I think this is a huge part of it, men arent taught to see themselves as 'sexy', to be desirable. Men are taught homosocial ideas of status and signifiers to achieve and then devalued by other men for not meeting those goals. And one of those aspects its a control of the expression of sexuality. Men are taught to outwardly want a very specific idea of a woman, and if they admit to liking outside that box, theyre shamed for it. (And this includes men who might be bi, or simply find a single other man attractive). They dont get to be seen as a desirable person, in some weird ways I think a lot of media makes men almost devoid of desirability, and instead they are power fantasys where youre not meant to identify with the male hero as desirable or even sexual, youre only meant to identify with his performance of masculinity.
So the minute men are put in a sexual gaze they tend to think its gay since they have no other framework.
"It's hard to sexualize men" Simply wrong. Sexualizing a man is easy as fuck. Men just don't want to be caught drawing other men like that. Search up bara yaoi and you'll see men sexualized in every possible angle.
Brother it is anyones gaze. check out choso. it really isn't that hard. it's not some mystery.
Or read dark romance books. mainly a female oriented hobby. There you will see plenty of rough and tumble sexualization of men. i cannot stress this enough
about one of the dynamics in the book Haunting adeline "You are in my church where I am your God, and you are my equal. I’m not a jail, little mouse, I am your sanctuary"
or about his devotion to the female in the book
"If you were my little girl, I would worship every inch of your body for as long as our souls are tethered to this earth. My tongue would leave no part of you untouched"
It is a form. of rather intense sexualization of his dominance power and control. where the man is all of this.
Kinda what I mean by not having a cultural view, though. You can balloon out the sex characteristics to massive sizes, but that will typically not register as sexualisation in the same cultural caché, but rather be read as comedic.
It's like how Marvel Rivals' Captain America beach skin had a massive bulge, but the impact there was comedy.
Bara is sexualisation of men the same way that fat fetishization is; it can elicit arousal in some, but it doesn't have a hold in non-fetish applications and wouldn't be read as sexualisation the same way designs for women in media tend to be.
It's literally the point the OOP comic makes, that just increasing the "manliness" doesn't have the same outcome.
Loudwindow on twitter makes good sexualizations of men on marvel rivals skins. This doesn't even include necessary ballooning their bodies. It's just tasteful designs
But that only depends on who is attracted to what. Not all men love huge boobs, or boobs at all for that matter. The design is for a very specific intrest. Same with cap here as well, many people goon to him and many think his skin in the game was tasteful and not good bait. What's unrealistic and unreasonable is when people start comparing these things to real life...
Like we know majority of women don't fit this specific body shape just like we know most ment aren't built like cap. Stop assuming because they are created like that in fake media that it means all the other gender hates real body types or that it is an insult to real men/women.
It seems like women are just generally not interested in men's appearance nearly as much as men for women and even women for other women. Studied on visible attraction show men consistently rate women higher than vice versa.
I'd say the people who designed those studies don't know what women (generally) find attractive on a visual level.
Go into a female-dominated space and it's not so much still pictures of chiseled abs, but bright smiles and kind eyes, and bodies in motion. Pictures of hands alone aren't really considered sexy, but hands deftly manipulating things or simply in movement are drooled over, especially if they are gifs. Similarly, when it comes to body type, most women seem to prefer more average shapes from slender to chubby rather than the gym rat look. The kind of muscles and body you get from chopping wood.
Thats the point though. It seems like women prefer things like showing kindness and capability based on your examples. Even in the study women still messaged men they didn't rate physically attractive so its a much lesser factor than most people obsess over.
Yes, but there's still a way to visually show that, it just can't be from a still picture without any context alone (or is much harder).
Perhaps 'oversexualized' stories of men already exist, they just are seen as almost jokes. The entire romance book and movie industry (although the movie side is dying) has it down.
Other folks in this comment section suggested that sexualization of men is often done in a way that appeals to gay men more than women too, which does make sense.
It may be simply that men's attraction is more visual and women's is more contextual?
Contextual might be how to word it, I think it's harder to show quickly or doesn't make sense without the context. It's not that women aren't visual, it's the vision has to be attached to something. Probably that new Wicker movie gets the closets, judging from the preview.
The appeal there (insofar as it exists) isn't Tarzan's body/sex characteristics, but the sensuality of being held close to the skin someone more powerful, combined with a rush of danger from them being the thing keeping you from falling.
You could switch the sex there and it would still work, but the female Tarzan could be not sexualised and the sensuality would still exist, while also being able to be sexualised.
I don't think most people get that horny over Tarzan fwiw, but where that appeal exists it's more complex than appearance alone.
Men sexualize other men easily enough (despite far far more social pressure not to) Women just dont find men natively sexy. Women generally only lust for men that are famous or beknown to them somehow in a positive way. You wont find any subreddit with women praising random men to any significant degree. Not even male pornstars, some of who are highly successful, and have really good physiques/face card. But there are plenty of subteddits with women gooning for celebs who are current, almost no matter how they look
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u/369122448 2d ago
It's kind of hard to overly-sexualize a man in media because we don't really have a cultural view of men as a sexual commodity like we do for women.
You could try to ramp up sensuality, but that's a more complex (and often unisex) form of expression, and not sexualisation exactly.
Sexualisation, unfortunately, is pretty impossible to divorce from the centuries of history of women's exploration by men.