The metaphor of the mirror vividly illustrates the evolution of men’s magazines in the country in what seems a relentless attempt to saturate the idea of the female body as a commodity. More than mapping out a liberal American/British idea of beauty that is, at most, unattainable, it brings to the fore a conscious attempt at enjoining the female populace to be party to their own objectification in the guise of sexual liberation.

Workings of the master
There was much fanfare when the Philippine version of the international men’s magazine Playboy came out with its maiden issue in April, such that even primetime news programs carried the story. Which is not saying that the country hasn’t had its share of similarly oriented glossy magazines, what with the proliferation of such publications as For Him Magazine (FHM), Uno, and Maxim.

Created in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe as the first Playmate centerfold, Playboy has been published in over 20 languages and is currently being sold in 110 countries across the globe, according to the editor of its original US version, Hugh Hefner. And with the likes of FHM comfortably lodged at the top spot as the most popular magazine among readers, Playboy may have found, as Hefner hopes, a “lasting home” in the Philippines.

Unlike other international magazines like Penthouse or Hustler or even its original US version, Playboy Philippines, along with a host of other publications, is careful not to offend the supposed Catholic sensibilities of readers by excluding images of frontal nudity, genitals, and sexual activity. What can be seen instead are pictures of women clad in skimpy bikinis, usually in a reclining position, their vision directed outwards as though fully aware that they are being looked at and are thus submitting themselves to the viewer’s full scrutiny.

Beauty, or at least how these magazines conceive of it, has also become competitive. Like Paris awarding the coveted Apple of Discord to Aphrodite, men’s magazines select who they perceive to be the most beautiful women to be featured in their monthly issues and rank them at the end of the year. Playboy has its Playmate of the Month; FHM, Girlfriend of the Month; and Uno, with its Numero Uno, Uno Girl, and Uno Mission.

What perhaps makes these magazines more appealing is that “ordinary” women are encouraged to partake of the “empowerment” enjoyed by featured celebrities. FHM, for example, dedicates a section where readers can contribute images for publication. Female readers send in their pictures, usually in appearance and posture similar to the other featured women, to the pleasure of their male partners as the senders themselves admit.

Unveiling male gaze
In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey traces the tradition of visual pleasure as a form of scopophilia, or male gaze, where the woman serves as the image, and the man the bearer of the look. Therein results a malevolent opposition, according to critic Antony Easthope: male/active/desire versus female/passive/narcissism. As spectators, men develop sexual desire for women by actively looking at their images, while women are swayed to identify with the images of their own kind by passively looking at them.

Unmistakably, the images found in local men’s magazines seldom include a male lover, whose role would now seem unnecessary in light of the gaze of the male spectator. However, for a few images that do so, the woman’s vision is rarely directed at him; she is either looking away from him, or outward to an invisible yet present male spectator. The spectator then, according to Berger, either identifies with the male image, or ultimately ousts him from his perspective.

The first edition of Playboy Philippines stretches this convention by using a double centerfold for two women; Filipina models with the exotic, dusky “morena” looks which women from the tropics are stereotyped with. It thus seemed to appeal to both male and female readers; the masculine myth that governs almost all possible discourse, after all, permits in its binary perspective that women appear as if they were castrated men. It is even a common notion that two women in sexual tension or action is the ultimate male fantasy.

The mirror falls apart
But the male fantasy, despite its universalizing tendencies, will never be a totalizing disposition. Like an ever delicate mirror, it will always be at risk of being shattered.

Nude images, Easthope posits, poses both a threat and a resolution to the same. It is a threat in that the real body is absent, thus evading the imperative of the male ego which is to act as a mechanism for surveillance and dominate on everything through its vision. More than the undesired absence, the image’s “otherness” or femininity, more so with the image of a naked woman, presents itself as a sexual threat to masculinity.

Yet the threat is immediately resolved as what is absent is made present and manifest by the same nude picture reproduced and duplicated. The sexual threat, moreover, seems to be eliminated at the surface with the spectator’s clarity of vision, and his ability to size up the female body in its every detail.

Such resolution, however, thrives in deception. In the case of men’s magazines, both local and international, the image of the naked woman is always subjected to technical treatments and alterations, so that even the slightest flaw, say, a pore, body hair, or a misplaced skin imperfection, is removed and made invisible. What results, therefore, is the perfect female body, the essential woman; an abstraction which the male gaze can content itself with and simply ignore other threatening images of the female body. The essential woman, however, is that which is ultimately unattainable, and the masculine myth will always be threatened.

Moreover, the idea of sexual liberation put forward by these magazines is one that is, according to bell hooks, a mere inversion of the male notion of sexual freedom that fails to deconstruct the power relations between men and women in the sexual sphere. This obsession with sexuality, hooks further argues, that exists solely for the perpetuation and legitimization of gender inequality, male dominance and consumerism only deflects attention away from the need for genuine social transformation and emancipation.

It is through these gray areas, these sites of unrest, that both men and women can come together to shatter the looking-glass of their own deception, and then work in concert towards dismantling other, more tyrannical interventions.# Philippine Collegian

References:
Berger, John (1973). Ways of Seeing. New York: The Viking Press.
Easthope, Antony (1986). “The Idea of the Woman.” What a Man’s Gotta Do. Great Britain: Paladin.
hooks, bell (1984). “Ending Female Sexual Oppression” Feminist theory: from margin to center. US: South End Press.

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