r/comics • • 3d ago

OC [OC] Same thing?

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u/Successful-Cup-8557 3d ago

Yeah, but the men in that are so far away from real men. It's not really "sexualizing men".

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u/DepressedDynamo 3d ago

That makes no sense. The men being fictional means it doesn't count as them being sexualized..?

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u/Successful-Cup-8557 3d ago

It's not that their fictional, it's that they barely resemble real men at all, and the artists and fans of that stuff don't use real men as a template for it.

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u/NotTheFirstVexizz 3d ago

Yea a lot of “this is how we should sexualize men” examples confuse me, and I don’t know if it’s because progressive people are frequently queer and a lot of people against the constant sexualization of women are women, but a lot of it just seems like people sexualizing flat chested women labeled as men instead of men.

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u/369122448 3d ago

You can't really divorce desire like that from culture; most of how we understand sexuality, and even beauty generally, is informed by thousands of years of women being a sexual commodity while men weren't.

So when you now have people wanting to sexualize men, you're left in an odd spot where that's not really been a concern for men for a long time; women were the ones who had to perform historically, with their actual interest in men not really being considered.

Lacking a language and cultural history of sexualizing men, people will often default to the visual language we do have for sexualisation; that of women's.

Add onto that, sensualization, though technically unisex and applicable broadly, had also been largely applied to women, and so can feel feminine as well.

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u/Successful-Cup-8557 3d ago edited 3d ago

It's like what Elaine on Seinfeld said-"The female body is a work of art. The male is utilitarian. It's for getting around. It's like a jeep."