Sorrentino, star of Jersey Shore, a big hit reality show in the U. S., and spawning spin-offs here like Georgie Shore, perhaps somebody's seen that. Interesting comparison. Clever man, that Tom. Likewise, Tom's drawings always reveal the male derrière as a sexual organ. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of that. Not just in some of the more hardcore examples but the way that Tom-ish buttocks are so spherical, so sensual, so inviting. One of the most striking and prescient sketches from 1981 is also one of the tamest, a row of be-denimed male bubble butts sticking out at a bar, awaiting perhaps the attentions of the hugely powerful Abercrombie and Fitch photographer Bruce Weber, a big Tom fan, or perhaps the vaselined, wide-angled lens of a Levi commercial. Tom's big break came in the 1950s with Physique Pictorial, an underground semi-legal gay American fanzine disguised as a straight men's body building magazine, which frequently put Tom's men on the cover. Oh yes, by the way, this is the boys from Geordie Shore. He's very shy, obviously. [Laughter.] They are in Newcastle. Doesn't look like we've got that Physique Pictorial cover after all. Nevermind. Half a century later, and seventeen after Tom's death in 1991, the world is literally inverted. Flesh and blood men who look like Tom's drawings appear on the cover of bestselling corporate mags, such as Men's Health. Flick one open and you'll find it's full of advice on how straight men can turn themselves into something Tom-ish, or straight-ish. Very charming young man. If Tom did the designing, I'm going to look at how the construction is done. This is another article from a few years ago, this one was in the Guardian. 'Roids may sound as '80s as Cher's black lace bodice, but they're back, even bigger and bustier than ever. According to a series of recent reports, steriods or 'juice' or 'gear' to the initiated, once an exotic judge of cheating athletes and freaky body builders have entered the mainstream and have become just another lifestyle product for young men. Some boys as young as twelve are reportedly taking the drug, though not very many. And this despite the frightening possible side-effects meticulously listed in these press reports, including liver, heart and kidney damage, atrophied testicles, erectile dysfunction, depression and raised aggression, though arguably you could experience most of these symptoms if you support Arsenal FC. The key to this mainstreaming of steroids is vanity. If you want to get into people's bloodstream these days, promise to make them like what they see in the smoke glass gym mirror. According to the surveys, a large majority of young men using the gear are not doing so to be stronger or faster or scarier, all traditionally acceptable masculine ambitions, but to look more attractive, to look shaggable, or just make you look. In other words, young men are taking steroids the way that many gay party boys have taken them for years, to look good on the beach, or dance floor, or webcam. Muscle Marys, as they're called by envious, less muscular gays, are apparently no longer a strictly gay phenomenon. Muscle Marys are where masculinity is at, Mary. It shouldn't be so surprising. We don't really need surveys to tell us this. It is, after all, happening right before our eyes. It's the media that has mainlined steroids into the culture and our kids. Unlike say, very skinny girls, very muscular boys are very popular. An anti-size hero campaign like that we've seen against size zero is somewhat unlikely. Steroids are an essential, prescribed even part of the way that the male body has been farmed and packaged for our consumptions since it was laid off at the factory and the shipyard in the 1980s. A generation of young males have been reared on irresistibly and frequently chemically lean muscular images of the male body in sport, advertising, magazines, moves and tele. Even in the cartoons they watch and the computer games, toy dolls, or action figures, they play with it seems that all that's left of masculinity in a post-industrial, post-maternal world, apart from a science-fiction-sized penis or right foot good enough to get you into the Premier League, is a hot bod. Men and women, but especially men, will give you kudos for that. So will people casting reality TV shows, even Action Man is now a Muscle Mary. Let's see if we can find that picture. G. I. Joe 1960, G. I. 2001. God knows what he looks like now. Since the 1960s, his bicep measurements have more than doubled, from a scaled up 12 inches to 27 inches, and his chest from 44 inches to 55 inches. His current cut physique would be rather difficult to achieve just by eating corned beef hash rations, especially since as far as I'm aware, a portable plastic gym isn't one of his basic accessories. In an age when what's authentically masculine is unclear, but what's hot is in your face a nice pair of pecs, projecting synthetic manliness despite the possible risks to your actual man bits is not going out of fashion any time soon. The only effective way to discourage their use will be to come up with a new generation of muscle building drugs that work as well as steroids but have fewer side effects. I'd certainly take them. Steroids are the metrosexual hormone. They make men saleable and shaggable in an age that doesn't have much idea what else to do with them. Thank you. >> Now may I introduce Johan Andersson, who's a researcher at the School of Geography at the University of Leeds and his research focuses on a broad mix of sexuality, religion, cosmopolitan coexistence and the cultural transformation of the public sphere. And he's going to speak about this issue as arising from the AIDS crisis. >> Thanks. So I'm going to say a few words about AIDS and how that affected body culture and also a few words about the internet. So in the early 1990s, when gay culture recovered after the initial trauma of the AIDS crisis, it did so through the deployment of new aesthetic themes that emphasised cleanliness and health, and the main manifestation of this new gay culture in the UK, I think, are the gay villages in Manchester's Canal Street, and the one in Old Compton Street here in London. So what's new about these gay villages is first of all the clustering of many venues within close proximity to each other, and also they're very inviting for sods[?], in contrast to earlier gay venus which tended to be boarded up pubs in back street locations, with very discreet exteriors. These new pubs, or new bars, rather, they often have very big, open-fronted windows that expose their clientele to people passing by in the street. So it's a kind of collective coming out, if you like. The interior design of these venues is also very different. So earlier gay venues in London, apart from being dark spaces and on the outside boarded up, they were also dark spaces on the inside, with dim lighting, and in some instances, the lighting gets even dimmer during the AIDS crisis. So The London Apprentice, for example, in Old Street, they changed their lighting in the mid-'80s to conceal the very visible signs of illness on many of their customers during the AIDS crisis. In contrast, Soho's new gay bars, they conform to minimalist interior design. The traditional dark colours of the pubs have been replaced by light colours and natural light. Wooden materials also associated with the public house have been replaced with chrome, steel, sink and glass, materials which in modernist furniture design have typically been associated with machines and cleanliness, or at least the appearance of cleanliness. So this type of cleanliness aesthetic can be seen in the context of AIDS, and early writing on the health crisis noted that the emphasis is on the look of high technology in western hospitals and how medicine's impotence to treat the illness at this time was somehow compensated for in the image of gleaming chromium. Similarly, in the new gay bars an emphasis on clean surfaces and hygienic design motifs was part of the promotion of these venues as healthy spaces. The first of these bars was Manto in Manchester, which opened in 1990 and the first one in London was Village West One which opened on