A 2024 survey of men’s motivations for going under the knife provides useful insight here. The study, which looked at adult men in German-speaking parts of Europe, found a clear overlap between men who had surgery and men who held a traditional view of masculinity. Traditional masculinity was defined by several traits including competitiveness and dominance, having a playboy lifestyle, and pursuing power over others. Men who were highly invested in traditional masculine norms were about twice as likely to get cosmetic surgery, and almost four times as likely to have a hair transplant.
The researchers concluded, “Men increasingly use cosmetic surgery as a means to assert power, success, dominance and sexual success.” No man in the study said he got cosmetic surgery in order to please a partner, they added. Rather, it seemed that cosmetic surgery was a way to increase masculine status.
There have always been men who cared about how they looked — remember metrosexuals? — but grooming used to be more associated with women and gay men. A generation ago, the typical straight man projected indifference about his appearance. He did not buy moisturizer, much less go in for wrinkle treatment. He didn’t need to. How he looked was rarely the deciding factor in achieving power, wealth or even sexual success. Now a straight man’s appearance seems to be an increasingly important expression of his masculinity. One way of explaining this cultural shift is through a familiar feminist idea: the male gaze. I suggest the male gaze, long trained on women, is turning on straight men too.
The male gaze, a concept popularized by the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey, describes the way a woman’s body becomes an object for male consumption, transformed into a collection of body parts to be scrutinized. Women often internalize the male gaze by learning to objectify their own bodies. They perform beauty for other women as well as men, of course. But within a patriarchal system, the men in power are the ultimate arbiters of female beauty standards.
Under the male gaze, men’s faces have become a new playing ground for a familiar sport. The feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye proposed this dynamic long ago in her book “The Politics of Reality”: “All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize and form profound attachments to,” she wrote, are, “overwhelmingly, other men.”
