They’re made of red lace and the shops are selling them quicker than they can get them on the shelves. The designer puts her hands through them and pulls the fabric to show the intricate detail of the lace. She is describing her work with pride, how she designed a very masculine piece of underwear, the pattern of the lace is one of geometric squares she explains, for women we would not use such a pattern. Yes, but it’s red lace! What kind of man wears red lace underwear?
I don’t have to wait long for my answer. In a French department store they appeared, men led by their wives. The shop assistant confirmed it: Male lingerie is usually bought by women, for their husbands.
What kind of woman wants her husband in red lace? Plenty of them, according to the sales figures. Male lingerie is the latest fashion fad, at least in France, and it is a phenomenal commercial success. Of course not all of it is red lace, most of it is a little more classically male, but still, it is trespassing into our territory and I don’t like it.
From lingerie the program moved on to cosmetics. We were shown men who spend hours every morning getting ready, who have facials and body treatments, who buy anti-wrinkle creams and have their teeth whitened. This did not surprise me; I have long suspected that men are just as vain as women. All it takes is 30 seconds at a traffic light in Riyadh to see it in action: Every male checks himself in the mirror, adjusts his ghutra, makes sure he looks just right. Personal grooming is just as important for men as it is for women, if not more so. None of this is new, but red lace?
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. David Beckham famously likes to wear his wife’s underwear. It’s quite a common fetish. But somehow I feel this is different. It is part of a more general redefinition of what is male and what is female.
In Spain, it is a little more serious. A law is about to be passed which will force men to take on an equal share of housework in the marital home. The law comes as a response to the fact that 40 percent of Spanish men were found not to do any housework at all, even when both husband and wife had full-time jobs. The Saudi solution would be to import guest workers to do the household chores, the Spanish solution is to enshrine in the marriage contract a definition of equality which spells out the need for both men and women to take on an equal share of the household responsibilities, particularly the care of children and the elderly. Somehow I think the Spanish solution though difficult to enforce in the short term will be more successful in the long term.
The way we live is changing and this is naturally leading to changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. Psychology theory teaches us that much of what we think of as innately feminine or masculine is in fact social in nature, more to do with how we construe the world than anything in our biology. As our social environment changes, so the way we construe certain traits as feminine or masculine will also change. That is not only natural but healthy.
So perhaps it’s not all that surprising that the boundaries between male and female clothing are beginning to blur a little bit, but red lace? They asked Yannick Noah, the former tennis champion and French superstar, whether he would wear it. No, he answered, I couldn’t do that to my kids. And for a moment I felt reassured. Until I heard him admit that he weighs himself three or four times a day. My amusement at the idea of men in red lace swiftly turned to alarm at the thought of an athlete like Yannick Noah being obsessed with his body image.
Body image is an issue close to my heart. It was the topic of my Ph.D., research. Ten years ago I compared Saudi and British women and found that Saudi women had a healthier body image than British women, at least in my research sample. I strongly suspect that if the research were repeated today, this would no longer be true. The social pressure on women to be thin and to adhere to strict narrow standards of physical beauty is like a virus that has spread through the world. As well as spreading through the globe, it has now also crossed the gender divide. Whereas it used to be an essentially female dissatisfaction, negative body image has become a male problem too. You don’t have to look very far to see it manifest itself. In the newsagents, you see stacks of men’s magazines proposing the latest diets and body building techniques, advertising posters are just as likely to show images of men’s perfect torsos as women’s bodies, the music channels pump out video after video of both men and women with seemingly perfect and more worryingly — homogenous — looks. Whether the singer is Egyptian or American, the video clip will include strikingly similar images.
People are quick to blame negative body image on the media and the fashion industry, but the truth is that it is a much more complex problem. Negative body image is not something frivolous like men wearing red lace; it’s a much more serious problem. It is a pervasive dissatisfaction with your physical appearance that spills over into the other domains of your life. The problem is not wanting to look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, the problem is feeling devastated because you don’t.
Appearances are important; male or female, we all want to look good.
Maybe looking good means men wearing red lace, maybe it simply means being fit and healthy, but one thing’s for sure, the definition of masculinity will continue to evolve.