Hanway Street in 1991, shortly followed by Village Soho on Wardour Street. And at this time as well physical ideals begin to be reshaped with a new emphasis on youth and smooth-toned bodies, and this physical ideal is not least expressed in the particular forms of aesthetic labour that the new gay venues in Soho and Canal Street deployed. So before opening the Village bars, the owners interviewed 150 people and selected 14 young men with an average age of 21 and they deliberated went for a very fresh-faced, healthy-looking, clean-shaven type of look. The advertising for these type of bars is created by the graphic designer trademark which promotes a similar look which draws on a very classical ideal of male beauty: again, clean-shaven face and high cheek bones often reminiscent of American icons including Marlon Brando, Chet Baker and James Dean. What about the body? Well, I think it's defined rather than buff, perhaps because earlier types of gay muscle bodies, such as the Tom of Finland ideal that Mark just talked about, or the clone, or the Muscle Mary, they may indicate strength but not necessarily health. So the new physical ideal is sportier and it projects an image of a well-balanced lifestyle. It's a more sculptural body which requires much more varied equipment, so push-ups and sit-ups and weights at home may no longer be sufficient. You probably need a membership at a gym to help you achieve this very sculptural body. Another key attribute of this body is that it's hairless, smooth and silky. Again, I think this can be seen in the context of AIDS. Many unusual skin blemishes associated with disease that could potentially be hidden on a hairy body will be immediately visible on the shiny surface of this new gay body. Perhaps the ultimate symbol of the new sanitised gay culture is the go-go boy, a type of erotic dancer that both of the Village bars tried to promote here in London but which perhaps never takes off to the same extent as it does in America, where it really becomes an obligatory form of aesthetic labour from the late-1980s onwards. Again, I think it has to be seen in the context of AIDS and what happened before when New York City in particular was very famous for its very raunchy sex scene, however, in 1995 the Department of Health shuts down most of the sex clubs and the go-go boy becomes the kind of substitute that keeps the sexual economy alive and secures the circulation of capital at this moment of crisis. Another key example of this body ideal is Bruce Weber's Calvin Klein adverts. This is perhaps the moment when white underwear becomes very hegemonic in gay culture. Again, this can be seen in the context of AIDS: white is the virginal colour that symbolises innocence but also surgical colour against which one can easily detect any suspicious looking discharge associated with sexual disease. So how is this new body ideal policed? Well, as the previous commentators have suggested, it's very much about media imagery and in tandem with this new gay scene in Soho and in London generally, the new gay media comes along listing magazines such as Boys, which is launched in 1991 and then QX in 1992, which very actively promotes this body culture as well, not least by taking pictures of people with the best bodies, if you like, in their advertorials for different clubs. In some instances, the body ideal is enforced in an even more explicit way through door policies. The Roxy nightclub, which is really the heart of the muscle scene in New York in the first half of the 1990s operates a coding system whereby all potential customers are rated on a scale of 1-4 based on their bodies and the rating then determines who will be allowed into the club. I think with the internet, this fixation with ratings and numerical categorisation has been exacerbated even further. So on many of the online dating sites, you're encouraged to rate other users and of course most things you say about yourself can be reduced to number: weight, height, waist line, cock size, for example. Even in the section where you say a few words about yourself, one of the most common ways of describing yourself is by simply listing the number of occasions each week you go to the gym. And I think as some of you may know, the less you say about yourself, the more messages you get. So it's almost as if the obligatory torso shot is an empty canvas on which other people can project their sexual fantasies and of course, if you reveal something about yourself, that fantasy might fall apart. So this blank and quantitative way of presenting yourself and evaluating others may of course have some relevance if you're looking for a hook-up and have very specific sexual preferences but the internet is increasingly at the social heart of the gay community in ways that go beyond quick sex. So if you move to a new city, for example, it's often the easiest way to meet new friends, and of course when you contact people it's on the basis of this numerical criteria or on looks, then when you meet up, for whatever reason, there might not be sexual chemistry but you still are acquaintances, or you become friends, or you're introduced to this person's social circle - it seems to me that these physical and numerical criteria on these websites no longer only impact your ability to get laid but also on your chances to make friends. Another example of this sexualisation of friendship is the increasing number of gay people who use very similar type of imagery on their Facebook profiles. Facebook is of course also increasingly used in a variety of utilitarian contexts, so if you're looking for a flat share for example, it's quite common that you have to send your Facebook profile before for the people in this flat share to see if you're a good match. Or even in some professions you might be asked to send your Facebook profile. So it seems that this sexualised imagery is increasingly entering spheres which we may not automatically think of as sexual. So to conclude: the combined forces of the post-AIDS body culture and the internet, which is a very efficient and pragmatic medium, has produced a space which is perhaps now the dominant context for connecting gay people with each other, where body normativity and physical preferences are not merely implicit or hinted at but increasingly expressed in very explicit terms. So people on the internet frequently express racial preferences in a way which I think wouldn't be tolerated in other spaces, of course, with the caveat that "I'm not racist; it's just my preference." Similarly, many people describe themselves as straight-acting, masculine and manly, often asserted in very aggressive terms that no camp or effeminate person should even bother to contact them. This language, which is again presented merely as a preference should probably give us reason to pause and reflect on the very conservative and normative values it communicates. After all, one of the great qualities of our culture historically has been the ability to appropriate and subvert given gender norms. However, in the current assimilationist climate of gay politics, where the emphasis is on marriage and adoption rights, suggests a desire to join the heterosexual structures of society, we may have internalised exactly the same gender norms that used to, and one might argue, continue to oppress us. [Applause.] >>Thank you very much. We'll move quickly on to Jonathan Kemp, who's on the faculty of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College. He's a novelist and researcher and his first novel was called The London Triptych, which is a description of gay experience through male prostitution over a hundred years. And he's coming from a completely different aspect of the topic. Jonathan. >>I'm going to take the discussion into a different direction. I'm going to talk about conceptual origins of the concept of beefcake and the ways in which I see it colluding with the advent of commercial capitalism in its pursuit of the impossible ideal of masculine strength and confidence. So I called this, 'The Genealogy of Beefcake, or Having Your Beefcake and Eating It, Too.' [Laughter.] The German philosopher Theodore Adorno, in his book Negative