Globalizing male attractiveness: Advertising in men’s lifestyle magazines in India

Abstract

This study examines the construction of new models of masculinity in men’s lifestyle magazine advertising in India. Using textual analysis of advertisements, the study shows how certain kinds of western masculine ideals and body aesthetics are being adopted and reworked into advertising to appeal and facilitate consumption among middle and upper-class Indian men living in the urban centers of India. The contemporary construction of upper and aspirational middle-class masculinity includes size and hypermuscularity, fair skin/whiteness, and a view of self as global ethnic. These types of constructions help to globalize the male body and masculine ideal while also privileging whiteness and class in the local and global arena.

Keywords

Advertising consumer culture globalization India magazines masculinity textual analysis

Introduction

Visuals tell a compelling story. They evoke powerful emotions, draw us in, and persuade us to act. In our everyday life, we often refer to them as objects of reality as well as stimuli for dreams and fantasies. In today’s consumer culture, they are everywhere affecting us in ways that we don’t always comprehend, and through repetition, they become part of our consciousness, our imaginations, our memory, and also our culture.

Visuals are assumed to cross national boundaries much better than language (Messaris, 1997). Hence, global advertisers have relied on them to communicate certain ideas and ideals to sell products around the world (Sutton, 2009). Visuals in advertising are able to transform people and products into powerful objects of desire for individuals to consume. Hence, they also play a role in shaping identities, particularly gender identities, and reinforce gender hierarchy and norms (Gauntlett, 2008; Schroeder and Zwick, 2004). Kellner (1995: 248) explains, “[i]n a postmodern image culture, individuals get their very identity from these figures [e.g. Marlboro’s cowboy figure as a symbol of masculinity], thus advertising becomes an important and overlooked mechanism of socialization, as well as manager of consumer demand.”

In the past, several prominent scholars have studied advertising visuals to understand their role in construction of masculinity and femininity (see for example Bordo, 1999; Cortese, 2015; Dyer, 1982; Goffman, 1976; Messaris, 1997). However, most studies in this area have been undertaken in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia with comparatively few studies conducted in Asian countries (see Lee and Song, 2017; Prianti, 2018; Tanaka, 2003). These, largely Western studies, though very significant in raising issues related to power and politics of gender representation in advertising, do not adequately inform about similar issues in non-Western countries, nor do they reflect or address new issues that have emerged because of increasingly porous national boundaries and increased global cultural flow through global media which is accelerating cultural exchanges to unprecedented levels. As a result, today the local and global/foreign are constantly competing in the same arena through complex processes and politics. Unstable hybrid cultures and identities are emerging through these interactions in contact spaces where the local and foreign are simultaneously competing for dominance while also celebrating, adopting, and mimicking each other.

This article focuses on the changes in contemporary construction of masculinity as a result of growing global-local interactions in India. It focuses on India because India over the last two decades has reshaped into a modern consumer society and is witnessing many changes resulting from globalization. Structural changes brought about by market liberalization policies in the 1990s coupled with increased encounters with mediated representations of lifestyles of the rich and the famous from around the world has resulted in changes in how Indians live, what they wear, how they spend their leisure time, with whom they associate, and how they express themselves (Derne, 2008; Pandey, 2014).

The study aims to inform about the changes in contemporary construction of masculinity via a look at representation of men in men’s lifestyle magazine advertising. It does so because advertising stimulates consumption and plays an important role in “the construction, maintenance, and representation of male bodies” (Schroeder and Zwick, 2004: 21). Advertising also plays a central role in magazines production, and given that magazine producers have increasingly becoming dependent on advertisers for their magazine’s survival in a highly competitive media environment, examining advertising in cultural production and construction of masculinity is even more important (Johnson and Prijatel, 2013; McCracken, 1993; Scott, 2014). Advertising’s importance in production of men’s lifestyle magazines in India, can also be understood through comments made by publishers in popular press. For example, Arjun Mehra, publisher director Condé Nast India was quoted in an interview stating:

We have been inundated by requests from our advertisers to launch a world class magazine like GQ in India. There is a huge vacuum in the men's luxury market and GQ will bridge that gap. Our launch issue showcases over 120 pages of advertising supported by every major luxury brand. (Campaign India Team, 2008)

