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Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn: Spartacus: Blood and Sand.” The Guardian. 22 May 2010. 15 Dec. 2010.
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Ebert, Roger. “Roger Ebert re-enters the ‘games as art’ debate.” Guardian.co.uk Games Blog. 20 April 2010. 10 Dec. 2010.
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html>.
Beefy Guys and
Brawny Dolls
He-Man, the Masters of the
Universe, and Gay Clone Culture
MICHAEL G. CORNELIUS
In 1981, Mattel launched the Masters of the Universe line of action figures, creating a toy-derived sword and sandal fantasy microcosm inhabited largely by a series of muscular, mostly naked he-men marshaled under the figure of the aptly named He-Man himself, the chief warrior for the forces of good and the “most powerful man in the universe,” as the figure’s packaging modestly noted. Simultaneous to the release of the action figures, Filmation studios syndicated a thirty-minute cartoon of the toy line called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe; from a marketing perspective, this was a novel concept, since He-Man was the first series of toys to be launched concurrent to a television show. As Sam Anderson explains: “It [the television show] was basically a long-form, serialized Mattel commercial, the first cartoon ever to be conceived and produced only for the purpose of selling an action figure — a mythology preceded by its own icons (plastic ones, with swiveling torsos and ‘power punch action’). In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that my love for the show — my quasi-religious immersion — was just a Pavlovian response to aggressive cross-marketing” (Anderson).
The exaggeratedly muscular form of He-Man dominated every aspect of the Masters of the Universe — its packaging, its marketing, the television show and comic books— so much so that it was rare to glimpse at a scene of the series or a page of any of the comics without seeing the hyper-developed pectoral and gluteus muscles of He-Man staring back. Whereas He-Man himself was a drab, stolid Boy Scout–type who always did what was right, fought for social justice, and tossed off the occasionally leaden bon mot while doing so, his musculature became the actual cynosure of the show, as his hyper-developed form was con-154
Beefy Guys and Brawny Dolls (Cornelius) 155
tinually on display, front and foremost, for all eyes to see. As a result, the enlarged physique of the chief Master of the Universe was not designed to signify He-Man’s dominance or virtue; it was not designed as a signification at all.
Indeed, his muscles were, in fact, what the show and the toy line were ultimately about. He-Man’s overdeveloped physique was the star of the series, and the man himself was just a skeletal structure crafted to carry that exaggerated musculature into battle for all to admire. He-Man was not fashioned as a simulacrum of exaggerated male masculinity; He-Man’s muscles were his masculinity. In fact, they constituted his entire identity, the sole and overarching extent of his entire iconic fashioning. For He-Man, he flexes; therefore, he is.
Yet despite the godly otherworldliness and singular nature of He-Man’s strength, within the Masters of the Universe toy line, his muscular physique was replicated in hard, tactile plastic for nearly every figure in the series, both good and evil. He-Man’s chief nemesis, Skeletor, was a sorcerer, a figure for whom an excess of muscles was hardly relevant, since he relied on magic and guile to combat his foe. Yet, Skeletor’s toy body exhibited the same definition as He-Man, since it utilized the same plastic parts to create the same muscular figure. In the Masters of the Universe world, the male form was ceaselessly replicated and transmuted from one figure to the other. Doll manufacturers have long done this, utilizing one form to represent multiple figures. From a pecuniary perspective, this demonstrates a wise business acumen, saving money on molds and parts. Generally, children and even collectors raise no objection if Doll X and Doll Y have the same basic underpinning; their plasticized bodies exist only as a frame to countenance their clothing, hair, and the other accessories that distinguish their identity from the other dolls on the toy store shelf.
Barbie is perhaps the ultimate representation of this ability to market sameness in form. Collectors will easily purchase dozens and dozens of the same doll —
of the same form, the same plastic structure — in order to amass the parapher-nalia associated with the particular look packaged onto the doll (and the packaging itself ). Though much has been made of Barbie’s representation of the female form, and rightly so, Barbie herself is not her physique, not her plastic curves and molded-over vagina; rather, she is the hair and clothing that cover these aspects of her personage. Her names suggest as much, since Barbie alters identity every time she switches wardrobe: differing personas like Balle-rina Barbie, Western Barbie, and Pan Am Stewardess Barbie are differentiated only by raiment, hairstyle, and accoutrement. Her identity is designed to be discerned by how her form is both covered and represented by these accessories.
Of course, Barbie is known primarily as a “fashion doll” (Hall 47). Yet the same is true for most other dolls and action figures. GI Joe figures, for example, likewise utilize similar plasticized physiques as their base, but, as with Barbie, the undercarriage is irrelevant; here, clothes (and from a sociophallic perspective, weapons,) truly make the man.