Dialectics, reminds us that, "objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder." In other words, every time we create a concept, there's always something left out, something that doesn't fit in. Something locked off in order for the concept to function in its ideal form. Like the ugly sisters hacking off toes to squeeze their bloodied fit into the glass slipper and so marry the handsome prince, our standard ways of conceptualising inevitably distort the realities they purport to describe in order to establish a seamless identity between the concept and its object. Every concept requires conformity to its idealised form and what doesn't conform to the ideal is violently amputated in the rush to define. In other words, to define is to limit. It's never the full picture. The full picture is messier, more complex, and includes all those things that don't conform to the concept in its idealised form. Adorno calls this remainder, 'the non-identical,' and it is here where what doesn't fit in is discarded that something approaching the truth can be found. It is, he argues, 'precisely the things that do not fit in that will provide the supplement necessary for the full picture to emerge.' Every definition thus shapes reality at the expense of the truth, peddling as somehow natural or inevitable what is in actuality a conglomeration of ideology, cultural assumption and embedded historicity. Concepts have a history which is always political, charged with implicit values which nonchalantly parade themselves as self-evident, as purely and simply what is. With this in mind I'm going to talk about some of the things erased or removed from our conceptualisation of the term 'beefcake'. I'm going to focus on the non-identical, on the excluded or erased aspects of that concept, and what isn't being said when we use it. In this way I hope to expose the ideological oppressions, the violent hierarchies that lurk just outside the ring-fencing of that concept. An online slang dictionary gives us a slang definition of beefcake: "a muscularly handsome male." Offering an example of the word in use, the section: "She's been going out with a real beefcake." Immediately we are given highly gender normative and heteronormative coordinates with which to frame and focus the concept. It is always male and it's sexual orientation is towards women. Thus the concept of beefcake is in its most basic definitional level saturated with cultural assumptions about the gender and sexual orientation of the subject to whom it is attached. In other words, there is an active semantic exclusion of beefcake as gay, lesbian, female, queer or bisexual. If we turn our attention to the classic visual signifiers of beefcake, as exemplified by Bob Mizer's iconic photography for Physique Pictorial magazine in the '50s, other layers of exclusion are added to these conceptual erasures, for we find almost without exception, in the most cursory search on Google, for example, page after page of white, able-bodied males flexing their guns for the world to see. I trawled through a good couple of hundred images before I came across a single black body, and there were no images of disabled body builders at all. As Michele Foucault has shown, power relations have an immediate hold upon the body, they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. He writes, "the body is the inscribed surface of events, traced by language and dissolved by ideas; the locus of a dissociated self adopting the illusion of a substantial unity and a volume in perpetual disintegration." Foucault developed Nietzsche's methodology of a genealogy as an analysis of dissent, which is situated within the articulation of the body in history. It's task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body. The genealogy of beefcake can be seen to originate in the 1880s with Eugene Sandow, the original strong man, who entertained the American public with his musculature and feats of strength, inspiring a fascination with the perfect male body which consolidated a modern commercial form of masculinity predicated on strength, resilience and self-empowerment as the keys to success. In 1899, the magazine Physical Culture warned its readers, "weakness is a crime; don't be a criminal". From the beginning, then, body-building culture and corporate America were fuck buddies. 'Beefcake' is a capitalist fetish used to characterise the American-dream-turned-nightmare. Furthermore, Sandow's personal narrative evoked a sickly childhood transcended by self-determination, his strength in overcoming of personal deficit. He recounted being a slight and sickly child whose chances of survival were slim, and this narrative of strength and determination was mainlined into popular culture. It was at the centre of Charles Atlas's success: the seven stone weakling target of sand-kicking bullies transformed into the muscle man whom no one would mess with. As John F. Kasson comments: "the theme of metamorphosis lies at the heart of bodybuilding, and a longing for male metamorphosis lay deep in the culture of the United States and much of western Europe at the advent of the modern age." Rampant corporatism is thus intimately related to a vision of muscle bound masculinity, the development of which is coterminous with these narratives of transformation from puny boys to men of strength, confidence and power. Weakness is criminalised as capitalism stakes a claim on the power and success to be had once one has acquired the right body. Images of heroic white male superiority are used to dominate women, people of colour, disabled bodies, queer bodies and less technology advanced societies. The underside, or negative of this narrative of transformation, however, is one of shame, an unexpressed shame. Beefcake as the signifier of the sickly or bullied child. This shame articulates and informs a specifically modern form of capitalism centred on the visual. It is a shame the overcoming of which necessitates buying into the very discourse which created it thus perpetuating the cause and the effect in a vicious circle that continues with every turn to reinforce and duplicate the violent hierarchies it attempts to transcend. The abjected figure of the skinny child is buried underneath a mountain of muscles that denies its shameful origins and in so doing, perpetuates a heteronormative and capitalistic standard as destructive as it is compelling. It is the kind of 'kill or be killed' mentality at the heart of corporate capitalism and we are all its victims. The question remains whether, given its origins within heteronormative and corporate discourse, the concept of beefcake can be somehow reclaimed or 'queered' in any useful way. I'd offer the work of the female artist Francesca Steele and Heather Castle, who use an exaggerated physique to intervene in various contexts in order to interrogate systems of power, control and gender, or the work of Buck Angel, a female-to-male porn star, 'the man with the pussy', as examples of ways in which the concept of beefcake is interrogated in interesting and challenging ways. But what about gay men? In his study of sport and homosexuality, Brian Pronger tries to argue that gay muscles are a subversive take on orthodox masculinity, saturated with postmodern irony. In truth, gay muscles only reinforce the status quo by fetishising our oppression, contributing to the ongoing commodification of the body and reinforcing orthodox masculinity by worshipping it even as it crushes us in its overdeveloped arms. It's a form of Stockholm Syndrome; we love our captors. In a very real sense, our investment in the concept of beefcake reinforces an ideology that ultimately oppresses us, perpetuating a sense of shameful inadequacy, reproducing discursive overvaluations of an idealised masculinity in whose shadow we all wilt, measured against which you can only ever fall short. In the words of the drag artist and ukelele player Taylor Mack, the revolution will not be masculinised. Thank you. >> Matthew Todd is a playwright, a stand-up comedian and an award-winning journalist. He's the editor of Attitudes, so he's the problem. [Laughter.] And he's going to continue the theme, partly, of 'shame'. >>I do feel