It is important to note that men’s lifestyle magazines genre are relatively new in India as most have emerged after 2005 when the Indian government changed its policies regarding foreign direct investment in the “non-news” print media sector allowing for international magazine titles such as Men’s Health, Maxim, GQ, and FHM to enter the Indian market. Around the same time, several local men’s lifestyle magazines (MW, The Man, and M) also emerged all mimicking the glossy Western men’s lifestyle magazines. These magazines are typically aimed at a niche audience of elite, educated, English-speaking, internationally-oriented, globetrotting, and upper-class affluent Indian men between the ages of 25-45 (Campaign India Team, 2008, TheMediaAnt, n.d), however, they also serve the needs of the middle class who like to spend their disposable income on aspirational goods. The audience for men’s lifestyle magazines lives in major metropolitan cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai with a few residing in smaller cities. These men are perhaps more similar in their lifestyle to middle class men in the West than they are to their Indian counterparts in suburban and rural India.

Men’s lifestyle magazines host both local and global content and receive support from global and local advertisers. Thus, they are hybrid or glocal (Robertson, 1997) cultural texts that reflect lifestyles, desires and aspirations of middle and upper-class Indian men living in large metropolitan cities and not the entire country, which is quite vast and diverse. As Turner (2007) argues, the impacts of globalization are uneven within a country, thus it is useful to study the transformations within smaller pockets, the “enclaves” rather than the country as a whole. Men’s lifestyle magazines provide an opportunity to study one such enclave where the local and global converge to speak to an increasingly transnational and cosmopolitan male audience and thus reveal transformations taking place in smaller glocalities rather than the entire country.

It should be noted that studies on gender representations in Indian media exist, however those focusing on Indian advertising have been limited, and those focusing on masculinity in advertising have been even fewer (see Cayla and Koops-Elson, 2006; Chaudhari, 2001; Das, 2000). Given that gender is a fluid social construct (Butler, 1990), and global interactions have increased in the last decade since majority of the studies in this area have been conducted, newer analysis of masculinity is much needed. In addition, a deeper, more nuanced exploration of masculinity, power and privilege that emerge at the global-national nexus is also needed as has been called for scholars like Beasley (2008).

This study fills in these gaps in the gender representation literature by exploring newer construction of masculinity at the nexus of global-local interactions. It connects the local construction of masculinity to the global, thus extending the theoretical framework that helps to understand construction of identities in a more globalized world. It does so after theoretically engaging with the concept of glocalization or hybridity which suggests that the interaction of global and local produces hybrids which exists on a continuum from more global to more local (Robertson, 1997; Pieterse, 2013) in the literature review section. It should be noted that hybridity includes the subject matter of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; Walby et al., 2012) that acknowledges that “identities are constructed through the intersection of multiple dimensions” and these intersections can reproduce racial and gender hierarchies (Crenshaw, 1991: 1299). The study highlights that the contemporary construction of upper and aspirational middle-class masculinity includes hypermuscularity, fair skin/whiteness, and a view of self as global ethnic. This type of construction helps to globalize the male body and masculine ideal while also privileging whiteness and class in the local as well as global arena.

Literature review

Global-local intersection in masculinity construction

Gender identities and their construction is a complex process. Gender (e.g. masculinity and femininity) is a fluid social construct that is different from sex that is biologically determined (Butler, 1990; West and Zimmerman, 1987). In other words, gender is something one does (West and Zimmerman, 1987) or performs (Butler, 1990) and sex is something one has. Gender, as Gerson and Peiss (1985) have noted, is constituted through interaction and its meaning is continuously created through human actions, hence with various changes in society, the meaning of what it means to be a man, or a woman, can also change.

Connell (1995) explains that masculinities are reproduced through many institutional practices, including images, ideals, and representations of roles, behaviors, and emotions and that at any given time many different kinds of masculinities exist in a society (see Connell, 1995, 2005). In India, a wide variety of factors such as region, religion, class, caste, and sexual orientation give rise to many forms of masculinities, which have been highlighted by scholars from many different fields such as anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, and sociology (see for e.g. Chopra et al., 2004; Dasgupta and Baker, 2013; Dasgupta and Gokulsing, 2014; Derne, 2008; Osella and Osella, 2000, 2006). Analyzing the many forms of Indian masculinity is an important and complex issue meriting a thorough study of its own. However, for this study, first an examination of the literature that provides a broader understanding of various intersections such as globalization, economic neoliberalism, local histories, patriarchy, social class, and others that shape masculinities at local level is discussed as this remains theoretically underexplored (see Beasley, 2008; Bose, 2012). As West and Zimmerman (1987: 147) have argued, gender should not be simply explored as a “property of individuals but as an integral dynamic of social order” that include institution, cultural and other interaction that affect social change. The importance of studying intersectionality has been well documented in the works of many scholars (Bose, 2012; Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 1981; Yuval-Davis 2006). The various global-local intersections that have given rise to different local (Indian) construction of masculinities is discussed in the following paragraphs. The literature is organized around the three waves of globalization (Robertson, 2003).

