Sexualized Male: Addendum

Ikkin: In any case, I was under the impression that this whole conversation was based on the initial question of "how do you sexualize a male character for women?" with the implication being that the answer could be used to balance out the sexualization of women that's all-too-common in the context of gaming.

Thank you! And thanks for engaging in the conversation with such vigor. (Though, honestly, issues of balance are not terribly interesting to me; I'm quite happy if people want to target particular audiences by gender, if they want. I just don't want anymore bland-as-wallpaper products being conceived as "female friendly" as if "inoffensive" is somehow a synonym for "attractive.")

And back to the topic at hand, here are some interesting datapoints I've picked up from conversations, both recently and in the past:

* women don't always seem to know what they want. That is, I've had conversations that went something along the lines of, "I suddenly discovered in my twenties that I really liked..." This is almost inconceivable for hetero guys, because we all seem to work it out by the time we're 18. I suspect that's the case because we're heavily marketed along the most common interests. In short, we've been working on isolating the most common cues for what arrests a guy's attention since the carving of the Venus of Willendorf. Marketeers then use those cues like a bludgeon to attract male attention to their products.

* but we can't say the same thing about women. Sometime between the first performance of "Lysistrata" and the filming of "Eyes Wide Shut" we've decided that women aren't supposed to like sex. When discussing sex with only other women, I hear about a frequent refrain of "I'm not a slut, but..." So even when women know what they want, they are hesitant to advertise that fact, which makes capitalizing on it by folks like Zak nearly impossible. The most important thing the romance novel industry does is hide from men what exactly is between those covers. Few women will buy porn, and I'm not sure that many more will openly purchase erotica. Which leads to this bizarre situation where a collection of letters to Penthouse must be carefully treated like it's radioactive, but any twelve-year-old can buy Anne "A. N. Roquelaure" Rice's Beauty novels off the shelf at Barnes & Noble without anyone batting an eyelash.

* and when we do try to sell porn to women, gay men scramble the signals. I'm still not sure we, as a culture, really know what women find physically attractive because the market signals keep getting disrupted by gay men, who are far more likely to buy porn. I think it speaks volumes that most magazines aimed at women tend to sport a woman on the cover.

I've known women who were crazy about bald guys. I've known women who were crazy about chubby guys. I've known women who went absolutely insane over any guy who could physically pick them up and carry them in their arms. I've known women who were crazy about beards, and women who couldn't stand beards, and I've had women describe their ideal mate to me in terms of physical characteristics almost exclusively. And all of these women were native-born Americans.

Were these women outliers? We don't know, because everyone is too busy "knowing" that hetero women are all about the tight ass, broad shoulders and six-pack abs. Just like everyone "knows" that hetero men adore large breasts, even though nearly every female movie star and supermodel can barely fill out a c-cup.

The end result is that sexuality for women turns into a maze they have to navigate on their own, hiding every step they take from anyone who might notice, dealing in codes and signals like spies in enemy territory, and always trying to read between the lines. So long as this remains the case, it's going to be extremely difficult to tease out what, exactly, they're looking for, especially if they themselves don't appear to know at times.

Sexualized Male: Workin' It!

So a sexualized woman is one who is advertising her availability for sex. A sexualized man, on the other hand, is advertising his ability to deliver a certain kind of sex. What does this look like?

Ask a woman what turns her on, and generally you will get a list like Mandy's. It's largely all about being. Ask a man what turns him on and you'll generally get a list of things you could do tonight to put him in the mood. This is what sexualizing is. At its heart, sexualization is concrete actions. It's not the T-and-A so much as how it's presented: the twisted, broken spine posture, cleavage, the exposed skin, the facial expression, and the scissoring legs.

When sexualizing guys, it's often less about the body and more about props. Perhaps the most potent prop is the motorcycle. (And thanks to Oddysey for giving me this example, as well as helping me to clarify my ideas on a number of points in both of these articles.) Motorcycles grumble with adventure, speed, skill, and freedom. A guy on a Harley is not going to be overly much a gentleman. There's no guessing and there's no games, nor will there be an exorbitance of “please.” He'll make it clear what he wants, will appreciate the same candor from her, and she can count on him to be gone by morning.

Horses work just as well, but the symbolism is different. Skill and command are united with sensitivity. He will be aware of her moods, her emotions, and how she reacts to how he touches her. Sensitivity, however, is not a synonym for "nice." Some horsemen will be gentlemen. But not all.

Other props are easier to come by: the dog-eared copy of Byron's poetry promising slow and intellectually stimulating foreplay while hinting at kink, the well-worn dancing shoes that intimate grace and body awareness, the shirtless and sweaty chest with work jeans and dusty boots betokening an honest and forthright vigor.

That all said, we are brought back to Mandy's list of being-verb men. If you're going to invoke any of these props, you need to be able to follow up on their promise. Any woman can slip into high heels that lengthen her legs, or put on the innocent schoolgirl uniform. The hesitant clutz on a motorcycle is a poser and more laughable than a clutz without a bike.

Even worse, the vocabulary is not as well known or understood for titillating women. The above-mentioned schoolgirl uniform can be either innocent or slutty with the same props if they're just worn a little differently. The visual language is understood so well that great nuance is possible. It's easy and natural to talk about what any individual man wants: we know what it means, and women know how to capitalize on it, when we say that Quentin Tarantino is a “foot man” or that Sir Mix-a-lot is a “butt guy.”