a bit shamed today. No, I'm joking, they're all really clever, what are you going to do? I'm just going to tell you about my experience. Thank you for having me, very exciting to be here talking about wellbeing, health, start my clock. I just want to tell you about when I came out when I was 16, hard to believe, in 1990, and I phoned up Child Line and they were like, 'Oh, it's probably a phase,' and I was like that was good. So I phoned a gay switchboard. They said, 'Where are you?' and I said 'In Croydon,' that's shameful as well. And they said, 'Why don't you go to a youth group called Croydon Area Gay Youth?' "CAGY" which is ironic. So they gave me the number and I phoned up and I went to meet the man who ran it. I went out and met him, I was 16 years old, had never come out to anybody in the whole word, and I went to meet him at East Croydon station at 3 o'clock in the afternoon in the Easter holidays, got back on the bus all the way to my house, I was shitting myself, it stopped at a little council estate where they held the group, which was in his bedsit. And he showed me a video of gay pride and gave me a copy of Gay Times and said 'welcome!' That was good. And so, my point being about the gay media, why it's important and why it's relevant and interesting and why gays are obsessed with their bodies, and I'm very proud to be the most out of shape person on the panel tonight, for once - yeah. Obviously we do not see many representations of ourselves wherever we look in the media, in the world. In Attitudes we do a page called Truly, Madly, Deeply. It's couples - it just shows a couple who've been together, just talking in a sickly way about their relationship, about how much they love each other, and I get so much mail about that just from young kids saying to me, 'Thank you for showing that we can have relationships.' And if you think about it you never see it anywhere else, ever. You might see it on Come Dine With Me, perhaps. There will always be the naff kind of mental ones from Canvey Island or something, but on the whole you don't see gay relationships anywhere. And I met Esther Rantzen the other day and we were talking about it and she was saying, 'You've got Elton John and David Furnish,' and that's the kind of sad reality. As much as I love them, and you had Kenny and George Michael, obviously not the most ideal role models when you're 16 years old and thinking 'can I be a grown up gay and happy?' So, it's very difficult. So we looked at gay magazines. And when I first looked through Gay Times, nothing against them much, I love them, good friends with many of them, when I first looked through Gay Times - it's full of political stuff, because it was 1990, there was a lot of political stuff going on, there was lots of porn, there was lots of drag, there was lots of crazy club pictures, lots of muscles and all the rest of it, and lots of rent boy ads, and all those other lovely things. So automatically if you're coming out and you suddenly step into gay culture, and I think it's worse now - let's try and Google 'gay' and see what comes up, I think it's nine inches long... [Laughter] Erm, it's a difficult place you're going to because it's all about sex. And I think, from what Jonathan was saying as well, the ultimate problem here is being a bit A-level student about it, capitalism, commercialist society we live in, trying to sell you things you don't need, trying to flog things to you, and I think that to me that's my experience of how gay culture grew up and how the gay magazines grew up. I'm sure you guys all know this and understand this, but just with QX and Boys, all those magazines are run, and Gay Times to some extent, are run and fuelled by advertising from gay businesses, from gay clubs, gay saunas, gay this, gay this, mostly it's all a hell of a lot of shite, and the one thing that links this all is sex. So part of the problem, I think, is that we've become obsessed with sex. We think that sex defines us, it's presented to us in that way, anything gay is sex sex sex sex and that's all you get. And so, part of all this stuff we're talking about: people feeling bad about their bodies, and we all do of course, I do, but guess what, you have to kind of get over it to some extent, that is part of the truth, but part of the thing is that if you're concerned about sex all the time, if you're obsessed with the superficial, then the superficial is going to become more important to you, if you get what I'm saying. If all you're caring about is sex then of course you're going to want to be competitive, have pecs, big muscles, big penises, all the rest of it, and that's what the culture reflects and gay culture is a bit fucked up as far as I can see. And one of the gentleman talking about the clubs in New York where you had to be rated, I think that's the same as Room Service on a Thursday night? Where they airbrush all the pictures of the punters in the club and it's all about who's going to be on the club's Facebook page tomorrow. I remember seeing an ad for Fit Lads - I wasn't going there though, obviously - and they said, there was an ad saying that you get in free if you have an 8-inch penis or bigger... so I got in for half price [Laughter.] But there's just this fucked up kind of message that you get everywhere. Now obviously whenever I speak at any events everyone's like "all you fucking do is bodies and muscles and blah blah blah" and it comes up all the time. Very briefly the history of Attitudes: started off as a political, Boy George, politics, et cetera, no one bought it, it stopped. [Laughter.] And I remember we put - I was just 22 then - we thought let's put Mr Gay UK on the cover, Roy Fairhurst - I don't know if you remember him, he was very attractive. And they were like oh god, what if it's really embarrassing, it's really shit, and the sales flew up. And so we realised, the editors at the time realised that you have to put celebrities on the cover, that was the way that the culture was moving, this mental celebrity obsession and it's gone on like that. Now I took over three and a half years ago. I know we put lots of hot bodies on the covers and so on, but which ones did you buy most recently, let's be honest, I have to say. I'll show you some of the things we have done recently. So... where can I find that naughty man that we did, erm... Oh yes, there he is. Now that's the cover we did, everyone went bloody mag, it was a huge seller, it was the biggest seller of the year, everyone bought it, people still keep coming up to me and saying, and it's all very well to say 'oh body image, isn't it awful,' but it's the public going out and buying this kind of stuff. And I got to be right in front of that. Lucky me! [Laughter.] But we do do other things at Attitude, believe it or not. When I posted that on my Facebook as I do with every cover, someone was like "why don't you put gay men on the cover, why don't you put normal people...!" and I said, "Well, who do you mean? Because I'm totally genuinely interested to hear?" and the guy said, I don't know, Boy George, Brian Paddick and some DJ that no one had ever heard of. Now that's great, and we do do those people, but the fact is that if I put Boy George on the cover you ain't gonna go out and buy it. I love Boy George. Inside, in the new issue, we've got Elton and David, and I want to make the point because I do get defensive about it, that we do have lots of normal people in the magazine. I got the editorial system to count up all the last 50 covers, a hand count, so that was good, and 25 of them were shirtless men, and 25 were not. This is the new one, if I can open it: Daniel Radcliffe in a jumper, fuck with me gays, that's a jumper not a hot body, get over it. [Laughter.] Lots of the things we do, people always go on about this obsession, all you do is hot bodies, blah blah blah, and they miss the fact that we do lots of other things as well. There was a- I went to the parliamentary thing that Duncan organised on Monday, Steven Williams was there, a gay MP, and he was saying he read the magazine. He held up the current issue and I was like oh God, it would have to be one of those, wouldn't it, with a shirtless thing. And he