First wave of globalization: Construction of masculinity in colonial context

The general subject of globalization and masculinity has received more sustained attention from a western perspective as noted before; most prominent is Connell’s (1998) work on historicizing the linkage. Connell (1998) shows the link between historical waves of globalization with changes in masculinity around the globe in colonial and post-colonial contexts. According to Connell (1998), the first wave of globalization was marked by conquests, colonization, and settlements, which led to the celebration of a certain type of man, mostly soldiers, who were violent and egocentric, and had an exploitive relationship with land, people, and cultures. Later, when these men began the process of empire building, their masculinity began to be associated with their economic successes and those they colonized, their masculinity began to be problematized. Colonized men were often separated into “manly men” and “effeminate men” whose roles and tasks differed. This according to Connell (1998) helped to create a gender difference and gender order in the colonized countries.

Similar observations have been made about colonial India. Scholars contend that in India gender was not as demarcated as it was in the West and that the binary opposite forms of gender developed as result of contact with the West during the colonial period (Verma, 2004). In colonized India, British considered Indian men in general to be less “manly” than the British, and Bengali men were considered even “weaker” and more “effeminate” than other Indian men such as Pathans and Sikhs (Chattopadhyay, 2014; Chowdhury, 2001; Sinha, 1995). This perception led to the exclusion of Bengali men from the Indian army (Chattopadhyay, 2014). However, in spite of being perceived as weak, some high-class Bengali men managed to gain power in society through Western education, which allowed them to be the first ones to take on administrative, teaching, and civil services job in the colonial British government. These men, Chatterjee (1993: 120–121) explains, constructed various dichotomies in order to succeed during colonial times. They separated their lives into two worlds, the “inside/home/spirit” world where Indian traditions prevailed and the outside world where western colonial norms prevailed. This inside-outside divide allowed men to embrace modernity while preserving their traditional Indian identity (Chatterjee, 1993). These men, referred to as Bhadralok (respectable man), were prosperous men known for their sophisticated behavior, refined taste, interest in books, art, and music. They were the intellectuals who were able to influence policies and other social reforms in India (Chattopadhyay, 2014) in spite of being perceived as “less masculine” by the British.

Second wave of globalization: Construction of masculinity in post-colonial context

In 1947, India gained its independence from the British after several centuries of colonial rule. In the post-independence era, Indians felt ambivalence towards their colonial past. Cayla and Koops-Elson (2006: 151) refer to this as the “postcolonial condition,” a time when men simultaneously borrowed and contested colonial discourses and practices leading to what they describe as “the hybridity and inbetweenness of postcolonial experience.” Indian men defied colonial norms and practices but at the same time appropriated modern practices, institutions, media and media representations including the colonial representations of “exotic India.”

Between 1947 and the late 1980s, India entered a nation-building phase. At this time, the Indian government had a protectionist attitude towards its national market, but it was not completely closed off to the world. As the country focused its effort on national development and industrialization, a different kind of masculinity began to emerge and be desired, the one that did not focus on what Srivastava (2007: 141) describes as, “the bodily representation or aggressive behavior but rather on being scientific and rational.” This form of masculinity was attached to professions such as doctors, engineers, and scientists who were much needed for nation’s development. At this time patriotism prevailed, and in advertising, one saw the construction of a “patriotic consumer,” someone who rejected the British and other foreign goods in support of the local industry (Cayla and Koops-Elson, 2006: 152).

Third wave of globalization: Construction of masculinity in liberalized market context

By early 1990s, pressures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resulted in opening up of the Indian market to greater trade and foreign investments. At this time, neoliberalism started to take roots in India with the promise of choice, personal freedom, progress, and modernity that was promoted through multinational companies and their advertising agencies that followed them around the globe (Slater, 1997). Neoliberalism championed the need for a worldwide capitalist system, one that would finally embrace India. At this juncture, Sarkar (2011) notes that capitalism has become deeply rooted in India, a view that is also echoed by other scholars (Derne, 2008).

