The Male Body

A New Look at Men in Public and in Private

Susan Bordo

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

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An exciting new popular study of the male body--fresh, honest, and full of revelations

In this surprising, candid cultural analysis, Susan Bordo begins with a frank, tender look at her own father's body and goes on to perceptively scrutinize the presentation of maleness in everyday life.

Men's (and women's) ideas about men's bodies are heavily influenced by society's expectations, and Bordo helps us understand where those ideas come from. In chapters on the penis (in all its incarnations), fifties Hollywood, male beauty standards, and sexual harassment, and in discussions of topics ranging from Marlon Brando and Boogie Nights to Philip Roth and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Bordo offers fresh and unexpected insights. Always--whether she is examining Michael Jordan or Humbert Humbert, the butch phallus or her own grade-school experiences--she rejects rigid categories in favor of an honest, nuanced version of men as flesh-and-blood human beings.

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Praise for The Male Body

"Bordo's discussion of the differences between men and women in general is one of the best I have read anywhere . . . I am grateful for this book. Bordo's talent for reading culture presents us with the most valuable gift: a newly configured imagination."--Susan Griffin, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Remarkable, and not just because it is by a female scholar who has been through the gender wars. It is very tough. It is also very tender . . . Provocative, unexpected and winning."--Richard Eder, The New York Times

"A prodigiously researched tour through movies, TV, art, advertising, fashion, celebrity culture, pop psychology, social science, literature, medicine, and more . . . a readable treatment of what has sometimes become as academic and abstrusely theoretical object of study."--Laura Kipnis, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"An unqualified pleasure: thoughtful, funny, unusually engaging, with moments of almost novelistic poignancy."--Louis Bayard, The Washington Post Book Review

Reviews from Goodreads

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Zack  rated it  
Mar 31, 2011
Over the course of The Male Body, Susan Bordo takes the reader on a tour through recent American history, exploring how popular images of masculinity – and what they say about our society’s notion of manhood – have developed and changed. While it is unusual to see a feminist work that deals almost e ...more
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Matthew  rated it  
Jun 1, 2008
I finally can say I have a favorite non-fiction book! Joy! I started this book quite awhile ago, almost three weeks, but I wanted to read it at my own pace and not rush through. From the moment I read the first few pages, the book had me hooked. It had me at hello, I suppose you could say. Susan Bor ...more
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Dusty  rated it  
Aug 10, 2010
With reference to famous male bodies -- John Travolta, Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, and others -- Susan Bordo offers in this book an insightful analysis of how, and why, men at the end of the 20th Century have become equally as insecure about their bodies as women have been for centuries before. Sh ...more
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About the Author

Susan Bordo

Susan Bordo has written and edited several books, including Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Susan Bordo

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Available Formats and Book Details

The Male Body
A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
Susan Bordo

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
July 2000
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780374527327
ISBN10: 0374527326
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 368 pages, Includes 45 black-and-white photos throughout, a bibliography, and an index
$18.00
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