OMG the wood chopping make me lol! :D You'd think after all those MAN pictures they'd have issues with him dealing so directly with *wood*, ya know? I also love how they couldn't even be bothered to photoshop a chopped log into the picture. So it would seem he took a swing at it and all he did was knock it off. Sooooooo manly! :D

OH. This explains why attractive men are seen as effeminate and unmanly. That's been puzzling me for a long time.

Football doesn't make a guy straight! I saw a gay guy tossing around a football on "The Office" last night!

the motorcycle photo is really hot. Whether guys are gay or not, a dude on a motorcycle ALWAYS FUCKING GETS ME.

GODDAMNED HELL.

Zac Efron's Rolling Stone cover, on the other hand, contained no sports or hatchets. (http://madmegan.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/rolling-stone-zac.jpg) Just Efron, his half-off shirt, and his ridiculously pretty prettiness.

What the hell happened to Rolling Stone magazine? It's gone from rock n' roll to teen pop movie stars? Jesus, there's a whole possibility for a post right there.

These pictures are at least a little bit sexy, but I'm not sure they accomplish the photographer's goal of conforming to conventional standards of heterosexuality. The "wet T-shirt" picture especially seems consistent with gay-pr0n beefcake conventions.

I haven't seen any of the Twilight movies but this dude's a werewolf in the movie and werewolves/vampires have become representative of two different masculine archetypes.

The werewolf is the loner, the physical one, the woodsman, etc. This seems to be a manifestation of the set of male stereotypes that represent male physicality.

Vampires are the dominant types, ages old, with a piercing-gaze. They manifest the set of male stereotypes that represent patriarchy.

I don't know that Rolling Stone thought about this explicitly, but the point is that these are undertones, so they don't need to be conscious thought. I think when they had the dude pose in all these silly manly ways they were summoning up a very juvenile expression of the physical male stereotypes (cuz let's face it, even adults who like this stuff admit that it's their inner child that's into it).

Twilight, in particular, has a weird sort of precedent going for it where the two actors from the first movie were (or are?) dating after the movie finished, so it seems like that 4th wall has extended past the stage and onto the real lives of some of the actors. Rolling Stone may've been playing off of that as well.

Either way, having just enough context to understand this movie as told by anecdotes from some of my particularly shameless friends, that's what I see in these pictures. To people who've seen more maybe my observations lose credibility, I donno.

I think the perspective of "they put a football to show he's straight" is a bit limited... I can understand the analysis by looking at only the pictures (and, society's history of what-is-sexy), but i think they mainly try to appeal to female teenagers... With conventional, teenage-y ideas of what a sexy man is.

And i think that like with most twilight-related stuff, society is confused because it appeals a lot to young girls in ways that cultural products rarely do, and it makes it harder to decode if you are not a teenage girl (which i am not by the way, although I loved the books).

The Rolling Stones journalist actually grills the actor on his sexuality in the interview, who answers that he "definitely" might still be figuring it out, so it would be absurd if the settings of the pictures would be trying to visually assert a straightness he doesn't even claim to represent...

I also think that the definition of a sexual object as "presentable, inert, passive" is a bit outdated and rooted in gender stereotypes that have changed a bit (for better of worse)... I think that it's obvious that now sexual objects can be male and "the one who does the fucking" while still being objectified, and without having their sexuality or sexual roles necessarily come into question... I'm not sure if it is progress, but it's a change.

Some nuance would've been appreciated, especially if you're using the "f-word". Love your blog though, keep up the good work!

I can see where your analysis is coming from, but I feel like in a lot of ways, these photos are stopping at the objectification point - the motorcycle and wood-chopping photos seem to be showing off his stupendous muscles. Notice how he just so happens to be holding everything at an angle that forces him to be flexing? What a coincidence!
As for the football - rather than being a symbol of maleness, I see it more as an excuse for him to be simultaneously flexing and stretching in such a way as to show off his t-shirt-wrapped abs: He's about to throw a football, guys! There's nothing sexy about this! It's just... he's playing sports... on the beach... while wearing a thin, wet, white t-shirt.
It's a pretty voyeuristic perspective, actually - showing off his "skills" (which happen to be sports, motorcycle-riding, and mid-air-wood-chopping) while leaving the viewer to notice the muscles and pass their own judgement as to him being a sex symbol.

By the way - if anyone on here is a motorcycle rider - do you actually ride your bike on the beach? It seems impractical somehow.

He's seventeen. SEVENTEEN. I find it really disturbing that the media won't stop making him a sex object, even if he's just supposed to be a sex object to girls his age (which we all know isn't the case). I despise the hypersexualization of girls, but especially of UNDERAGE girls, and this pisses me off just as much, even if it's "leveling out the playing field." If we want to start objectifying men the way we objectify women to reach some sort of less-sexist hypersexuality, I can see the point of that, to an extent...but do it with people who are LEGAL, please.

Ugh. This whole thing gives me the creeps.

Very interesting!

With regards to the original post, it is interesting, perhaps ironic, to note that these kinds of "masculine" props - sports equipment, motorcycles, etc. - seem to be very common and very fetishised in gay pornography, especially so, I think, in the US, where there's this ideal of "gay hypermasculinity" (as in other Western countries, to some degree).

So, rather than preventing objectification by presenting him as a man of action and ensuring that he's read as "straight", I'd say the use of the football in the cover photo only strengthens the connotations to gay pornography, to the point where I find it hard not to think of it as intentional. Especially, as commenter adlegian (as well as Sarah and Joshua) noted, the acts and props are useless and seem sexualised according to porn conventions. In gay porn terms he'd be an "underage muscle twink" or an "athletic jock" or something like that; it's really standard.

