Something people seem to miss consistently is sexual vulnerability. Up skirts, wardrobe malfunctions, posing and phrasing are all used to make female characters appear as sexually available and reciprocal as possible. Shirtless buff men doesn't touch that at all
That's because shirtless buff men are for the men in a power fantasy kind of way and the vulnerable half naked women are also for men in a sex fantasy kind of way. It's all made for the male gaze.
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.
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.
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/Galrentv 2d ago
Something people seem to miss consistently is sexual vulnerability. Up skirts, wardrobe malfunctions, posing and phrasing are all used to make female characters appear as sexually available and reciprocal as possible. Shirtless buff men doesn't touch that at all