“Save Us from the Womanly Man”

Abstract

Over a very short period, between approximately 1905 and 1908, surf bathing on the ocean beaches of Sydney, Australia, was reinvented as a national pastime. The primary focus of this reinvention was the exposed male body, which emerged as a visual symbol of a racially hygienic and pure, virile, militarized, and natural Australian masculinity. The author argues that, far from constituting a natural space, the idealized male body needs to be understood as occupying an impossible space, essentially trapped between an emphasis on the exposed body as a spectacle of masculine virility and the need to repress any pleasure, desire, or eroticism associated with this subject position as the object of the admiring gaze. The surf bather, that is, was emasculated by the need to deny the very existence of the source of his masculinity, the specular idealization of his body.