Like GI Joe, He-Man’s name is emblematic of his identity; yet, rather than
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make reference to his clothing, weapons, or occupation, He-Man’s name is a double reference to his masculine physique —combining both “he” and “man,”
noting the masculine twice, while at the same time employing a common term for a strongman or muscleman. Anderson labels He-Man “a half-naked steroidal Aryan cartoon beefcake,” an apt description of the character, one emphasizing his bulk and the erotic potential of it (“half-naked,” “beefcake”) (Anderson).
Thus He-Man and his fellow Masters are all about their plastic physiques; raiment and accoutrement matter little. In their world, the body is text, to be read as key signifier in the fashioning of male identity. Interestingly, this reliance upon, and fascination with, the male form in the He-Man toy line is reminiscent of the manner in which the male f
orm is considered as both object of desire and object of subjective fashioning in the gay clone subculture, a subculture that flourished at the same time the He-Man toy line was created. As in the Masters of the Universe, the hyper-developed masculine form is a key marker of the gay clone culture; musculature is crucial for admission into the subculture and acceptance by its membership. Maneuvering successfully through the gay clone world requires musculature; it requires impressive physique. In short, it takes a “he-man.” This is not to suggest that Mattel modeled the He-Man line and its reception and representation of the masculine form on the gay clone subculture; however, this happy duality does seem to be suggestive of larger social anxieties and desiderata that the toy line and the clone culture reflect regarding similar attitudes towards the male physique, attitudes that, in many ways, differ from the larger heteronormative continuum present in society at the time. As Karen J. Hall notes, the body gathers “its meaning from historical, social, and geographical contexts” (35). The social context that gave form —
literally and figuratively — to He-Man and gay clone culture reflects intriguing notions about the hyperdeveloped male body in this particular moment in history. By establishing the hyperstimulated physique as a model of attainment —
as something to desire for one’s self and in others— both He-Man and clone culture shape the male form simultaneously as a desirable object of the same-gendered gaze and as an attribute so commonplace in the two microcosmic subcultures as to render the form invisible, or less visible, than would otherwise seem possible for such hulking, out-of-place shapes. The end result is both an idolization and palliation of the enlarged male form and a reconfiguration of contemporary constructs of the masculine overall. Ultimately, the ways and means in which He-Man and gay clone culture both create, sustain, and marginalize the male form suggests that each are rejoinders to masculinity itself, both old-fashioned established forms and newly emerging variations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are redactions of and reactions to altering paradigms in the traditional role of the heteronormative male. They are, in fact, more masculine than the newly evolving male of the still-developing men’s movement; as men grew more in touch with their feminine sides, these two seemingly disparate cultures— one a sexualized sub culture, the other a fabri-
Beefy Guys and Brawny Dolls (Cornelius) 157
cated child’s fantasia on traditional pepla motifs— both established a male ethos that, in its insistence on hypermasculinity, fetishized and obtunded the male form itself.
On Muscles and Molds
Men’s bodies are detachable ... a man and his body are soon parted....
What men are afraid of most is not lions, not snakes, not the dark, not women. Not anymore. What men are most afraid of is the body of another man.
— Margaret Atwood
The Masters of the Universe line of toys was first designed by Roger Sweet, with a back story created by Donald F. Glut. The early examples of Masters toys, often called the “first wave,” are remarkably homogenous in appearance.
All of them revel in celebrating the muscularized male form: the pectorals bulge, the abdominals are rippled and rigid, the biceps and triceps strain from overdevelopment. Initially, Masters’ toys were crafted from only a few existing molds: there were two chest molds (one smooth and one hairy); one belt/waist undergarment mold (the depicted undergarment was given a textured surface designed to resemble animal fur; hence the fan-given appellative “furry underwear”); and three sets of arm and leg molds (one smooth and muscular, one hairy and muscular, and one smooth and muscular that ended in claws and webbed feet instead of fingers and toes). In addition, all of the initial toys shared the same pose; the left hand was splayed open, as if to slap a foe, while the right hand was curved with the thumb positioned up, designed to facilitate the grasp-ing of whatever weapon was packaged with the action figure. The arms were both curved, to emphasize their muscularity; they could move only up and down, and were easily detached with a small amount of applied torque. The waist swiveled on a tight elastic band, creating a motion designed to mimic a
“power punch.” The legs were connected to similar bands, which allowed limited mobility in several directions. The figures could balance on their legs, but posing options were severely restricted.
