Before I had had the chance to see it in a magazine, the Emporio Armani underwear ad featuring David Beckham had already whizzed around the internet, popping up on blogs galore, being emailed around the world. In fact, I still haven’t seen it in a magazine, but then I suppose I don’t buy the kinds of magazines in which I’m likely to see it. Or any magazines, really.
Not that this is the first time we’ve seen Beckham in a state of undress. His picture-autobiographies reveal his torso and tattoos, and he has stripped down for Armani before. A 2007 ad showed him lying on a bed, apparently in the process of removing his trousers, so this new one is like a natural sequel. Now the trousers are definitively off!
And those older ads (even the one where he lies atop a woman in bed) have little of the direct come-hither attitude displayed here. He may be scowling at the viewer with manly toughness, but his body is laid out submissively for our gaze.
He reclines on a bed of rumpled white sheets, with the light falling on his new white undies in such a way as to emphasise the bulge therein. Of course, following fast on the heels of the picture as it crisscrossed the globe via the internet were accusations that those Armanis had been filled out with a ball of socks — a favoured old underwear model’s trick, it would seem. That or the crotch area has been Photoshopped a little, if it wasn’t already lit with the kind of care once devoted to Marlene Dietrich’s face. Moreover, according to some people who have carefully studied Beckham photos old and new, the nipples have been tweaked too.
I’m not sure one should worry about such enhancements, whether electronic or sock-related. (I hope at least they are Armani socks.) I know it’s useful to believe that Beckham is a real person, because that enhances his status as an endorser of product.
A straight man friend, who knows about such things, reliably informs me that Beckham is not just a fashion icon, but in fact has a parallel career as a footballer — or used to. It’s also helpful to believe he’s real if you want to sell newspapers on the basis of his sexual indiscretions. But last time I saw his image on TV and it began to talk in a batlike squeak, as if he were indeed a real, flawed person, I switched the TV off at once.
Beckham is sexually attractive, but only insofar as the photographer and/or lighting assistant and/or Photoshop operator are artful. He is a constructed image, and the image is irresistible. He’s like the genetically modified epitome of male beauty and he symbolises the return of the repressed, as Camille Paglia would see it — the classical-Greek idolisation of male beauty that was suppressed by all that text-obsessed Judaeo-Christian prudishness and denial of the body. And, in Beckham’s case at least, it is beauty that he possesses — in a way that used to be applied only to women. Yes, he’s added some tattoos to the boyish torso, to increase the impression of traditional masculinity (decoration through pain), but he is basically an example of what you’d call the feminised phallus.
That he would seem to have an actual phallus himself, possibly even testicles, is something the new Armani ad asks us to contemplate. In fact, it’s not the bulge making that suggestion so much as the forearm that appears in the background. If it is indeed a forearm. With its densely tattooed surface, and in the way it is partially obscured, it looks like Becks’s pet python has slithered into bed with him unawares.
The sock-bulge in the white briefs may be suspiciously rounded, all too neatly curved, lacking the bumps and angles that would speak of real flesh. But it’s also about a package: Beckham the overall package is summed up in the perfection of the undies-package.
The pythonic forearm subliminally suggests one thing, and then we return to the neatly rounded bulge in the underpants — after all, it is the underpants that are for sale at Emporio Armani. If I buy them, I too can have testicles of an almost supernatural generosity and sphericality. But where do I get the python?