University of Vermont history professor Paul Deslandes spoke to UCSB students and faculty members yesterday in a talk entitled “Models, Idols and Porn Stars: Selling and Consuming the Beautiful Man in Britain, 1950s-1970s.”
The talk detailed an ongoing study on the effects of male aesthetics on English culture. In his presentation, Deslandes outlined standards of attractiveness for British males from the 1950s to the 1980s and explained how magazines and advertisements cater to teenage females and homosexual males influenced by these standards.
According to Deslandes, studying and discussing male beauty is as a way of digging toward bigger issues in British society and the history of its history.
“The study serves to illuminate vitally important historical themes in modern British history, which include, but are not limited, to the rise of consumerism, the visually oriented advertising industry, notions of racial difference, attitudes towards disability and the modern sexual subjectivity,” Deslandes said.
According to Deslandes, the study is sometimes met with skepticism, but nonetheless it contributes to the appreciation of male beauty and its effect on social issues.
“When I mention to people that I’m writing a book about male beauty, the first reaction, especially from American audiences, but also surprisingly from Britain themselves, is frequently quizzical,” Deslandes said. “‘There are attractive men in Britain?,’ they ask. There are, in fact, a number of very attractive British men.”
Associate history professor Erika Rappaport, who organized the event, said she felt impelled to expose students to Deslandes’ ideas because he is not only one of the first historians to look at the history of masculinity in Britain, but he also takes a unique approach to analyzing how heterosexual and homosexual identities, as well as masculinity and femininity, have worked together throughout history.
“Unlike many other scholars, he argues that the history of male beauty was shaped both by the emergence of heterosexual teenage girl culture and gay male culture during the 1950s and 1960s. He shows how magazines geared toward both audiences shared certain notions of ideal male beauty,” Rappaport said in an email.
In addition to these aspects of Deslandes’ research, Rappaport said the scholar also looks at economic factors involved in creating beauty ideals, as his research touches on “the role of consumerism in the construction of homosexual and heterosexual identities.”
Deslandes studied British social culture during the period of 1954-1980 by analyzing the reactions of teen girls and homosexuals to various forms of male beauty. For example, teenage girls, according to Deslandes, often appreciated male beauty by staring at magazine clippings of heartthrobs and indulging in romantic and sexual fantasies.
During the lecture, he presented advertisements which he said sparked the rise of consumerism in Britain. These pioneering ads showed the early importance of beauty and admiration of male models, according to Deslandes, even though male modeling did not emerge as a career until after World War II. Some pictures highlighted the characteristics of male beauty and the deformities that occurred because of World War I.
“Facial beauty possesses an explicitly commercial value, especially for men. In the Victorian period, the acquisition of good looks … sold products, like hair-dressing services,” Deslandes said. “The First World War prompted the discussion of beauty and the polar opposites of ugliness and deformity as the sacrifices of the nation’s youth — the horrors of modern warfare as reflected in the facial injuries suffered by a lot of the youths coming back from war.”
The event was sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s New Sexualities Research Focus Group as well as the History Department, Feminist Studies Department and the Center for Modernism, Materialism and Aesthetics in the English Department.
A version of this article appeared on page 1 of October 30th’s print edition of the Daily Nexus.
