Men achieved their political power by representing themselves as disembodied and casting women as disordered, irrational bodies (Bordo, 1987; Pateman, 1989). However, this denial of the importance of the body remains a privilege available only to powerful men, usually middle and upper class, who conform to particular dominant ideas about how to be a man. David Morgan (1993), for example, has distinguished between male bodies represented as classical (like eighteenth century aristocrats) and those represented as grotesque (like peasants). The line between these types is now more blurred, but working class men continue to be represented as having grotesque bodies, lacking in control. However they have some symbolic power via association with the natural and certain respect given to their capacity for violence. Current examples of ‘classical’ male bodies might be the controlled besuitedness of men such as George Clooney, or the suaveness of Ralph Fiennes. Although he is not real, Homer Simpson is perhaps the ultimate characterization of the working class man with a grotesque body that does not measure up to dominant ideals.
Hardly any individual measures up to the hegemonic ideal of male rationality and control over their bodies and emotions (Connell, 1995). However, all men have to struggle with that ideal in varying ways, which involve different relationships to embodiment. For male labourers and manual workers, for example, their bodies are what they use to
make their living and they are simultaneously hyper-masculinized in displaying the kind of muscular body that is supposedly the ultimate marker of masculinity, and yet also femininized because they are objectified as bodies and treated like children in the way their bodies are regulated at work. As one welder said: ‘How would you like to go up to someone, and say “I would like to go to the bathroom”? If the foreman doesn’t like you, he’ll make you hold it, just ignore you’ (Stallings cited in Donaldson, 1991: 12). Such workers complain that they are not treated ‘like men’ because they do not have autonomy over their bodies and their work, which is the mark of hegemonic maleness. Connell (1995) argues that masculinity is particularly constituted through bodily performance. Masculine identity is threatened if a man cannot perform, if he cannot display control over his body. Clearly the amount of control over his body a man is able to display depends on other factors such as class, age and ablebodiedness (see for example Seymour, 1998). Therefore it is not a simple matter of men being disembodied, and there appears to be a growing commodification of men’s bodies and related increases in masculine body modification (for example, see Faludi, 1999). In addressing some of these issues sociologists have been heavily influenced by the work of French historian of ideas Michel Foucault, but similar ideas about bodies as disciplined can also be found in second-wave feminism.