In this third wave of globalization, marked by post colonialism and neoliberalism around the world, Connell (1998: 16) notes a reorientation of the global gender order and an emergence of a new type of masculinity, the “transnational business masculinity” that is performed by an elite group of socially dominant men who are in the offices of multinational corporations, investment banks, and at business lounges at the airports. These men are said to be aggressive and driven by profit making (Connell and Wood, 2005). Connell and Wood (2005: 359) write that this form of masculinity has “some continuity with older bourgeois masculinities” with its preoccupation with acquiring power and money while becoming “increasingly detached from older loyalties to nation, business organization, family, and marital partners.”

In the context of India, Chattopadhyay (2014) highlights an emergence of a different kind of masculinity as a result of complex interaction of class, changing economy, and the role of media. Chattopadhyay (2014: 125) calls this new type of masculinity as the “transnational middle-class masculinity.” Chattopadhyay (2014: 129) illustrates this form of masculinity through the transformation of Bengali Bhadralok masculinity from one who pursued art and culture as a marker of status to the one who now consumes to acquire status. This form of masculinity he writes is different from “transnational business masculinity” as it “lacks managerial ability” and “competitive individualism.” Other scholars like Derné (2000, 2008, 2014) too explored the intersection of globalization, media and masculinity in India. For example Derné through his 1991 ethnographic study of filmgoing middle-class Indian men living in a non-metropolitan city, observed that Indian men continued to focus on “Indianness as the cornerstone of their identity and associated it with a distinctive family systems that included arranged marriages and limitations of women’s movements outside the home” (cited in Derné, 2014: 148). However, in his later study Derné (2008) observed changes in masculine identity especially among the more affluent Indians.

Focusing on Indian advertising during the post-colonial neoliberal era, Cayla and Koops-Elson (2006: 156) observed a shift from the “patriotic consumer” to a “globalized consumer,” and the adoption of a “global Indian,” cosmopolitan consumers, and hybrid identity. They observed that these new hybrid characters “straddle[d] an Indian core of tradition and spirituality as well as the domain of technological modernity.” In terms of representation of masculinity in advertising, they write, pre-liberalization, Indian men were shown in “soft contours,” “as a family man, a secular man and peaceful man,” but post-liberalization, their representations have become “more assertive and aggressive.” Das (2000: 705) made similar observations through her examination of advertisements from a variety of magazines published at the onset of market liberalization in India, that is in 1987, 1990 and 1994. Das (2000) found an increase in “traditional-other” role (i.e., men shown as “authority figure,” “family man,” “career-oriented,” and “involved in sports/recreational activities” categories).” Later, Chaudhuri (2001) observed something slightly different in her study of gender representation in advertising published in newspapers, news magazines and women’s magazines. Chaudhuri (2001: 373) noted an increased presence of male models in the advertisements than before and concluded that “liberalisation [had] heralded new notions for malehood that include[d] traditional and newer notions of power and success,” and a “definite effort to incorporate very strong notions of individual achievement, pleasure, and identity for both men and women” in advertising.

These studies conducted over a period of time collectively show that models of masculinity in India have been evolving as a result of global forces and widely shared local desire on the part of Indian men and women alike, to be ever more “modern” and “global.” Since 2006, it has been noted that we have entered a new phase of globalization (World Bank, 2007). Global/Western media have become even more present in people’s lives than before. New models of masculinity have emerged and continue to emerge clearing the way to new patterns of marriage relationships, new ideas of fatherhood, new ideas of maleness, and new forms of masculine interaction and roles. In Asian countries, in the last decade, several scholars have observed changes in local masculinity as a result of globalization and presence of global media including magazines and advertising (Baas, 2016; Lee and Song, 2017; Prianti, 2018; Song and Lee, 2012; Shaw and Tan, 2014). Given the context of increased globalization in India, what contemporary models of masculinity have emerged in the affluent and urban pockets of India where the impacts of globalization are most pronounced?

