I thought it ironic to see the once shy and humble boy, who from modest means in a North East London borough rose to become the greatest sporting star of all time, spread-eagled with the insignia of one of fashion’s most successful designers emblazoned on his crotch.
So in the spirit of Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, semiotician and Voted Favourite Person to Have at a Party, I think I’ll entertain a little of my own mythologies on this advertisement.
First of all, what sticks out the second most (hehe) is the complete absence of leg and chest hair. Clearly, David Beckham thinks a good manscaper is imperative!
As we well know, the obsession with expurgating body hair is more commonly associated with the vanity of women than of men (inversely proportional for homosexual circles). According to popular rhetoric, obliging ladies to shave their legs, typifies man’s paedophilic inclination towards the pre-pubescent body; basically, men want women to be infantile. So is this to say that we want David Beckham infantile? He does, after all, play with balls.
Allow me to venture a similar, yet distinct theory. What is it that is said to continue growing once the body is entombed after death? That is, the hair and nails. According to Georges Bataille, in his ground breaking monograph Death and Sensuality, this would have had the gravest of impacts on the first ancient cultures to indoctrinate burial practices. Along with the decomposition of your fellow man’s body is the preponderance of hair.
Hence, shearing this excess growth acts as a symbolic gesture towards deterring death. It is not so much eternal youth that David Beckham’s hairless legs signify, but the universal anxiety over death and the subconscious dream of eternal life. To exist hairless is to exist outside of nature’s logical path of maturation and death and hence, to exist outside of time. Not pre-pubescent, but embryonic.
Consider this photograph of Billy Corgan by the New York based artist David LaChapelle.
Old ladies visit the hairdressers more than anyone else because they want to purge the signs of decay, of grey and thinning hair. With this perspective, this image of the Chicago rocker instils a sense of atemporality. Living, not in the moment, but outside of all moments, before time even has a chance to do its mortal and unholy work. (Monotheistic religions proclaiming an afterlife are obsessed with cleanliness, wanting one to expurgate everything from blood to hair to foreskin in order to reach beatitude.)
Traditionally, grooming was an aristocratic activity. It was reserved for those who had an inexhaustible amount of time and money - individuals who did not actively participate in the laissez-faire economic system, a system controlled by the clock.
It was not until the 18th century Dandies of Western Europe, that the middleclass began to practice the effeminate art of greater upkeep of their physical appearance. They would essentially imitate aristocratic sensitivities, grooming, powdering and occasionally buggering.
It is not so much the appearance in itself, which is significant - as it is with the plume of a peacock – but the perceived time invested in the appearance. And so as class revolution gave rise to the bourgeoisie over the 19th century, time became an accessible luxury and these values were instilled into the bourgeois logic.
So back to the legs. Georges Bataille might have referred to this fetishized act of biomaterial destruction as “negative expenditure”. We negate a part of our body in order to elevate our social and divine standing.
Beckham’s standing is no less than godly. He is a Greek statue, a masculine paragon cast outside of time, to wither eons of birth and death. David Beckham was born lower-middles class. He is now a God. He can afford all the time in the world to veet his legs. (He does, after all, play for L.A. Galaxy.)
And so, it doesn’t seem altogether out of place, to see this man of humble beginnings, laying hairlessly, as a God, bulging, adrift on a satin cloud, awaiting your fiancé’s phantasmagorical orgasm. This will be his myth. Zeus!
(Now I haven’t even talked about the bulge. Well, clearly it indicates a fondness for tennis.)
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