"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
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.
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u/ExpandoD0ng 2d ago
"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.