Method

Advertising persuades its audience largely through visuals, thus visual analysis of advertisements was untaken to study the contemporary construction of masculinity. Visuals in advertising have been analyzed for a long time using a variety of methods that include content analysis, experiments, reader response, and text-interpretive methods, each with its own strengths and weaknesses (Mcquarrie and Mick, 1999). Messaris (1997: xv) writes, “in the area of print advertising, whose single images are often designed much more meticulously than multiple shots of TV commercials, the creators of advertisements have traditionally attempted to build gender or sexual connotations into the formal or stylistic features of images, rather than just manifest content.” Thus, for this study, textual analysis was used (Dyer, 1982; Stern, 1996). Textual analysis allows one to go beyond the manifest content and quantifiable categories of quantitative content analysis and helps “to discern latent meaning, but also implicit patterns, assumptions and omissions of a text” (Fürsich, 2009: 241), and also helps in reading of the text in its broader cultural context (Fürsich, 2009; Olivotti, 2016).

Textual analysis falls in the cultural-critical paradigm and draws from many methodological traditions including semiotics. Textual analysis is a type of qualitative method where meaning is ascribed to a text by the qualified analyzer who observes the text closely and describes what it means (Dyer, 1982). Typically for textual analysis there is “a strategic selection and presentation of analyzed text as the evidence for the overall argument” (Fürsich, 2009: 240). Supporters of this methodological approach contend that “although any randomly selected consumer may or may not read an ad text in a given way, in the mass, more consumers than not will read a text in a way that is predicated on the text structure itself” (Mcquarrie and Mick, 1999:38). Fürsich (2009: 238) has argued that “media texts present a distinctive discursive moment between encoding and decoding that asks for special scholarly engagement.” Critics however note several weaknesses of this method, which includes lack of united intellectual and methodological tradition, subjectivity, and focus on small sample (Fürsich, 2009).

For this study, textual analysis as described by Stern (1996) was used. Stern (1996: 62) identifies three steps for textual analysis. The first step involves “identification of textual elements” (“attributes” e.g. language, character, plot, background). The second step involves “construction of provisional meaning” (categorization of attributes as type or genre, rhetorical tactic),” and the third step involves “deconstruction of meaning (exposing the cultural assumptions that both sustain and subvert it).” This is similar to Barthes (1977) first level analysis “denotation,” where the advertisement is simply described, and second level analysis “connotation,” where meaning is assigned to each element of the advertisement based on shared cultural knowledge.

For this study, first a one-year sample (January to December) of six top selling men’s lifestyle magazines in India (Men’s Health India, GQ India, Maxim India, FHM India, MW and The Man), a total of 72 magazines from 2013, except The Man, which included magazine from Jun 2013 and May 2014 as earlier magazine for the earlier months were not available to the research. The magazines were examined to obtain an overall impression of masculine constructions in the advertisements. In the magazines, overall, one notices a large number of advertisements in which men appear alone, in passive decorative roles (Berger, 1972; Goffman, 1976), that is, just posing with or for a product as opposed to recreational or professional roles. The male models are fair good-looking men with beautiful muscular bodies. One also notices a large number of advertisements for global brands. Global brands such as Hermes, Burberry, Gucci, Tag Heuer, Omega and so on, used standardized advertisements (same ad across the globe) with Western European male models or global icons/celebrities. In addition to these, one also notices advertisements for local Indian brands with male models.

To conduct deeper textual analysis, I strategically chose three advertisements for local brands to highlight newer constructions of masculinity that includes, incorporation of western body aesthetics, fair skin, metrosexuality, muscularity, sexual virility, and ethnic global. These examples are reflective of a contemporary trend and are by no means the only forms of masculinity available in the Indian media or the culture. Attributes of three advertisements as well as the construction and deconstruction of meanings embedded in the advertisements about masculinity are discussed in detail in the findings section. Later, what these advertising images tell us about cultural shifts, aspirations, western influence and masculine transformation taking place in smaller pockets of urban India and their consequences for men and gender relations as a whole, is discussed.

Findings

Advertising in men’s lifestyle magazines provide a peak into the contemporary construction of masculinity at the nexus of global and local. In the following paragraphs, aspects of new masculinity through three examples are discussed. These examples show that advertising geared towards upper-class urban men in India have moved beyond the dual construction of Indian masculine identity that rested on the interplay of the “traditional” and “modern,” or the “local” and the “global” (Cayla and Koops-Elson, 2006; Chaudhuri, 2001; Das, 2000) to one that has increasingly become more global or Eurocentric. The new masculinity leans heavily towards the West in terms of focus on self and body aesthetics. Looks matter, size matters, and being seen as a part of the global/Western matters in contemporary construction of masculinity.

