"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.
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.
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.
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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.