The Male Body Chapter Summaries:

Gentlemen or Beast? The Double Blind of Masculinity & Humbert and Lolita

Gentlemen or Beast? The Double Blind of Masculinity: Susan Bordo exploits the double blind of masculinity. She does this by analyzing various famous authors and events throughout history that define this double blind of masculinity. Bordo first starts by analyzing the work of John Gray, a best-selling author, sex therapist, and infomercial-meister (230). He promotes the metaphor that men are from Mars and women are from Venus (230). Bordo argues that Gray is bias towards women when she states that none of Grays writings suggests that men and women share a single proclivity, reaction, fantasy, or need (231). She does not feel that his traditional 1955 male dominance attitude is acceptable anymore. Bordo then goes on to answer the question which is the young man supposed to be an animal or a gentlemen? (234). The answer is a trick question, in that you have to be both. A man must be an animal and a gentlemen at the same time, pending the circumstances at hand. She illustrates this by referencing books and films like The Return of the Alpha Male, in which women are proud of the manliness of their husbands (235). At the end of the day, Bordo is trying to say that a balance of hormones between the animal and gentlemen is key to a happy relationship. Susan then moves to the topic of aggression in sports, with an emphasis on football. She claims that famous sports rapist use their natural anger tendencies out on women (238). Bordo explains that they sports stars have had the same treatment their entire lives, from being a jock in high school to being drunk at college after parties, it builds into a male packed with aggression (240). Susans double blind of masculinity plays a vital role in our society today as well. She ends this section leaving the reader thinking about how the double blind standards effect their lives (263).

Humbert & Lolita: Lolita is a story published by Vladimir Nabokov. This story is of a middle-aged man that has a sexual obsession with a twelve-year old girl. Humbert was the middle-aged man and Lolita was the twelve-year old girl. Gordo uses this story to emphasis and challenge the ideological and conceptual views of the male animal (299). The story was written in the late 1990s and nobody really thought of it as child abuse, however, Gordo goes into more detail and analyzes this film and really touches on the double blind of masculinity. The character Humbert is described as not just a charming monster with a thing for little girls, but is haunted by something much deeper than mere lust, or even personal memory (310) which brings the reader into his demented thoughts. There were times where Humbert said that he was going to dispose her body when she gets older with a sole less attitude, but at the same time will not throw away a bobby pin from her hair that he has had for years (311). Overall, Susan uses Humbert and Lolita as universal icons that people can be characterized by (317). Gordo makes Humbert a universal characteristic by simply stating Humbert is all of us (317). Susans piece states that Humbert underlines the essential, inefficient, painstaking and pain-giving selfishness of all passion, the greed of all urges, whatever they may be, that insist on being satisfied without regard to the effect their satisfaction has upon the outside world (317). In turn, these universal ideals of Humbert play hand in hand in our society by illustrating the difficulties in letting things go and moving on with our lives. All in all, the author uses the experiences in analyzing Lolita multiple times as a way to better understand society as a whole.