was flicking through it - and I like him, I think he's great, but he was saying - oh there's no 40 year old bald men in here are there? And I was like oh God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And then actually I was looking through it when I got back to the office, and look at that. A 40 year old balding gay man. And the same on the next man: another normal person. And then another a normal person: lesbians, in fact. Look everyone, they do exist! [Laughter.] It goes on and on and on. We do a big feature of Mrs Thatcher, look! More old, ugly gays, it's fine! [Laughter.] So I think - look, more! We also do a thing - we're fucking tripping over ourselves with ugly, old homos, no I'm joking. Look, we do a couples page which is always normal people, so we do try. But the fact is, the thing that drives this is sexy pictures (another normal person!), is sexy pictures, that's what people want, unfortunately, so we try and balance it out. We try to do different things. We do have the actors section, which my publisher made us do. That does have some horrible ads but - I was asked why do we take those ads, what do we do to these ads? We don't, I don't have anything to do with the ads, we just put the space in, they buy them. If we didn't take the ads the magazine would end - that's the end of our business. Some people would say that might be a good thing, but there are lots of young people who email me all the time saying they rely on Attitude and magazines like us, and the websites and things, to give them a sense of getting over shame and thinking that it's okay to be gay. I'm just checking how long I've got; not very long. I'm just going to quickly talk about what I think is the problem. I don't know if any of you read the magazine. We did the thing a couple of years ago called The Issues Issue, writing about it a lot, had the biggest reaction we've ever had at Attitude, which is about gay men and mental health. There's a book called The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs, he's an American therapist, he now writes for us, and it basically explains how when we are young, we pick up feelings of negativity from our parents, and as we get a bit older from school, from school children, from parents, homophobia, we don't see any positive role models, we're brought up in shame and shame is the problem. For me, body image stuff and I think this goes along for straight people as well, it's about feeling depressed, it's about feeling shame. The first thing we do if you're not feeling good about yourself is you focus on the exterior, the expression of yourself, and the first thing that is is your body, so lots and lots of people feel shit about themselves. I'm not saying that body culture isn't bonkers, I totally agree, it totally is, but I'm just talking about what I think is the bigger cause of all of this. And actually, that thing that I said about when I came out to the guy in the first place blew up because I was too chubby at the time, I've lost a lot of weight since them, but I was too chubby, but that guy was having sex with all the young people who came into his group and a lot of gay culture which is completely fucked up comes from oppression, no one's really sure whether they're coming or going, we have high levels of depression, high levels of addiction, and addiction and all these compulsive behaviours are about having low self esteem, you want to block out the feelings and you can do that by drinking, you can do that by taking drugs, you can do that by working out and making your body look amazing, and I think that's what it's about, and you can do that by having sex, I think a lot of people have issues with sex addiction, and I know that I certainly have, definitely have, issues with compulsivity and compulsive behaviour, and I'm writing a book about it at the moment, and I think that is what it's about: if you don't feel great about yourself, the first thing you do: build your body up, be amazing, be great, and the thing is, we have to be responsible about it. Don't you think it's interesting - I don't know how often you guys get together, but it's interesting to be in a room where we're not all kind of [poses], you know, and sniping, all kind of expecting to cop off. We don't ever have situations where we're not in a nightclub, where we're not online, fucking ditch the gaydar, ditch the Grindr, unless you go to Jersey and you need to know where the nearest restaurant is and ask a local gay, as I did last year. We need to get out and meet normal people because we need to fucking engage with each other as human beings, Attitude is what it is, I'm not apologising for it. That's the thing, people always used to say to me when I come to these kind of events, 'You'd never put Stephen Fry on the cover, would you?' So we put Stephen Fry on the cover and bombed with the lowest-selling issue we'd ever done. I put, let's see some of these other ones here, there's loads of things which are kind of sexy, but they're not all just sexiness. They're not all topless blah blah blah. Someone said, when we put up the new one today, 'Oh, it's the first time you've ever had anyone with a shirt on,' and that's so totally not true. Beth Ditto, put on, that totally bombed, 'why the fuck did you put Beth Ditto on the cover?' Because I have a commitment to trying to change things in the way that I can, through Attitude, but it's a drop in an ocean, and we all need to take responsibility for it, because part of it, when I go on Grindr with my big fat face at the moment, none of you lot want to have sex with. So get over it. [Laughter.] Because we all do it, so we all have to take responsibility and maybe we could try being nicer to each other? Controversial, I know. [Laughter.] >> So I have the privilege of having to chair this, so I get the first question while the mics are going round, but one thing I wanted to ask, that I was really struck by, I run a sexual problems clinic for North London, and I'm struck by the stream of straight men, who come in almost with the same sorts of concerns about body image. And I just wondered, is this just a gay phenomenon? I know, I think one of the speakers said well, the gay men live on this, is this partly true? Anyone want to... does anyone have a view about that? >> Well, part of the reason why I'm not talking or generalising too much about gay men is because the last few years I haven't know that many because I'm now going back to the North East. But the other reason is that although as the YMCA survey showed, erm, and as this evening demonstrates, obviously there are legitimate concerns affecting, special concerns affecting gay male body image. But at the same time, I think that by separating them out from other men, there's always that problem of pathologising, and also in this instance, disguising the scale of the changes going on in the wider culture, which gays may or may not be responsible for, in part. So there's that dilemma of how useful is it to separate gay men as a sort of species, a separate species, and study them in relation to body image and then start talking about shame and homophobia and this sort of thing when so much of it applies to men in general today. And as the images you see show, there is this massive overlap now between that kind of Tom-ish body and the straight male ideal today. I mean, Geordie Shore, that chap from Geordie Shore shown flashing his Tom of Finland breasts, was quite dramatic. I'm not saying that all straight men are quite like J from Geordie Shore but quite a few are, particularly in the north east. So that's my take on that particular question. [Provost] I think it's very interesting because when you do see Men's Health magazines they contain many of the same images that you are showing in Attitude. Right, over to you, here there's a question. Can you wait for the microphone to come, sorry. >> [Matthew] Can I just quickly say something about Men's Health? Just when I was younger and actually thought it was possible I could get some amazing, fantastic body, it was Men's Health that I looked to. And if you look at Men's Health, the covers are ridiculous. They're completely airbrushed, they're completely deranged, you