The most significant differentiated piece of any Masters of the Universe figure was its head. Unlike the rest of the body, which was constructed of rigid, firm plastic, the head was much softer, yielding to the touch and somewhat pliable. These heads could rotate, and each was crafted from a different mold, creating a perhaps unnerving paradigm wherein differing heads all shared the same body. While this could be said as emphasizing the nature of the head —
and, by extension, the intellect, passions, and ideals held within — in reality, the pliable nature of the head suggested the weakness of the mind as compared to the hardness of the body. This is reflected in the very nature of the toys them-
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Of Muscles and Men
selves. He-Man, leader of the Heroic Warriors, was noted chiefly for his strength; the literal “strongest man in the universe,” he won contests and saved the day through brawn, not brains. His counterpart was his chief foe, Skeletor, leader of the Evil Warriors, whose intellect and scheming are continually defeated by the sheer he-man-ness of He-Man himself. Peter Schwenger has suggested a correlation between de-intellectualism and maleness when he notes that “self-awareness ... [is] antithetical to [the] idea of the male” (624). Instinct, gut reactions, aggression, violence — this is the world of the male, not logic, coolness, intellect, and awareness. Thus brains were not prioritized in the Masters world; it was brawn that mattered.
As such, the body of each Masters figure was crafted out of a rigid plastic that changed colors for different figures, representing shades of skin or (presumably) ultra-tight clothing. The Evil Warrior Mer-Man was green, for example, reflecting his aquatic home; Beast Man, another evil minion, was orange, his hairy hide perhaps designed to suggest the tawny tone of a lion or tiger.
None of the first wave Evil Warriors had flesh-colored skin (Skeletor himself was blue), save for Zodac, who, in the cartoon series, was converted to the side of good (and who also had clawed fingers and webbed feet, suggesting his differentiation from the first wave Heroic Warriors, who all had the shaggy or smooth booted feet). Heroic Warriors were mostly depicted with white faces—
He-Man himself, Man-at-Arms, Stratos— and their coloring suggested ultra-tight clothing, save for Stratos, a flying man whose gray, reportedly fur-covered skin was oddly disrupted by the fleshy tones of his face. There is, quite naturally, a presumption of white privilege amongst the coloring of Masters figures; white is good, that old chestnut, while non-white was demarcated by the side of evil.
Still, whether the skin was colored tan, blue, green, or orange, all of the figures, good and evil, shared the same physique, and the musculature of each figure was prominently featured and displayed. Sartorial options were minimized in the Masters of the Universe line; He-Man himself only wore a criss-cross
“leather” harness that strapped across his chest, emphasizing the chest’s enlarged nature, along with his shaggy underwear. Most of the other characters followed suit, wearing uniforms that “revealed” rather than “concealed.” Interestingly, for the most part, the Masters’ uniforms served no functional purpose (though, on occasion, they had a loop to store the figure’s sword, as with Tri-Klops); rather than being an extension of their powers or a reflection of their persona, the clothing placed on He-Man and the other Masters figures was largely designed solely to emphasize each toy’s enhanced musculature.1 Unlike GI Joe, who hid his body behind military fatigues, the sword and sandal pedigree of the Masters of the Universe allowed for the full consideration of the male form in all its plasticized glory.
He-Man was not directly derived from Robert E. Howard’s creation of Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian, as some have believed (the popular Conan the Barbar
ian movie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, would not be released
Beefy Guys and Brawny Dolls (Cornelius) 159
until 1982, a year after the toy franchise’s debut and two years after its initial development). Nevertheless, Conan and his peplum kin are obvious influences on He-Man’s appearance. Howard’s Conan narratives did not shy away from describing the form of his hero, in all his manly glory:
[Conan was] a tall man, mightily shouldered and deep of chest, with a massive corded neck and heavily muscled limbs. He was clad in silk and velvet, with the royal lions of Aquilonia worked in gold upon his rich jupon, and the crown of Aquilonia shone on his square-cut black mane; but the great sword at his side seemed more natural to him than the regal accoutrements. His brow was low and broad, his eyes a volcanic blue that smoldered as if with some inner fire. His dark, scarred, almost sinister face was that of a fighting-man, and his velvet garments could not conceal the hard, dangerous lines of his limbs [Howard, Dragon 89 –90].
Descriptive words like “massive,” “giant,” and “powerful,” commonly applied to Conan, were all designed to convey a sense of his size and strength. Presenting the masculine is important to the sword and sandal genre. In the realm of the barbarian hero, male flesh is an obvious commodity. It signifies power, virility, and dominance. Recent examples of the genre, including Ridley Scott’s 2000
film Gladiator and the 2010 Starz television network series Spartacus: Blood and Sand frankly revel in the fleshy world of the male, allowing the camera to linger on numerous shots of sweaty masculine bodies at work and in repose. This voyeuristic presentation of the male body produces at least one curious side affect; it generates and reduces the male form as the object of the decidedly male gaze, since men are considered the primary audience demographic for the sword and sandal genre (as Peter Bondanella observes, “Most audiences [for sword and sandal films] were composed of men” [178]). In those instances where a gendered form is presented as the object of that same gender’s gaze —
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