Arousing cheer: Exhibitionism in men’s sports from weimar to the present

Abstract

From the tennis champion Rafael Nadal to the soccer star David Beckham, male athletes in recent years have aggressively marketed their attractiveness as well as their talent, a form of exhibitionism that the journalist Mark Simpson in 2006 famously termed "sporno." Whereas Simpson framed the phenomenon as a recent one, this chapter argues that the erotic celebration of sportsmen stretches back well over a hundred years, and it points to the particular influence of Weimar Germany's sexually open media landscape. Sports exhibitionism on both sides of the Atlantic receded in the middle decades of the twentieth century, before reappearing in the 1970s and flourishing in the 2000s. Drawing contemporary examples from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, South Korea, and elsewhere, this chapter argues that a combination of increasing sexual openness and shifting gender roles, along with new business opportunities and technologies, have encouraged male athletes to put their bodies on show, leading to shifts in male behavior and masculine norms more broadly.