can literally see where they've painted on the abs, and that magazine is literally, "You must do this!", "You must do this!", "You must do this!" the whole way through. And that's what it falls to. I mean, it's interesting they don't like to acknowledge it, but a massive part of their readership is gay men. >>[Michael King] If everyone can put their hands up then the microphones, while they're waiting, will get to them. So go ahead. >>[Audience member] Thanks very much, thanks for organising tonight as well, I found it really, really interesting. A couple of points: Mark, it's interesting that you've really focused on the connection between Tom of Finland and Geordie Shore, I don't know if that's a good thing necessarily because basically Geordie Shore and Jersey Shore, they're very lowbrow reality TV stuff so I don't quite know what point you're making - whether Tom of Finland is a good thing, when you're relating it to something so low brow today. >> [Mark] Well, isn't muscles quite low brow anyway? >>[Audience member] Yeah but perhaps it is, but as a kid - [interruption] - as a kid growing up, and this now leads to my second point, what is a more general opener to the whole panel, it was only really touched in the introduction, the link between body image, body dysmorphia and eating disorders, I think, and I find it quite interesting that nobody's really covered that apart from, and I'll be really honest, apart from stuff that I've read in Attitude that has addressed it, I've never seen anyone across other gay media or the gay community talk about food, food addiction, anorexia, bulimia in relation to body image. So I just wondered if anybody's got any comment on that. >>[Michael King] I think it's a really interesting point, and while you're deciding who's going to answer this, because it might be difficult, I think the question of shame is even more important here. Many women with eating disorders are extremely ashamed of the eating disorder, but when a man has an eating disorder, it's even more stigmatised as a shameful thing. I don't know what - do any of you have any views on that, or is it not an issue that comes up? Perhaps in Attitude, because the question I think was aimed at Attitude there? >> [Matthew] Erm, since I started looking, or my own issue, just at the time I took over Attitude, we tried to talk about it more, we've got Joe Court who's a gay therapist in the States and Alan Downs who wrote the book The Velvet Rage which you should read, it's really interesting, it's not for everybody but it's worth a read. So we tried to address it but also we are a commercial magazine so, you know, sometimes in the office when we talk about let's do this feature, let's do that feature, we're thinking shut up, don't be such a do-gooder, we have to reflect the fact that people want to see all sorts of things. But yeah, I just think for me, from my own experience, addiction and compulsive behaviour and eating disorders and all these things are linked and generally the media doesn't really understand it at all. Like when you see the way alcoholism or drug addiction is reported, it's just crass and finger pointing, most of it, so I think everyone's got a long way to go to understand what drives people to do self-destructive things. >>[Michael King] Okay, oh, sorry did you want to...? >>[Duncan] Sorry, I just wanted to say that I think it's something like 90% of people with eating disorders are female and whilst it's an important issue for men, I think it's slightly different from the research that we've done, the ideals surrounding muscularity, it's about getting bigger, so it's about things like protein supplementation, steroid abuse, and that's not to dismiss the point that you made. >>[Michael King] A question at the back? >>>>[Audience member] Sure, so this is to the whole panel. So everyone's mentioned this as context of something that's more or less socially bad, it's socially bad that we've become obsessed with this sort of body image, it's something that affects both straight and gay communities, but we didn't really touch on policy recommendations. If, you know, obviously government policy recommendations are one thing, but just generally policy recommendations - how do we fix this? What do we do to move the culture, what can the government do, what can the media do, since we seem to be talking about it a lot and other things, what can the government possibly do to the media? Interesting to hear where you think we can move forward in terms of changing and turning this around beyond the things that have already been said? >>[Michael King] Duncan do you want to have a go at that because you're at the heart of this? >>[Duncan] Can you hear me? [Audience laughter.] Yes, so as I mentioned, the YMCA's providing the secretariat to the All Party Group on Body Image and we are looking at this issue and we will be coming out with policy recommendations in the spring, and they will touch on government, on industry, on the voluntary sector, on everywhere. I'm in a very difficult position because I don't want to preempt the findings of the report, but I can tell you from some of the evidence sessions we've had, there were some clear areas that we will be looking at. One example that we will be looking at is cosmetic surgery advertising, and the regulations around that, there's also, I don't know if you saw last week, stuff about airbrushing and L'oreal got a slap on the knuckles, and they got another ad banned, because they airbrushed an image. Airbrushing is an important one, but I think it's a distraction. I think the underlying issue here is body diversity, and there just isn't enough body diversity in the media, and in advertising particularly. Matthew's actually done some great stuff with Attitude magazine. If I was to look at Attitude magazine and flick through it, I think it's the adverts where you have more of an issue. Other stuff, well, if we look at young people, I think something that youth organisations have flagged is that teachers don't feel competent enough or confident enough to teach body image in schools. So there needs to be something around teacher training and with PSHE education under review, where will body image sit in the national curriculum. So those are just some of the things that we'll be looking at. >>[Michael King] Okay. Ben, you had a question. >>[Audience member] Thank you very much for all your presentations, it's been fantastically interesting when you come and look from such different angles. And I've been struck particularly by the different way that you've been thinking about imaging and visuality in your talks, particularly Jonathan's idea of capitalism being centred on visuality, and I was thinking well, really what we're talking about is a bigger question of imaging and representation, and that we live in a time of increasingly, increasing confusion of images, where images are being produced in increasingly sophisticated ways and manipulated in increasingly sophisticated ways, and perhaps we don't have the kind of criticality to address that complexity. I think the key terms that have come out of this discussion for me is about fetishisation - I can't even say it right now - but the idea that images actually mystify things and mystify power relations, so fetishisation in the sense of, in the Marxist sense, but also in a psychoanalytic sense, in the way that Jonathan was talking about, images in places where we displace anxieties, that they become tokens, so I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about that? >>[Jonathan] Erm, yeah, I think absolutely, if you think about the way in which we've increased as a visual culture, it goes hand in hand with the increase of ourselves as a consumer culture; the visuals are being produced for a reason, to be consumed, and I think on the one hand there's something great about that bespoke image producing, and the subversions that can occur through that kind of democratisation, but I think also at the same time, there's a consolidation of certain imagery and what I was trying to do with my paper is to look at how that consolidation centres around idealised versions of masculinity, have a lot to do with notions