ABSTRACT

The media have frequently played an important role in presenting new models of gender and sexuality, often attracting attention because of the androgynous, macho, queer, ‘girly’ or highly sexual figures they offer their audiences, and sometimes calling into question ‘received notions of “masculine” and “feminine”, straight and gay, girl and woman, boy and man’ (Garber, 1997: 354). While it is often regarded as commonsensical to identify the central role of the media in the cultural construction of femininity in its many guises, it is equally important to note that the media have played an equally vital role in identifying and extoling masculine archetypes, values and their variants, or by calling the same values into question. Indeed, the ‘crisis of masculinity’ – a term that has been used routinely to describe everything from representations of male angst in 1950s Hollywood cinema to the plight of working-class youth in contemporary urban settings – was first coined by the political commentator Arthur Schlessinger Jr in an article of the same name in Esquire magazine in 1958. It is in this process of identifying what it means to be a man and consequently giving a name to new iterations of masculinity that the media can be seen as being in the business of ‘producing’ masculinity, and this is an activity that has gathered pace in recent years.