Did you swoon over Colin Firth in THAT wet shirt in the BBC 1995 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice? I didn’t. Gross. I was 15 in 1995 and in that scene Colin Firth – then 35 – looked to me like an old dad who had got a bit sweaty doing some gardening.
Many did, though. So prepare for some feelings at the news the shirt Firth wore in the show fetched £25,000 at auction this week. Has it been laundered – this is the question we need answered.
But it also raises another question: did Colin Firth’s wet shirt moment mark a sea change in the way British women were expected to look at men?
The general consensus has long been that men respond best to visual stimuli, whereas for women it’s just a bit more complicated than that. In the 80s, answering criticism of its Page Three girls, The Sun launched “Page 7 Fella” in 1988. It lasted for seven years but never really caused a stir.
It remains the case that it is mostly men who consume pornography, but it is women who have led the surge in explicit romantic fiction – both in e-reader downloads and also in audiobooks.
No-one ever thought women were immune to pictures of hunks, but the hunks were usually having to do something while also being, well, hunky. Once upon a time they only needed to be smoking a cigarette, but then came the trope of the dashing uniform.
That Athena poster of the model with the baby was partly so popular because look, he’s holding a baby. Nick Kamen, in the famous Levi 501 advert was casually washing his jeans, oblivious to the stares of his fellow launderette patrons. He was a focus of lust, yes, but he was just going about his day.
The uproar over the Firth shirt scene led reasonably swiftly to the idea that, in fact, women were also open to the idea that men didn’t have to be doing anything – changing a tyre, riding a horse, washing jeans – in order to make women’s hearts go pitter-pat.
In the same year, Coca-Cola brought out its “Diet Coke Break” advert, where female office workers lined up in a window to perv over a construction worker taking off his shirt and drinking a Diet Coke. But he was still doing something, right? He was having a break from heaving brieze blocks about and staring into holes.
But then: hello, David Gandy! Gandy posed for Dolce & Gabbana in the mid-Noughties in just his pants. No launderette, no baby, no hard hat.
This was one of the first times, since Page 7 Fella, that a man had been presented in this passively sexual way. Yes, yes, we had the John Paul Gaultier adverts with all those sailors smooching about, (and even then they were doing something: sailing!), but that was also overtly camp – sexy men seen through the lens of a gay man, rather than through the eyes of a straight woman.
David Gandy’s advert was equivocal: here was a straight (probably?) man, presented in such a way as to appeal to both straight women and gay men. The series of D&G adverts was not especially camp and yet it also did not subscribe to the previously required “doing stuff” trope. Hmm, we thought. This is odd. Gandy is a national treasure now and therefore is about as dangerously sexy as a bottle of WellMan gummies, but back then it was very new and actually quite strange.
Later, in 2012, we had the movie Magic Mike, in which beefcake Channing Tatum plays a male stripper. Female audiences were not given very much more than muscles and dancing to go on. The strippers were not only not “doing stuff”, they were also inhabiting a role, becoming the object on the stage only to be looked at, in the way that women had always been.
In 2015 this all started to backfire, with commentators noticing that all male leads in visual media now required impossibly ripped torsos. Even Aidan Turner in Poldark – Poldark! – had to chug protein drinks and hit the gym in order to star in a very middling BBC drama about tin mining.
The same year Kit Harrington, who played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, broke the key celebrity tenet – “Be boring at all times” – and said something actually interesting. “To always be put on a pedestal as a hunk is slightly demeaning,” he said. “I’m in a successful TV show in a kind of leading man way and it can sometimes feel like your art is being put to one side for your sex appeal. And I don’t like that.”
It all leads inevitably and perhaps queasily to Jeremy Allen White.
Allen White, the pocket-sized and very cute lead of Hulu’s The Bear starred earlier this year in an advert for Calvin Klein. He leaps up a flight of stairs in New York, strips to his white CK pants, white trainers and socks and writhes about, ending up slumped on a red corduroy sofa.
The hot take on social media was that for women this was a real marmalade dropper, but I’m not so sure. At least, it wasn’t for me. I think we are so far now into the idea of male objectification by women that we’re sliding back into John Paul Gaultier camp territory. Today, women I know say they feel much more empowered to leer at their favourite hot male stars, and comment on their hotness in front of their partners. They’re helped along by their Instagram feeds, which bombard them with pictures of Paul Mescal in his gym shorts.
There’s also something else going on. Advertisers rely heavily on sex to sell basically everything. But the sexual objectification of women in media has felt extremely poisonous since the music video for Robin Thicke’s monstrous track “Blurred Lines”. The objectification of men by women, on the other hand, is seen as a pretty victimless crime. Sure, a group of women at a male strip club can get a bit rowdy – but what threat do they actually pose?
And don’t think for one second, in this week of International Women’s Day, that this overturn in how men and women are presented in mass marketing has changed the lives of real, actual women. We are mostly still underpaid, undervalued and unheard. Presenting men as sex objects is just window dressing, a feint to make women think they hold any cards at all.
Still, it’s a nice try.