of succeeding within a capitalist system. So at the risk of sounding like an A-level sociology student, I'd say the solution is revolution. >>[Johan] Can I just make one point there. Many of us have mentioned capital as the-- capitalism as one of the key problems, but I think it's also important not to underestimate the capacity of commercial culture to actually challenge some of these body ideals. If you think of some of the clubs in London such as XXL or Bear Culture, which is now a global phenomena, that really proves that there is often a market for counter-cultures within gay culture that very much challenge these stereotypes, so perhaps we are overstating the hegemony of the gay bodies, perhaps a bit more diverse than, for example, my presentation indicated earlier. >>[Audience member] So back to this whole thing of commercialisation, and Jonathan's point, it seems to me that all advertising, certainly in television and newspapers, the whole thing has been about sex and success, the two are absolutely equated, and the fact that we're all being sold Cadbury chocolate bars on the basis that if we eat them we'll actually think we're actually getting more beautiful is a demonstration of that, or the fact that if we're advertising gravy branding it's still about sex and success. I just wonder to what extent it may be that in the majority of the community that's heterosexual aren't actually influenced by it, they look around and can actually see that people aren't what they're on the tele and maybe that may not be quite the same in the gay community, but it seems to me that while we live in the culture we live in, it's insoluble. Matthew isn't going to sell toothpaste to his readers if he's got an old codger like me doing an advertisement for toothpaste. He's going to sell it by it being sold by advertisements with attractive guys. >>[Michael King] Absolutely, that's a very good point. Youth and beauty are strewn over everything, aren't they? >>[Matthew] Well, it's interesting just that, I notice with advertisers, I mean not so much with Attitude because we tried to get more mainstream advertisers, but when you get some hotel that will say hey, I saw a copy of your magazine the other day, they'll email me and say, wasn't it exciting, we might do an add! And so they send in some ad with a sexy man lying back with no top on and it's a constant equation with - we need to get over the fact that gay means sex because it just means so much more than that, do you know what I mean? And also I do think that, and I love Duncan, I think you're doing an amazing job and it's amazing that he's got on all this stuff off the ground, but I think we do need to be kind of relaxed about it as well, like that whole thing about gay men would shave off a year of their lives to look 50x better - hello, yes please! It's amazing, shoot me tomorrow, do you know what I mean? We do, you know, there's nothing wrong with looking good, there's nothing wrong with looking great, and lots of people who do spend some time, some are obsessive, some are not, looking fantastic, I think the problem is this feeling that's pumped into us that we all must do that - you must do that to be happy, you must do it. People want to look like that - great, but you shouldn't feel that you should have to, I think that's the key problem. >>[Michael King] Or that all of sexual attractiveness is visual. >>[Matthew] Yeah, I was going to say this point before, but like, I have put on a bit of weight. Sometimes I do have a boyfriend - amazing, occasionally, and what is attractiveness on a cover of Attitude or a glossy magazine, some amazing fit body, that's fantastic if not the only thing that's attractive, but the reality is that someone with a big fat belly like me is not going to look particularly attractive on a magazine, yet in reality, in the real world, you're having sex with somebody, if you like someone, if you're intimate with somebody, it doesn't matter, those things aren't as important, and I think there's this kind of distortion, you know, you see kids on Facebook, gay, straight, whatever, feeling like they have to airbrush everything. I know gay men that I'm friends with who air brush their faces for Facebook pictures, it's ridiculous - be who you are. Your airbrushed face does not turn up when you go on a date, you know what I mean? >>[Mark] Sort of adding to that, a little bit, I think we have to -- it's all very well talking about capitalism and corporate culture and yes, it's the root of all evil, and we can't escape it without a revolution, et cetera, but it's not simply the case, and I'm sure this wasn't implied anyway, but I think it needs to be spelt out that we're not just talking about people who are sheep being mind-controlled by corporations. Corporations would love to, there's no doubt about that, and they spend a lot of money trying to influence your decisions and your deepest, darkest desires and hopes. But the reality is that they wouldn't have anything to work with if we didn't have ideals and weaknesses and art comes from that. What we're talking about now, with lowbrow reality TV shows featuring Tom of Finland straight guys, or Muscle Marys, is a visual culture, whether it's advertising, Men's Health, Facebook, webcams, the whole thing is a visual culture that's conquered everything. There is no lowbrow anymore, as a result. There's no highbrow, either really. And whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is almost irrelevant, because it's happened and we're living in this visual, mediated world now and that's why people are so obsessed, to use that word, but perhaps appropriately, with how they appear, because visual culture is about how you look. And that's the world that we're living in, increasingly. >>[Michael King] Well I think it's interesting, that you say that, "we're all this," or "we're all that," when I'm actually picking up a very cynical view from the audience. I don't get the feeling that the audience is very into this at all, but someone trying right back up here... >>[Audience member] I would like us to discuss making best use of the significant element of gay body culture that is very positive, and I think in a time where there's an obesity crisis, if we look at the cultures in places like Brazil and Australia, you can see an element of that body culture that is positive for people and while I agree with lots of the comments on the panel, I feel that we as people who care and who care about our own bodies apart from anything else, could actually be doing things together that help ourselves and other gay men without, well, I would relate it to the problem with the internet. Our sex lives have become things we have to pay to get access to, almost, and I can see where all the comments are going with the commercialisation of our bodies, which is our health, but we as a community need to take these things back. >>[Michael King] Okay, thank you very much. We've got about five minutes more to... >>[Matthew] Can I just quickly say one more thing about we have to pay for sex, that's the message we receive, but actually we don't. When I don't go on Gaydar, and I do on sometimes but it makes me feel shit because I'm competing against these people, it's a body, it's a this, it's a that, everywhere you go, and it makes me feel really depressed when I go onto Grindr and people... [unintelligible interruption]... I totally agree with you, that's why we need to create it. We're all here, it's nice to see you all here today, we're not all going to go off and not see each other again. Let's change it. Let's start - there's the, what's it called, Out in the Country or Out in the Sports or something. Some lads. But some thing started in Manchester where you go in, you meet up and you go trekking - Outdoor Lads! But maybe some people are a little bit cynical because it's a bit boring or whatever, but I think it's a really good way, we need to get offline, I think, to some extent, we need to meet people in the real world, we need to not be about sex and about how big your chest is and how big your cock is and who you are - God, I sound like Julie Andrews - but it's true. >>[Michael King] Okay yes someone has been