My Masculine Beauty Manifesto: Part One

I remember wandering the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and coming across a gallery of classical marble statues. Of course, my eyes were drawn to the masculine forms, the naked bodies imagined, sculpted, and presented carefully, thoughtfully, and without shame. I imagined a sculptor meticulously chiseling and working the stone for hours, because he saw something important and wanted to capture it forever in marble for other people to see, too.

And I, hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away, was receiving his message and seeing what he saw. I was overcome with a profoundly relieving sense of not being alone in the world, a profound relief to find a place where my aesthetic gaze was welcomed home. I believe I cried.

The best of these stone masterpieces are so smooth and their surfaces look so pliable, like real skin. But they are marble, hard and unyielding.

Abstractly, this captures what I find metaphysically beautiful about men: the intermingling of hardness and softness, the simultaneous strength and gentleness, ferocity and tenderness.

It’s the marriage of the two that does it for me. Strength or fierceness on its own doesn’t stir much in my heart; nor does tenderness or softness alone. But the two multiplied by one another, like width and height to create area, draws me in.

This dynamic also extends to visual aesthetics in real, flesh-and-blood men, not just statues. I find beauty in a strong masculine body doing something graceful, like a sport, or dancing, or singing; or a man being rugged in some ways, but also well-groomed and presented.

Wildness, controlled and directed.

The word “meek” used to mean this: restrained and controlled strength. Older translations of Scripture use “meek” to describe Jesus, including his own description of himself:

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.

– Matthew 11:29 (KJV)

This evokes the image of an ox yoked for labor. An ox is not weak at all. But a yoked ox’s strength is controlled and directed. He is fierceness given over to gentleness. The all-powerful God submitted himself to incarnation, being yoked to a physical body, to accomplish his mission of redemption and salvation among us.

Finding my gaze drawn to that blending of strength and tenderness I see in men can be a way that the beauty of creation points me toward the beauty of God and the story of the Gospel.

I grew up in evangelical purity culture where lust was seen as the inevitable outcome of perceiving beauty for everyone – guy, girl, gay, or straight. Needless to say, a deep shame attached itself to my capacity to experience and appreciate beauty in men, because there was no imagination for what it might mean besides sexual brokenness, and where it might lead besides lust and sexual sin.

And yet didn’t God create beauty to be seen, appreciated?

Didn’t he create beauty to point back to himself?

What if my heart, soul, and body’s reaction to the created beauty of men is actually helpful?

The correct response to beauty in creation is always wonder and delight.

I’m getting well-known around YOB for saying that line (it’s “the drum I’m always beating,” I like to say). What I’m talking about here in Part One of this manifesto is the initial gut reaction, that leaping feeling, the pulling of something deep in the base of your being when you see something or someone beautiful.

I’ll have a few things to say about what can happen afterward, but for now I want to focus on this initial, involuntary spark. 

To be extra clear: I am not talking about ogling someone. Please do not misconstrue my words as pro-ogling! Do not ogle people. Right now I’m just talking about the instant we perceive beauty in another person.

When I see a beautiful man and feel that initial spark of wonder and delight, it is correct. For whatever reason, God has wired me to be receptive to that beauty in a way that he has not wired straight men to be receptive (or, I believe, women – it’s hard to be sure, but I think there’s a distinctly masculine way to be affected by male beauty that I experience, but women do not).

To be able to perceive this kind of beauty in this way is a rare gift! The vast majority of people may look at the same thing I’m seeing but not see the same thing I see! Isn’t it a little like the phenomenon of tetrachromacy, in which a person is born with an additional color receptor in their eyes that allows them to see extra colors which are invisible to most people?

Isn’t it a little like God is letting me in on a secret, being able to perceive beauty like this? It’s like he created this beauty in men, but like any artist, he couldn’t bear to keep it to himself; so, he gave some of us men the eyes to see it, in the masculine way his masculine aspect does.

How liberating a thought is this? How can our learned shame stand up to it? The Master Sculptor put a loving message into beautiful flesh, in skin and bone and muscle, and chose us to receive that message, to see what he sees, to be moved the way he is moved.

Let’s take a moment to “breathe into that,” as they say in mindfulness circles.

Do it with me. A deep inhale and a deep exhale.

So far I’ve just been talking about the immediate response to beauty. But beyond that first moment, is there a way to sit in the presence of male beauty and receive it? To drink it in responsibly, in a healthy way that stewards our sexuality well?

I don’t think we can somehow ogle without ogling, but I think there is a way to sit with a beautiful friend and let his beauty be an ingredient of your delight in a persisting, whole-person friendship with him.

Our bodies matter, and our bodies are us, and so it is not unnatural for my love and delight for a friend to include a love and delight for his body, which includes his physical beauty.

I would say the key here is the full context of a full relationship with a whole person. When I sit across from a beautiful friend and we partake of a meal together, I’m (ideally) opening myself up to him on equal terms. My appreciation of his beauty is one aspect of a long-term relationship I’m investing in that calls for mutual grace, forgiveness, patience, trust, and sacrifice.

It is not the broken power dynamic of pornography, or the sly, greedy consumption of leering at strangers in public.

In Part Two of my masculine beauty manifesto, I'll discuss the realities of our fallenness and the temptation to lust, which often arises from our perception of beauty.

Do you receive your ability to see and appreciate masculine beauty as a gift, or do you find this reframing difficult? Where does your ability to perceive masculine beauty bring you shame?