What Robert Mapplethorpe taught me about masculinity
Emily Steer, Plaster
December 2023
The act of looking and being looked at is notoriously complicated between men and women. When I was a teenage girl, Robert Mapplethorpe’s images both scared and excited me; they presented such a powerful vision of masculinity, by men and for men, whether through the eroticised gaze of the male photographer poring over the nude body, or the macho bulges of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s youthful form, flexing into Adonis-like poses that play into the super-hetero gaze of frat houses and locker rooms.
For me, they conveyed an idealised vision of masculinity that felt out of reach. Mapplethorpe’s men were more overtly sexual than the bodies mainstream pop culture seemed to want me to be attracted to, and more smoothed and buffed than those I’d seen in real life. These brawny, polished men were not who I was supposed to be looking at – or at least, admit I looked at. […]