Looks matter: Focus on body aesthetics

In the men’s lifestyle magazines, a large number of advertisements were for expensive clothing and accessories, and also grooming products which itself indicates a heavy focus on appearance for men. This emphasis on physicality and appearance is an essential element of advertisers’ promotion of what has been called a “metrosexual” man (Simpson, 1994), a relative new arrival in India. A metrosexual is a heterosexual man, who is self-conscious and narcissistic, and spends a lot of time engaging in “feminized practices” such as grooming and looking good (Coad, 2008; Hall, 2015; Simpson, 1994). In the west, one of the icons of metrosexuality noted in the press has been the sports star David Beckham (Cashmore, 2013, CNN). Beckham is said to epitomizes the “metrosexual man,” a man who is not assertive or aggressive instead is preoccupied with looks and vibrant health. Cashmore (2013: para 3) described Beckham as a heterosexual man, who was also mild-mannered and “… dressed stylishly – if a little too flamboyantly for many tastes – groomed himself painstakingly.”

In magazine advertising, one sees construction of metrosexuality through promotion of not only appearance-focused products for men but also through use of global celebrities like David Beckham whose persona and body aesthetics are mimicked as one observes in the ONN underwear advertisement.¹ Beckham, a global sportsman, received quite a bit of press coverage after his 2009-10 Emporio Armani underwear advertisement campaign and since then has modeled underwear for various other brands such as H&M. The ONN advertisement appears to sell underwear using a model with similar body aesthetics as Beckham.

In the ONN advertisement, one sees a male model on display—a man who is tall, has well-developed muscular arm and chest muscles, well-groomed hair (though covered with a straw hat), shows a hairless chest, an arm with tattoos, and slight facial hair. This body is more beautiful than tough, and the advertisement builds a symbolic relationship between a muscular, tattooed body with global male icons such as Beckham. The shared characteristics are attractiveness, masculine beauty, and individuality. The male body and sexuality are still being exploited here through the use of semi-nudity. The focus, however, is less on sex (note the absence of a partner/companion) and more on simple comfort. This is made explicit in the tagline, “Life is a journey. Comfort is my companion.” Comfort here replaces the need for companionship, which is communicated as a more valuable attribute for this exemplar and by extension, its readers.

In this particular advertisement, there is an aspect of objectification, exhibitionism and narcissism in the imagery that engages the viewer to look at his male body but not his face. He is not shown in an assertive position. His traveling alone in this fashion is wistful, unusual and a fantasy, but nevertheless it allows the readers to visualize the brand attribute of comfort. One also notices that the male model is fair-skinned. To my Indian eyes, the model appears to be a fair-skinned Indian male, but he can easily be viewed as a European model. It should be noted here, that most male models in the magazine advertisements had light skin even though a majority of Indian men have dark-skin. The male models in the advertisements also had sharp features, high cheekbones, and their original ethnic origins were often difficult to discern, something that the readers will notice even in the few chosen examples presented in this article. Shome (1996: 510) writes, “[t]he body has functioned as one of the most potent ‘evidence’ of the ‘other’’s difference”, and by choosing a certain kind of body that is more Wester/European looking, the advertisers have in some ways eliminated the difference that Indian men might have with their Western counterparts and at the same time have helped exemplify the fair-skinned western male body for the Indian audience.

“Size matters”: Body size, muscularity and sexual virility

One of the prominent discourses related to masculinity in the West has involved the penis size, which has been linked to sexual performance of men, potency and masculinity (McKee, 2004), and ultimately to power. Even though this discourse has existed in India, it has rarely been overtly used in the mainstream media. Now the same discourse of body size, heterosexual anxiety of penis size, and body sculpting has entered the Indian mainstream advertising lexicon and is being exploited to sell products as one sees in one of the “Euro” brand advertisements.

Euro is an Indian brand, but wants Indian men to think it is European, a product identity that carries more prestige in India (Mazzarella, 2003). In this advertisement, we see three muscular men in their briefs standing close to big bold red letters that make up the word “Euro.” On top of the letter “E” we see in grey color the words asking viewers “what’s your size?” On the right size of the page, in one corner, we see the words “Euro” stylistically written with a red kiss mark next to it perhaps to indicate that women love this on men. Heterosexuality is ensured through the lipstick mark to avoid these men from being viewed as gay and their sexuality questioned.

