Before the 1980s, tattoos were rarely included in advertising images, and when they were, they served primarily as symbols of a "red-blooded" masculinity. A good example of this is the Marlboro cigarette ad campaign of the 1950s. In 1956, the makers of Marlboro, whose sales were beginning to sag, set out to change the image of the typical Marlboro smoker. Up until this time, Marlboro cigarettes had been known as a woman's cigarette. In an effort to create a new market amongst men, the revamped advertising campaign featured virile men sporting military tattoos on the backs of their hands. As Bordo describes it: "The original Marlboro Man . . . was bulky . . . and tattooed, his body a kind of visual masculine hyperbole . . . The Marlboro Man's excessive virility, in the eyes of the heterosexual admen who created him, was precisely what assured the consumer of his heterosexuality". Significantly, the tattoos that were chosen for the advertisements were derived from the military, whose patriotic themes made them more socially acceptable than those worn by prisoners and bikers.
The advertisements immediately struck a chord, prompting hundreds of letters from men wanting to pose as a Marlboro Man. Since the beginning of the 1980s, tattoos in advertisements, particularly those promoting men's fashion and body care products, have not only become more prevalent, but also increasingly complex in their meanings, inviting a range of possible interpretations depending on the nature of the viewing audience. While there are still advertisements that use tattoos in the traditional way, to affirm patriarchal constructions of masculinity, more often, they are deployed in ways that connote a diversity of masculinities and/or play ironically with conventional conceptions of masculinity. This reflects the imperative of advertisers to expand and diversify the male market for fashion and body care products. Whereas prior to the 1980s, the market for men's fashions was comparatively small and primarily addressed the relatively mature, white, Protestant, middle class, heterosexual male consumer, during the 1980s, there was a concerted effort to target a wider male constituency. While in the past, the main commodities that were marketed to men were items such as cars, alcohol, certain brands of cigarettes, mechanical tools, life insurance, and so on, over the last two decades an increasing array of fashion and body care products, and accessories from jewelry to bath oil, deodorants, and hair dye have been promoted to male consumers.
This has partly been in response to the growing involvement of men in consumption activities previously regarded as the province of women only. As more women have entered the workforce and have become financially independent, men have increasingly come to rely on other attributes, such as physical beauty, to attract a mate. It is also in recognition of the potentially lucrative gay market. As the stigma associated with homosexuality has lessened, advertisers have increasingly sought to incorporate this group of male consumers into its marketing strategies, cognizant of the fact that single gay men without family responsibilities tend to have higher disposable incomes than their heterosexual counterparts, and also often take a greater interest in their personal appearance. In their promotion of fashion and style to male consumers, advertisers have faced two main challenges: firstly, how to persuade heterosexual men to take a greater interest in this traditionally "feminine" arena while allaying their fears of emasculation, and secondly, how to address the new, lucrative market amongst homosexual men without alienating the heterosexual male consumer. In order to meet these challenges, a new type of advertising has been developed that uses polysemic symbols capable of expressing a range of different conceptions of masculinity. In these advertisements, the trappings of masculinity are presented as relatively "free-floating" signifiers, inviting the audience to see masculinity as a cultural artifact rather than as a biological given. As Nixon describes it, this genre of advertising: "place[s] stress on the unfixed nature of identities: mixing different bits and pieces in the self-conscious assemblage of a look.
The overall tone [is] one of irony, ambiguity and self-conscious play with identity". As such, they are decidedly "camp" in sensibility, in Susan Sontag's sense of the term. "Camp," as she defines it, is the love of artifice and exaggeration in which style is privileged over content and where things are not what they seem to be. "Camp," according to her, "sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp but a ‘lamp'; not a woman but a ‘woman.' To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing- a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre". Camp is playful rather than serious, employing duplicitous gestures that are susceptible of a double interpretation. It requires a certain detachment, and for this reason, has a preference for things of the past from which we have become distanced with the passage of time.
Such a strategy of theatrical impersonation has become popular amongst gay men since the 1980s. As Shaun Cole argues, in reaction against the stereotype of the effeminate gay man, during the 1980s, a "macho" look, which played with the traditional signifiers of masculinity, became popular in the homosexual community. Known as the "clone" look, this self-conscious assumption of a hypermasculine style-which employed many of the clichéd symbols of the butch male, such as worn jeans, leather jackets, T-shirts, and lace-up work boots-parodied conventional notions of masculinity by exaggerating them. In adopting this look, gay men could appear to be like "real" men while, at the same time, challenging traditional assumptions about what constituted masculinity. They wore their garments in a self-consciously tight manner to enhance their physical attractiveness, thereby infusing them with a new meaning of eroticism and overt sexuality.
This masculinization of homosexuality and emphasis on overtly masculine images and physiques that was first ushered in by the clone look continues today in other forms, and has become one of the primary modes of self-presentation for gay men today, as Cole points out. One of the many symbols of masculinity that has lent itself to such parodic play has been the tattoo. Because of the extremely diverse range of connotations they have acquired over the last few decades, this has made them equally appealing to "straight" and gay men, though for very different reasons. While for heterosexual men, they can serve as traditional signifiers of masculinity, confirming their sense of manliness despite their participation in the "feminine" domain of appearance, for gay men, they appear rather as ironic subversions of this very concept of manhood. This is exemplified by a series of advertisements that were produced during the 1990s to promote Calvin Klein jeans, and also by the advertising campaign for Jean-Paul Gaultier's perfume "Le Male," launched in 1995. As far as the campaign for Jean Paul Gaultier's perfume "Le Male" is concerned, while it quite explicitly sets out to target the male consumer (as indicated by the name of the perfume and also by the shape of the perfume bottle, which takes the form of a male torso), it does not seek to present masculinity as a fixed and unitary construction. On the contrary, it plays with the traditional signifiers of masculinity. The central icon of this campaign is that of the tattooed sailor. Traditionally, the tattoos worn by sailors were seen as signifiers of a life of daring and adventure, free from the normal constraints of society. In these advertisements, these associations are invoked, insofar as they "dare" the heterosexual male consumer to buy a product traditionally associated with women.
Rather than "feminizing" him, the suggestion is that of being "man" enough to take on the challenge. This is particularly the case with one of the advertisements that shows two sailors arm-wrestling each other. Prominently on display are their well-muscled upper bodies and arms, emblazoned with tattoos-all conventional symbols of masculinity. Though perhaps not as overt, a similar sense of bravado is suggested in another advertisement in which a single sailor gazes nonchalantly out of the picture with arms crossed in a casual, but confident, manner. Once again, the tattoos are prominently displayed, this time on the muscular upper body and arms, conveying an air of self-assurance and defiance. In both cases, the tattoos are old style ones of the sort originally worn by sailors and "rough" working class men.
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