In “When Men Put on Appearances” Diane Barthel writes, “By finding our identities in and through products, we actually hand over our identities” (137). In a capitalist society, the role of the people is to be consumers of goods. The people sell their labor for money, presumably laboring away to provide goods and services, and then spend this money on more goods and services. Consumers practice commodity fetishism which is “how people empower goods, treating them like magical fetishes to be worshipped” (Barthel 138). “When such commodity fetishism occurs, we no longer have power over goods. Rather, they have power over us. They rule our lives and determine our actions” (Barthel 138). It logically follows that whoever controls the goods also controls the consumers, who are stuck in an endless loop of production and consumption. The consumers are molded by the large corporations and the government who own the rights to the goods that the people produce (as well as the media). In the same way that people within Western society are shaped by their capitalist leaders, so is the rest of the world shaped by those same countries that are considered “economic powerhouses.”
By examining how men are influenced by the media, especially advertising, in the West, we can see how the same media elite determines how people abroad should act. The media tells men how to be masculine in a variety of ways. Barthel describes many ways that advertising shapes men’s gender performance—from ads for clothes to ads for cars. Barthel writes, “In page after page the solitary male figure appears handsomely turned out in a three-piece suit and top coat” (139). Car advertisements talk about “power, precision, performance” (Barthel 144). “Sports terms and icons are used to sell a remarkable range of goods” (Barthel 150). All of these advertisements tell men which products they should buy to make them masculine and also how to perform masculinity. Similarly, large corporations, many of them American, sell products overseas and are presenting comparable images to people of other countries. The advertisements presented abroad tell people what their ideals should be—how they should act and how they should look. When most of the people in advertisements are white and Western, as are the corporations and governments in charge of these advertisements, the ideal tends to become white and Western, homogenizing a global community.
The goal of much of the media is to distract from the real issue—patriarchal dominance. “Like popular inspirational speakers, advertisements reinforce self-indulgence and self-promotion with buzz phrases like ‘Enjoy’ and ‘You’re worth it’” (Barthel 142). By keeping people busy purchasing goods to fulfill their desires, those in power stay in power because the focus is off of them. This especially applies when looking at cultural imperialism. If the rest of the world is expected to modernize and become developed, essentially to be just like the United States, and if the people of those countries are expected to look white and act Western, as that has become the ideal due to the media, then certainly much of the world will be too distracted to notice the US hands pulling the strings.
Barthel talks about the creation of the New Man because the old stereotype was a “straightjacket of traditional expectations regarding the strong, silent male” (146). Brendan O’Sullivan’s article, “Dead Man Walking” describes how even though traditional masculinity is dead, we’re all still engaging in the tradition. O’Sullivan writes, “Where once there was relative certainty about what it meant to ‘be a man,’ there is now an explosion of different—often conflicting—possibilities” (101). This complicates the picture even more. Men have even more people to imitate in the media, from men on such varied shows as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and According to Jim (O’Sullivan 102). In the same way, people abroad have many expectations and ideals placed on them by Western society, all of them increasing dependence upon the US and its media.
Barthel asks, “Is there really any way he can succeed on his own terms? Is there really any way he can be his own man, rather than, in fact, just another walking advertisement for the capitalist system…” (151)? “Advertising has encouraged a ‘feminization’ of culture, as it puts all potential consumers in the classic role of the female: manipulable, submissive, seeing themselves as objects” (Barthel 148). The model presented by Barthel of consumers playing traditional female roles is applicable to not only American consumers but to the whole world. The elite in power, the patriarchy, tells everyone else, the “women,” how to act. Those with power seek to maintain our dependence on them for directions on how to perform, just as US foreign policy has shown a tendency to be a colonial power and play a patriarchal father figure to other countries.
All of this relates to Pozner’s article, “Reclaiming the Media for a Progressive Future.” The article provides methods to undermining the huge amount of power that the corporate media elite wields. Pozner writes, “After the 2004 election, seasoned activists and apolitical liberals alike began asking how George W. Bush could have hoodwinked so many low-income, minority, and women voters into casting their ballots for a corporate-welfare-supporting, job-squandering, sex-ed-slashing, racial-profiling, archconservative administration antithetical to their interests” (3). With the corporate media elite in power, consumers will always be deceived. With the patriarchy in place, men and women in the US and elsewhere will always be part of a power play, and they will always be on the dominated end.
Ridiculous Displays of Masculinity:
Old Spice Manly Test Commercial - Watch the best video clips here
-Erica
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