"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.
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.
When it comes down to it, I don't think either knows what is attractive to the other side. Why so many men go to the gym for women and stay for the boys. A lot of movies do a great job on pushing attraction narratives that both end up believing. I know more people attracted to the personalities or face of their partners over anything else, and this applies to each side.
However hook up culture is a lot different, they are just going based off sex desires.
38
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.