Killingsworth points out that advertising -- McLuhan calls it the “science of man embracing woman” -- depends to a large part on appeals to the body; any modern TV viewer knows this without much thought. The author notes that this is nothing new, nor is it lacking nobility; after all, even Walt Whitman used appeals to the body. In “Leaves of Grass” he writes boldly about copulation and says, “I believe in the flesh and the appetites . . .”
But there’s a world of difference between Whitman’s saying,“. . . each tag and part of me is a miracle . . .” and so much advertising using appeals to the body. Of course, many such appeals simply target the feeling of hunger (physcial or sexual) and the idealization of images -- what we call “beauty.” But a great number of ads aim at fabricating fear and self-loathing in order to sell products that promise to make us less fat, less bald, less wrinkly, less ugly, the implication being that such self-hatred leads to improved appearance, which leads to happiness. The success of this sort of advertising depends largely on the ability to fill us with disgust for our own bodies.
Not that these negative ploys are new. No doubt, hucksters employed them in Whitman’s time, too. On the other side, there’s a booming industry pumping up the positive appeals to the body these days, too, from Oprah telling us that fat is a myth, to the health club industry and all the muscle-building products that they promote. But I find it interesting the divergent uses for appeals to the body. Almost always, they’re extremely positive or quite negative; rarely do we find rhetoric that simply speaks in neutral or mundane tones about the body.
Of course, Whitman was “talking revolution” in the 1800s when he went beyond simply loving sensuality to actually treasuring the bodies of slaves on the auction block, recognizing in them the future of America and the future of the planet, seeing, "In him the start of populous states and rich republics . . .” Here Whitman seems to cherish the flesh and bones of these people as much as he values their minds and souls.
By contrast to such reverence for the human form, many modern appeals to the body are downright destructive. Though cigarette and alcohol commercials are almost non-existent these days, plenty of TV shows and movies represent the body as something that its owners treat with little reverence. If Hollywood is far less self-destructive than in decades like the 80s, it still promotes indiscriminate sex, booze and drugs as the epitome of fun and adventure, as is evident in a relatively benign film like “The Hangover.” Ironically, though we say we love our bodies, the media is full of images that show we loathe them or the media uses appeals to the body to make us loathe them.
According to Killingsworth, Whitman’s hate-free rhetoric about the body arose from the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “breaking down old hierarchies of race and class . . .” Today, taking a survey of American culture, I wonder where we can find that Whitmanesque appeal to the body and mind. On one hand, we have the “devil may care” sensuality of a show like “Sex in the City” or a myriad other Hollywood movies. But again, accompanying that sensuality, so often, we find, at the least, a veiled undercurrent that tells us that, unless we look as sexy as these stars, we don’t deserve sex, love or happiness.
I suspect somewhere between “Leaves of Grass” and “The Hangover” stands modern man, on one hand loving himself, his neighbors and his planet, on the other hand, trashing himself in wild parties in an attempt to cling to an extended adolescence. Killingsworth cites Plato’s fable of Phaedrus as an apt metaphor for this tug-of-war of the human condition, a chariot-driver struggling with two horses: one -- the soul -- trying to pull the chariot toward heaven, the other -- the body and emotions -- determined to pull the chariot to earth. If this “house divided” approach implies a degree of disharmony, even an inner civil war, I believe we can apply the metaphor specifically to our love-hate view of the human body. Then again, perhaps the the two horses of Phaedrus provide a healthy balance, a synthesis of the noble and carnal.
Killingsworth calls views of "the failings of rhetoric and democracy" elitist. Do you agree? If so, why? If not, why not?
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