In this advertisement, three handsome hyper muscular men with chiseled abs and hairless shiny bodies wearing different blue, black, grey colored briefs are presented. They have their right legs slightly bent. They are posing and inviting the gaze of other male viewers. The advertisements promote a particular mesomorph body-type commonly seen in the men’s lifestyle magazines in West (see Alexander, 2003; Labre, 2005). The male models’ bodies look the same, and those familiar with the magazine and magazine advertisements with male models in the West would be all too familiar with this body type. These models reflect a more globalized notion of attractiveness as has been noted by Baas (2016). The racial markers have been erased to a large extent in favor of a more “cosmopolitan aesthetic” (Berghoff and Kühne, 2013: 13), which helps to align the new masculine ideal with the ideals of the West.

Bordo (1993: 165) drawing on Mary Douglas, has argued, “the body is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed.” The changes in male body ideal noted here have come with changes in socio-economic conditions and growth in consumerism in India. These fair, V-shaped, hairless muscular bodies, symbolize westernization, beauty, health, and high socio-economic class. They are new markers of social distinction and consumption of a global lifestyle, for it is only the rich who can afford to go to the gyms to perfectly sculpt their bodies with the help of machines and trainers. For the rest, these models are mostly aspirational; many however are opening their wallets to achieve this body in order to get noticed and symbolically acquire class and status through purchase of luxury brands. It is thus not surprising to see that in the last decade there has been a boom in fitness clubs, gyms and the supplement market all over India (Baas, 2016), a new market that has developed in parallel with the promotion of muscular bodies in the media.

It should also be noted that in this particular advertisement, as in many other advertisements in the men’s lifestyle magazines, there is no background or place that one can clearly identify. The backgrounds are something that have been artificially created or put together. Such presentations are “culturally neutral” (Meyrowitz, 1985) rather than “culturally rich,” a visual strategy that helps to place the advertisements anywhere and relatable for many, and once gain helps to establish the globalness of people and products.

Being part of the global matters: The new exotic global ethnic

One of the other new discourses in advertising relates to the more frequent use of the word ethnic not “desi” (local, native or indigenous, belonging to India). In today’s consumer culture, the once commonly used word desi, has been replaced by a new word “ethnic,” which indicates a shift in how a local (rich) Indian man views himself as a subgroup of the global rather than just belonging to a nation. It is a complicated way of looking at oneself from outside as others would do with an outsider’s gaze. There is a sort of distancing from the desis (locals or natives) but also simultaneously exoticizing oneself in the global arena. In this discourse of “ethnic” not “desi,” there is fluidity where the local easily exchanges place with the global (Western) and the global exchanges place with the local as can be observed in the advertisement for the brand Diwan Saheb.²

In the Diwan Saheb advertisement, unlike the previous examples where locals were noted to be emulating the West and Western models, in this ad two European men appear to be comfortably adopting Indian-ness by wearing traditional Indian outfits. In this ad, one also sees the word “ethic wear” which helps to separate the outfit from the perceived mainstream clothing, which is western. In the Diwan Saheb advertisement, two European men are standing next to each other. They are wearing brightly colored sherwani (long coat-like garment) is yellow and blue colors with ornate embroidery. They appear to be father and son represented by younger and older looking male models. One can assume this also from the advertisement’s tagline “The bond of generations.” The father is looking at his son admiringly with his arms around him. The son is wearing a bright blue turban with golden jewelry adorning it and his father, with his silver white hair, is wearing a bright blue coat and a necklace which projects a royal look. In this ad, one sees the fluidity with which the East (India) and the West exchange places and the West gets incorporated into Indian-ness through white bodies. Ethnic wear is not mainstream rather is an exotic special class of outfit. In men’s lifestyle magazines one rarely sees men wearing traditional local Indian outfits like kurta and pajama. The traditional outfits that are shown are outfits that one normally associated with Indian royalty of the past, or something that a man would wear today at a traditional wedding, hence are “special occasion” outfits. When these Indian outfits are shown for example in advertisement for the brand Diwan Saheb, one also observes the use of European models or European-looking Indian models. Here, too one can see the privileging of race (Caucasian) or whiteness and class (royalty) in the construction of contemporary masculinity.

