The Male Gazed by Manuel Betancourt;

Author:Manuel Betancourt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

7.

Laws of Desire

THERE IS NOTHING SEXIER THAN A MAN IN A PAIR OF WHITE briefs.

I must admit their appeal comes from their ubiquity. Boxers with hearts on them may have been the go-to imagery for Saturday morning cartoons and modest boxer briefs may have been all the rage in Abercrombie & Fitch advertisements. But there’s no denying that the simple and pure and therefore unassuming Y-front white brief stands as the industry standard when any one of us wants to dream up the ideal for men’s underwear.

But maybe I should only speak for myself. I find briefs enticing for what they do to the male body. Unlike other types of underwear—say, boxer briefs, whose rise in popularity very much coincided with my teenage years—briefs have the perfect thigh-to-bulge ratio. Boxers hide and thongs flaunt, but briefs titillate by the very shape they contour and convey. Furry thighs and fuzzy navels create a landscape worth exploring, rolling hills that entice those eager to go sightseeing down below. As utilitarian as they may be, briefs have a way of coyly suggesting that which garments like jockstraps (and yes, wrestling singlets) handsomely outline. Plus, unlike athletic gear, briefs have a welcome mundanity to them. They’re tied to a bland ideal of masculinity that they eroticize in delightfully unintentional ways.

Moreover, there’s something bashful about a man wearing nothing but briefs. That’s why its arrival in advertising campaigns in the 1980s was greeted with such breathless adulation. For, if we are to trust American Photographer magazine, there was a day in 1982 when “the world awoke to find that sex had changed.” This was two years before I was born, so in cases like these, I’m stuck trusting the truthfulness of such a hyperbolic pronouncement if not, perhaps, its accuracy. It was that year that Calvin Klein launched what would become one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time, plastering a sun-licked picture of Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus on a forty-five-foot Times Square billboard. The Bruce Weber photograph, which featured Hintnaus languidly leaning against a bleach-white wall in Santorini, his bulge front and center in a pair of Calvin Klein’s signature white briefs, shocked many a bystander, causing a flurry of controversy that paved the way for the decades-long run of CK ads featuring beautiful male models in little else than tight-fitting, branded underwear. With his eyes closed, Hintnaus’s tanned body did most of the communicating. As curator Diana Edkins told American Photographer in their “10 Pictures That Changed America” feature, “It was the height, the epitome of a sexual liberation, primarily for men,” adding that the photo “changed what advertising could be and could show from then on.”

What could be shown was, of course, a man in his underwear. In briefs, no less. This was, at the time, revelatory in all senses of the word. Hintnaus’s body was an instrument that had, for years, been scrupulously examined by sports commentators, Olympic officials, and fans alike, and was here seen in repose. Presented for our consumption so as to encourage a decidedly different kind of consumption.

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