But we don't have the same vocabulary when speaking about women. Or, at least, it's not widely known, especially among men. If you go to the romance novels section of your bookstore you will find that they do come in categories. Some are not overt about it; Regency romances tend to be very tame, while those taking place in the old West sometimes have S&M aspects. Others advertise what they are right on the cover: family, cowboys, suspense and danger, or bad boys. Some of these are known qualities. It's not unusual to say a woman is "into bad boys" or is looking for a husband. But we don't usually see these as roles a guy should try on. Nor is our culture the place where a woman can casually suggest her husband don a loincloth and feathered headdress and tie her up in the living room.

And yet, that is exactly the sort of thing we ought to be talking about when discussing sexualizing men. The wife in the schoolgirl outfit isn't really a schoolgirl, innocent or slutty. And she can just as easily invoke the slutty librarian look, a Wonder Woman costume, or any of a range of lingerie that highlight her husband's favorite parts or brings to mind his favorite fantasies. There are, in short, not just visual vocabularies set up for the sexualization of women, but entire industries devoted to helping her do just that.

These vocabularies and industries do not exist for the sexualization of actual, physical men. In spite of the ease with which it is assumed a woman can get a man in the mood, every woman has available to her an arsenal of tricks and toys to do just that. What do men have? Well, if you believe popular culture, apparently nothing gets a woman hotter than lobster and diamonds. Even those who claim to have the secret to dominating the hookup scene primarily rely on psychological tricks to prey upon insecurities rather than titillations.

Frankly, this state of affairs is bizarre and is hopefully changing. As women become more comfortable speaking about their sexuality and acquire more wealth, we’ll develop the vocabulary, and then the industries, to cater to their desires. We’re still probably a generation away from it, but perhaps someday soon, a woman will more easily be able to express whether she wants a tender, gentle lover, or one she can chain to the bed and have her way with, and her man will be able to easily understand and put together the evening she’s looking for.

Photos by theaudi0slave and aka_serge.

Sexualized Male: the Act of Sexualization

Zack over at "Playing D&D with Porn Stars" has posted a very interesting question:

What constitutes a sexualized male character?

Not 'sexualized' in some ridiculous way that you don't actually find attractive, (like if you don't actually think Han Solo wearing Leia's gold bikini would be hot, don't put that) but in a way that you do find attractive... Remember: not merely "desirable" but 'sexualized'--like how a chick can be hot no matter what she's wearing, but if she's in a chainmail bikini and bending at the waist for no apparent reason, that's sexualized.

The answers have also been very interesting. I'm putting this here largely because Zack has requested that heterosexual men not respond in the comments to that post. Also, I want to look at the assumptions based around question.

Mandy's answers deserve special attention, I think:

Oh and....notice how all the characters I've listed are highly competent and skilled. They're the best at what they do or are special somehow, and it means they've really got most of their shit together. A man who can handle his sword or a man who can command a starship and defend himself in battle or a man you know just not to fuck with because it's made obvious by some action in whatever depiction of the character...That's just hot.

It's a fascinating insight. I also think it misses the question. Notice that everything Mandie discusses is who these men are. These are very much issues of soft being verbs. But when we say someone has been sexualized, that's a very strong action verb. In fact, when we see it used on blogs like “Go Make Me a Sandwich,” it seems very much an act of violation; male artists have done something heinous to their female subjects. Being sexualized has nothing to do with who these women are. It's something that is done to them, or that they do to themselves.

So what is the horrible thing that has been done to these women? The sexualized woman advertises that she is available for sex. Her costume and contortions highlight her physical attributes most associated in the heterosexual male mind with sex. Postures of submission or fear or challenge underscore the invitation. In the moment of sexualization, these women exist primarily, if not entirely, to gratify the lusts of heterosexual men.

Can we simply do the same things to men? Yes, so long as we assume the viewer is a gay man. Hence Nate's Gay Pride carnival:

Pride parades, leather bars, young men in v-necks smoking on street corners. Leather, chainmail, briefs, ass-less chaps, straps, studs, whatever. Muscular men wearing mesh shirts. Smaller boys in white briefs. Fat guys in leather pants and dog collars.

All of these advertise a man's availability for gay sex. How does a man advertise his availability for heterosexual sex with women?

Answer: he's breathing.

The general assumption in our culture is that any man who can still walk across the room is available for sex with women. Even those who can't walk across the room are assumed to want sex with women. Generally speaking, a man in the West has to go out of his way to advertise his unavailability for sex with wedding rings and priestly vestments.

In fact, sex from men for women is so available, social psychologists speak of it as having no value:

[S]ocial psychologists claim that men's sex has no value per se. In the world of prostitution you never see women paying men for sex. Men pay women for sex, men will pay men for sex, but women don't pay men for sex. You get a sense that she has something of value that he wants... Women can get sex whenever they want. Post it on Craigslist and you can have it within the hour.

Our culture not only has no real way for a man to signal that he is available for sex, it has trouble conceiving of a need for one. Lacking these signals, and all the cultural baggage that would go with them, you simply can't sexualize a man in the same way that you can a woman.

Does this mean that we can't sexualize men for heterosexual women at all? No! For, while a woman might be able to have all the sex she wants, not all sex is valued equally. A man's availability for sex might be taken for granted, but his ability to deliver sex that she wants is not.

More on that next time…