As you begin Beauty (Re) Discovers the Male Body, read author Susan Bordo spilling her morning coffee over outrageously sexual advice from a naked man. Initially, I rolled my eyes and decided to assume that I would read about the tragedy of how men are now objectified and exposed in advertising like women. As I flip through the pages looking at the scantily clad images I'm not really shocked; this essay was written fifteen years ago; I see these kinds of pictures going to the mall. What was shocking, however, was how Bordo, a philosopher born in 1947, wrote about these images. I felt myself blushing as I read "he seems slightly erect, or maybe it's his non-erect size, either way, there's a substantial presence there that's palpable (it feels so tangible it makes you want to put your hand on it) and very, very masculine" "(113). Can you write this in an academic essay? Your essay is written in a fresh and unique style, full of incomplete sentences, personal comments, references to films, and shameless sexual language and images only because of these aspects, but I feel that the real tension of the essay exists in Bordo's critique of materialism and how we allow fashion, advertising, and images to define our sexuality. Bordo first introduces us to the concept of self gaze comparing the reactions of the philosophers and lovers Jean-Paul Sarte and Simone de Beauvior to being looked at. Beauvior believes that “for the woman the absence of the lover is always a torture; he is an eye, a judge... distant by him, she is expropriated”; Interestingly, Sarte has an opposing view, that a lover's gaze is hell because “the other person has stolen 'the secret' of who I am. I have to react, resist their attempts to define... middle of paper... accept the unconventional style of the essay and the images that do not seem appropriate for the class. As a reader, you must be willing to step away from the way you view gender and sexuality and allow Bordo to show you that the way you act, think, and expect others to act is not original. Your opinions are provided to you strategically; companies are counting on the fact that their images will require you to change them, making sure you spend to be like what you see. As consumers in a capitalist society, we like to think we know the system and are not influenced by the images we see. The essay does not allow us this luxury, it makes us question our ideas about what is masculine and feminine and the roles to which our culture confines us. Bordo asks us to dig deeper and ask ourselves if our materialism, our desire to be like what we see, is defining who we are and how we expect others to act..