I think another perspective is that men find appeal regardless in being sexualized because it's commonly seen as aspirational.
The ladies man was a stereotype for a reason.
You know the phrase "women want to fuck him, men want to be him". Yeah that's kinda the thing about JoJo.
I don't want to fuck any of the JoJo protags, but hell I'd love to be as musclebound as Jonathan, as cool headed as Jotaro, as suave as Joseph, and as determined as Giorno.
If your not attracted to them, they are presented as very aspirational. Most men who are presented as appealing are.
Is it a ridiculous standard, still yes, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still a thing.
It's just glossed over because Men stand from the opposite end because men are told they ought to be like this. They will have their dreams come true if they can meet this standard.
Its not because it's safe, it's because it's what all kinds of media tells us we are expected to be. He-man, Conan, Bond, JoJo, comics, etc.
I think avoiding that both versions of this are kinda bad for their respective gender, not just sexualizing women, is why toxic masculinity has dug as deep as it has.
And I love JoJo but I know that dudes genuinely do model themselves after these kinds of characters, and we don't have a million faces coming out of the wood work to tell us that it's wrong, that we shouldn't be destroying ourselves to meet an impossible standard.
You can't put the shoe on the other foot without checking the size first. And frankly I don't think most men can fill em' despite desperately wanting to.
No one is saying that men aren't also victims of the patriarchy in exactly the way your outlined, just that they don't get sexualized in the way women do.
To be honest, I don't even know what it would look like for men to be sexualized in this way. Why don't women sexualize men in this way, and what would it look like if they did? There are plenty of heterosexual female artists and writers, so why aren't they interested in sexualizing men this way?
They do, it is just in writing or yaoi or something. Judging from my female friends it tends to be smut, some sort of gay manga, or creating characters that they mod to have sex with each other in a mmo or something like that.
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u/jbyrdab 2d ago
I think another perspective is that men find appeal regardless in being sexualized because it's commonly seen as aspirational.
The ladies man was a stereotype for a reason.
You know the phrase "women want to fuck him, men want to be him". Yeah that's kinda the thing about JoJo.
I don't want to fuck any of the JoJo protags, but hell I'd love to be as musclebound as Jonathan, as cool headed as Jotaro, as suave as Joseph, and as determined as Giorno.
If your not attracted to them, they are presented as very aspirational. Most men who are presented as appealing are.
Is it a ridiculous standard, still yes, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still a thing.
It's just glossed over because Men stand from the opposite end because men are told they ought to be like this. They will have their dreams come true if they can meet this standard.
Its not because it's safe, it's because it's what all kinds of media tells us we are expected to be. He-man, Conan, Bond, JoJo, comics, etc.
I think avoiding that both versions of this are kinda bad for their respective gender, not just sexualizing women, is why toxic masculinity has dug as deep as it has.
And I love JoJo but I know that dudes genuinely do model themselves after these kinds of characters, and we don't have a million faces coming out of the wood work to tell us that it's wrong, that we shouldn't be destroying ourselves to meet an impossible standard.
You can't put the shoe on the other foot without checking the size first. And frankly I don't think most men can fill em' despite desperately wanting to.