Discussion

Indian society has undergone major changes in the past 25 years of market liberalization with the pace of change rapidly increasing in the last ten years. It has now entered a new phase, a phase where global consumer culture is competing with traditional patriarchal culture to give rise to new patterns of lifestyles and models of masculinities. By examining the advertising in men’s lifestyle magazines, one can see that the new exemplars of masculinity mark a shift from local to global, from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, and “from patriarchy to intersectionality” (Patil, 2013). The forces of globalization and consumerism is pushing masculine ideal to be more global, Eurocentric and assimilatory while also perhaps unconsciously reproducing race, class and gender hierarchies. This globalization of male body and attractiveness helps to sell similar products to similar groups around the globe, which increases profitability for the companies, but it also has consequences for men and society especially in terms of how they live, the relationships they develop, and what they value.

This exploration shows how global-local intersection can reproduce race, class, and gender hierarchies. In the men’s lifestyle magazine advertising, there is privileging of white masculinity through the extensive use of Western male models or the use of Indian male models who look white or whose racial identity is difficult to identify. Thus, the “most desired” or the “most wanted” men who serve as exemplar for cosmopolitan Indian men or the aspirational class of today’s India are fair-skinned men who look European. This shows continued power and hegemony of white bodies in glocalized spaces. This perhaps also explains the recent growth of “fairness crème” market for Indian men as increasingly white male bodies are serving as exemplars for all to emulate (Stanzil, 2015). In India, female beauty has been linked to a fair skin (Parameswaran and Cardoza, 2009; Segran, 2013) but it appears to have become a desired attribute for men too. I should explain here that the desire for fair skin among Indians is a complex issue, and in many ways, advertisers are only exploiting a deep-seated desire for fair skin among the public, but they are also helping to normalize fair skin through the extensive use of fair-skinned models. In India, people of upper caste, those in the northern part of India, and British colonizers were of a lighter skin. These were also the people who held power in the society (Tungate, 2008). Thus, fair skin symbolizes many things in India including beauty and power. Through fair masculine ideal, advertisers are unconsciously helping maintain racial and ethnic hierarchies, which places white men and fair-skinned Indian men (mostly residing in the North, e.g. Punjabis) and those of upper caste at the top.

Advertising and consumer culture also seem to erase the differences in body types for men and through promotion of a certain kind of body ideal, which is white, tall, hairless and muscular. The six-pack body that graced the covers of Men’s Health in the West for many years has now become popular in India. So, it is not just the globalization and homogenization of female beauty that is taking place through Western women’s magazines (Yan and Bissell, 2014), globalization of male attractiveness and body is also taking place through men’s lifestyle magazines. Muscular bodies are becoming a marker of social distinction and consumption of a global lifestyle among Indians as only the privileged have the luxury to spend time in the gyms to focus on their bodies and make them beautiful through consumption of a variety of expensive products and procedures. These kinds of images are fueling the usage of supplements, growth hormones and steroids among Indian men, the market for which has grown steadily (Hindustan Times, 2016; Press Trust of India (PTI), 2012). This has consequences for men’s health as men who don’t measure up to these advertised standards are likely to feel “less than” and suffer from low self-esteem.

In addition, the advertisements in the men’s magazines rarely showed images of middle-class life. Middle-class men seem to be completely erased from the advertisements (and also from the editorials and articles) in men’s lifestyle magazines, so the new exemplar is a man who is financially or materially successful, who looks Europeans and consumes expensive global brands.

In conclusion, this study supports the findings of Baas (2016) who highlighted incorporation of muscularity in contemporary construction of masculinity in India. It also adds to the finding by highlighting other dimensions in contemporary masculinity such as focus on fair skin/whiteness, class, and the view of global ethnic. The new exemplars of masculinity emerging in glocal spaces of India appear to be more Eurocentric. The findings of this study align with the works of other scholars who did similar examination in other Asian countries (Lee and Song, 2017; Prianti, 2018; Tan et al., 2013; Tanaka, 2003). It is important to reemphasize that these newer models of masculinity that have emerged in glocalized spaces are not the only forms of masculine ideals available to Indian men through the vast and diverse Indian media landscape, but the likes of these can be observed in other media too. Future studies can examine other media and compare constructions across different media types. They can also examine the reception and adoption of these masculine images as well as their contestation to understand their impact on Indian men. Future studies can also explore changes in masculine ideal in glocalities of other developing countries where similar economic and media transformations are taking place.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from Villanova University’s Waterhouse Institute for the Study of Communication and Society (WFI).

Notes

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