trying for a long time... >>[Audience member] Erm, just coming back to the comment on the visual culture, I think it's really quite problematic to just say that we're in this culture where visuals have won and that's sort of okay and that's that. It's not really because a lot of those visuals are championed and a lot of those visuals are punished, so until we actually have a level playing field we can't just say there, that's it, we live in a saturated visual culture. >>[Mark] But it's a fact. I was just bringing that fact up, and you're absolutely right to have a response to that, and an ethical response, but I think it was missing from the discussion. There was a pretence that it hadn't happened almost or that it was just a corporate illusion. >>[Audience Member] So shouldn't we try to challenge it more by undermining the images that are continually championed and rewarded and the images that are constantly punished and demeaned? Shouldn't we try and really fuck with that a lot more rather than just saying, well, it's happened? >>[Michael King] Any responses to that apart from the panel, or from the panel? >>[Matthew] Yeah I think we should. We can do it by not focusing on Facebook, I mean I go on Facebook, you know. When I met Duncan I was actually upset, having lunch with him, because I thought, oh God, he's really broad-chested, he's attractive, he's fit, real people in the real world make me feel shit about my body, but ultimately I'm a grown up and I have to get over it, it's not the end of the world, get on with it, go and do whatever, sit in my office and have a nice life, it's great. We all have some degree of power, I think, in the situation, to not partake in it that way. >>[Michael King] Of course, as many of you will have seen recently in television programmes, it's not at all good to be clear and out and attractive, as it is in football. I don't know if any of you saw Justin Fashanu's niece who was trying to find a gay footballer and is now trying to do it on television without much success. There's a question right up there. >>[Audience member] I guess my question has to do with what you were talking about, the consumption of visual culture, and how there seems to be, like a time warp and a split in between two different ideals that are both put forward by gay men. There's the gay ideal and then - which seems to have been very similar to the ideals of fashion in the '80s and '90s but in the past ten years, male models have been shrinking and getting thinner and thinner and actually going completely against what is popular in popular gay culture. And I guess fashion is pretty much dictated and run by gay men. So how are there two such different ideals and why do you think at that time it might have split? Sorry, I'm raspy from the weekend still. [Audience laughs.] >>[Michael King] Well - do you want to come in? >>[Matthew] We shot David Gandy, a supermodel, in November and he was fucking huge and to be honest I'm not that much interested in fashion. I'm into the political stuff and whatever, and there was some talk of this big fashion photographer called Mariana Vancor who shot it and they were really excited about the fact that these bigger men were now coming back. And they were saying what you were saying, that men had been getting smaller and smaller, and I kind of think who gives a flying fuck, I couldn't care less about it all: tall, small, blah, blah. I don't pay that much attention to it. And maybe there was something that came up at the parliamentary thing about maybe educating young people about how the media works and how fashion works and how it's all perfumes and this and that, just so people understand when they see images presented to them what they are and what processes they go through, what they're there to sell. I don't know, it's complicated. But I try not to - I'm long over - maybe that's a bit of a wankerish thing to say because I get to see the industry of it but I don't care about this amazing body and that's fine. [Audience member] You say you don't really care but [unintelligible] but your magazine needs pictures of semi-naked men on the front? >>[Matthew] Well I care in that I like looking at pictures of Harry Judd but I don't go oh no, I'm not like that. I'm not like that. I don't mean to be flippant about it actually because I know it's important but I can appreciate- I love looking at sexy pictures of men. When people look at porn they're going to go to the porn sites of people looking fit and tall and buff and the rest of it. But that's that, it's another thing, isn't it? It doesn't need to interact with me and I don't need to feel like we have to be like that. >>[Audience member] [unintelligible] ..buying into the gay ideal. And I don't look at pictures on Facebook, I don't look at Gaydar, I don't actually think that Harry Judd is a sexy image, I think that larger men are a sexy image, and the thing is that you keep saying that this is me, I'm a bit overweight, but then the sexy men over there. Why are you not a sexy man as an overweight man? >>[Applause] >>[Matthew] But we do have those images in the magazine, I can show you. I can show you, I brought some with me. I can show you pictures of bears and bigger guys and all the rest of it. But the fact is that when we put people like that on the cover of the magazine... >>[Audience member speaks unintelligibly] >> But I'm just describing the point about economics. We're talking about the fact that what's popular, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm losing my point, I don't know. >>[Michael King] Ok, can we come down here because we've only got a minute or two... >>[Audience member] Thank you. I sort of noticed from one point of view that a lot of body builders do body building because they want to reclaim their masculinity and I wondered - this is an open question to anyone who will answer their point of view professionally - and I guess in reference to their lecture. >>[Duncan] All I'd say is that a lot of body builders wax their chests, don't they? >>[Mark] Erm, yes. [Laughter.] One of the peculiar things about body building is that it does actually, even if it is to acclaim or reclaim masculinity, or accessorise masculinity, it often ends up somewhere a bit more androgynous, very androgynous sometimes. But I don't think that body building today, or going to the gym for a lot of young men, is necessarily about that. It's not necessarily about - and that might be an added bonus, but for many of them it does seem from the surveys and whatever, and from talking to them, it does seem that it's about how they look, it's about seeming attractive. >>[Audience member] It's about sex. >>[Mark] It's about sex, it's about being hot. Whatever that means. >>[Audience member] Do you think that moving away from the sexual aspect now and in the last few years we've begun this drive of healthy eating and a change of a life and organic food and this all kind of idea that now being healthy is the key, not necessarily just being sexy. And to sell the health image, do we not need those kind of poster boy or poster girls that portray that visually as well? >>[Michael King] I think this is exactly the point Duncan was trying to make. >>[Duncan] You can't judge a book by its cover, and actually Men's Health magazine and the images on the front cover of Men's Health for me, that's not the image of health; it's obsession. And I think the point that Matthew made - it's all about balance, really. You can look around the room, and something I'd really like to do is another naked photo shoot at the YMCA, any volunteers? But I'd like to take a photograph of each person and I'd like to then do a health assessment of each person, and I guarantee that the person with the ripped torso is not the healthiest person. You'd be surprised. Actually, if you're slightly overweight you're probably more likely to live longer. So it's all a bit messed up. >>[Michael King] Alright, I'm really sorry to draw this to a close, we have to. I'm sure the discussion can go on over drinks. We've touched on so many big issues here and I think what's coming through is that the buffed male is not necessarily the attractive image it's often thought.