Perhaps these photos, although they're not pornographic per se, play on the difference between straight and gay people's (assumed) ideas of "gay" (and of "gay porn")? As in that the photographer assumes and intends for straight people, especielly men, to read the photos as "straight", in the way the original post states, but also for gay people and others familiar with these codes to read the photo as "gay" and potentially pornographic?

(Of course, there's much more to be said about the duality of this kind of, if you will, "gay détournement" of "straight" masculine ideals, as a kind of subversion and, simultaneously, as a form of self-oppressing heteronormativity.)

To be fair, I think some of these activities could be from Twilight, the thing he's famous for. The kids, including Jacob, hang out at the beach/coast a lot. They probably played football at some point. Jacob and Bella work on a motorbike restoration. They all live in a woodsy-type area, so chopping wood would probably occur. Heh, "wood would."

Definitely a Twilight reference, but also clearly a form of sexual objectification (and a very ambiguous form, at that.) I find it simultaneously fitting and unfortunate on all counts (especially because he is so young, regardless of gender expectations).

But it's Rolling Stone and sex sells...what else is new?

...but he's just so good looking! He worked super hard for his bod. Gay or Straight or completely unsure, I stared at those pics. I saved them. I shall look at them again. Thank you. :o)

I think I just fell slightly in love with Lisa.

You know, when I saw this magazine cover at the store the other day I thought "Wow, they sure posed him like a girl. Sociological Images would love this." Nice to see I was right.

Also, the discussion of fucking reminds me of a really fascinating post I did on my LiveJournal about the differences between "X fucked Y" and "X got fucked by Y" and what people intuited about penetration and dominance from those phrases depending on the genders involved.

@I wonder sometimes if the range of male perspectives Lisa samples somehow managed to skip the generation of men who grew up with the androgynous, effeminate and/or bi/gay rock stars of the 70s and early 80s, and into whose constructs of masculinity these qualities are well settled into.

As someone from THAT generation, who is a white gay man who has tracked dominant pop images of males over the decades, it saddens me how Taylor had to "beef up" from one film to the next. In my day, we had a whole other level of "masculinity" that was presented, including on Rolling Stone. Anyone old enuf to remember THIS controversial cover, called "Naked Lunch Box" featuring David Cassidy??? <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/photos/gallery/5392214/1972_rolling_stone_covers/photo/10/large/vanmorrison"http://www.rollingstone.com/photos/gallery/5392214/1972_rolling_stone_covers/photo/10/large/vanmorrison

And he was being presented as heterosexual. His sexuality was never in question. He was known for being "a lady's man". So much of this is generational. I remember and lament the day that bulked up men hit the scene after the likes of Cassidy. MJ, and Duran Duran were seen as "hot".

The Cassidy image is decidedly different than the Lautner one. David is PASSIVE while Taylor is ACTIVE: both on the cover and in the spread: he's doing something masculine: including "having and showing off muscles one only gets from a gym". That's masculinity in the era of steroid abuse. Not to me, though. To me it's just grotesque. And in this case it's all very racist as well, for it's not just a young white man being set out for the visual connoisseurs, the feasters of photos. It's a young man who plays an American Indian who is sometimes a wolf. Remember how the Black woman was portrayed in "Hungry Life the Wolf"? As a beast for a white het man to capture, as a white British sexy coloniser. Now RS's white audience, of males and females of various ages (I don't even know their demographic any more) gets to consume Lautner, who they can pretend is their Indian/wolf trophy/pet. It's pretty vile white male supremacist stuff.

What the Cassidy and Lautner cover photos have in common is that youth--teen youth--Cassidy played one on TV--is feminising, all by itself. So if it's a teen woman, she's more feminine yet, and if he's a teen male, he's more feminine, because really "feminine" means "consumable", able to be possessed by someone with more power, and able to be violated by those more powerful people. And since Lautner is American Indian as well as Western European in heritage (French, Dutch, German, Ottawa, Potawatomi), he is feminised there as well. Any feminised men: men who are not white, not statused by wealth, not heterosexual, have to go the extra mile to appear more heterosexual, if that's what society at that time dictates. Back in the day, a whiteboy and a Black man--D. Cassidy in the early '70s and M. Jackson in the early '80s, were not assumed to be gay.

Now, looking back on the Cassidy cover and on MJ from that time, they both seem overtly feminised. Which points out to me just how masculinised men have had to be to be seen as heterosexual. The irony, of course, is that the gyms are packed with gay middle class white men. And hypermasculinity has been hot in white gay society for a long time. Het and gay porn stars are basically physical brutes capable of rape. It's THAT kind of power that is eroticised, always, in men. (You think that het girls' fantasies are of overpowering Taylor? Not according to the dominant cultural script. Because here, to be a voyeuristic teen het girl is to be passive. She can have his image but she can't have him.

Cassidy was too femme for gay men back then. The Marlboro Man was more the gay icon--this has so much to do with gay self-hatred, but that's too long a comment!! As for me, I had a crush on David and will take that aesthetic any day over this muscle-bound "looks like he could be the shit out of most women and many gay men" body-type. NOT appealing to me. (I'd never date a man who was physically capable of overpowering me, nor would I date anyone who I could overpower.) It's sad how "eroticised" men's POWERFULNESS is, and women's VULNERABILITY TO THAT KIND OF POWER. Desiring the powerful makes us powerless. And THAT'S what R.S. is going for. The Lautner boy's a manly boy--he ain't a weakling like that Cassidy fella. Het White Male God forbid.

Seriously, I hate it when my fiancee ogles guys like that. I easily blow up into a violent rage.