Why Don’t Men Get To Be Sexy?

I was just recently watching a video of a dance competition in which the couple competing were dancing “sexy.” When the woman shook her hips, she got cheers. When the man did a little shimmy, the announcer said “that’s just wrong.”

People talk a lot about the expectations that are placed on women to look a certain way, and how those pressures negatively affect them. Nearly every woman I know has self esteem issues surrounding their body, has dieted or is dieting, worries about their weight, and is uncomfortable identifying themselves as beautiful. This seems to come about because women are hyper-sexualized and forced to be in the role of “sexually available” pretty much all the time. If you’re a woman, beauty is the price of admission for life. So when a woman acts sexy or dresses up or puts on new makeup, people cheer.

But there’s another element to the “women are the sexual objects” bullshit that doesn’t get much airtime and it’s one that pisses me off royally. Whenever I try to tell my boyfriend that he’s sexually attractive, he gets legitimately confused. It’s rare for men to be called sexy unless they’re movie stars. When your average man dresses up or tries to shake his booty, people laugh or shrug it off or say “you clean up good,” as if that’s all the validation that men need when they’re trying to present themselves nicely.

Why don’t men get to feel sexy too? Why don’t we treat men as attractive?

I’m a straight woman. I’m more likely to describe other women as hot or sexy than I am men. Isn’t that a little bit odd? Isn’t it likely that people are going to feel uncomfortable with their sexuality, their bodies, and their relationships if they’ve never been told they’re desirable, or never seen other people of their gender labeled desirable?

Here are some problems with men never thinking they’re attractive:

1. It’s considered weird if a woman initiates sex or intimacy

2. Men think that they must be the aggressors and feel a great deal of pressure to initiate

3. The idea that women must be convinced into sex makes more sense, because men are simply not attractive. Therefore no woman would ever want sex on her own, and so must be convinced/coerced/forced to have it.

4. Physical attractiveness and other positive traits get separated. Men see themselves as intelligent/funny/capable, but not attractive, whereas women are attractive and so cannot be those other things.

5. Men are more afraid of looking at their own bodies, being open to different sexual things, or seeing sex as a mutually pleasurable experience that they can approach in a variety of ways because they can’t conceive of their bodies as something sexy or interesting or attractive, but rather as a tool or instrument for doing things.

6. It just feels really awful to think you’re unattractive, and we’re teaching boys that their bodies will never be attractive.

We can do better. We can teach our kids that every body is attractive in some ways and to some people, and probably less attractive to other people. We can teach people that their bodies are desirable, that they’re desirable, and that they can both give and receive pleasure thanks to their bodies. Even men. We can teach each other that anyone is allowed to pursue a romantic interest (until that interest indicates they do not reciprocate the interest) and that there’s nothing creepy, weird, or wrong about women being the assertive ones or even about having a mutual relationship in which each partner initiates sometimes and some things.

I think men are sexy. I think my partner is sexy. And I want men to know that they are sexy.

Thoughtfulness, Tragedy, and Autonomy

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the rhetoric that we use around women’s rights and their autonomy in terms of their own bodies. In particular, I focused on women’s health, and how the dialogue around women’s health tended to have two modes: “this is serious, debilitating, and tragic” or “A WOMAN DID SOMETHING WITH HER OWN BODY WOOHOO!” I believe that this type of dichotomy exists in all sorts of places in women’s lives, and that it doesn’t do women any good. When we are talking about women’s lives, almost nothing exists in the black and white places of life. More often than not, there is a dialectic. Something can be empowering and good while also being thoughtful or difficult. To look at a particular example from my own life: my attempts at recovering from an eating disorder are clearly a form of taking my own empowerment in hand and standing up to many of the expectations of women in my life. However at the same time it is something that comes with a great deal of pain, a great deal of stress and anguish and difficulty, and a great deal of thought and reflection. Most of the empowering things in our lives come only after deliberation and reflection.

 

Because of the role of oppression in women’s lives, we need to be extremely careful about understanding how the personal and the communal interplay in any individual decision that a woman makes. For example, I am all for applauding when a woman exercises her rights over her body, but having some empathy for the fact that it might have been a hard or confusing or thought-filled decision is probably a good idea. Societally, when a woman takes control of her own body and does something like have an abortion or have a mastectomy, she is helping to break down patriarchal values and oppression for everyone around her, including herself. However personally, these may be decisions that required some thought, that were painful or uncomfortable, or that just were not fun. We are allowed to both praise something and show sympathy for whatever toll it might have taken on the individual who enacted it.

 

Having empathy about the experiences that women go through while they are exercising their rights allows us to hear the individual experiences, something that has always been hugely important to the women’s movement. We cannot try to improve women’s experiences unless we actually take the time to hear what those experiences are.

 

Particularly in the realm of women’s health, we can both applaud someone for the fact that they have done something bold in their personal choices, while also recognizing that most health decisions and procedures come with some price and that we should be aware of that. We should recognize and celebrate that women go through complex thought processes surrounding their mental health. We should make it HARD for conservatives to view us as stupid little womens who don’t know anything about their own health and who just frivolously run around cutting pieces of ourselves off. We should respect each other enough to make thoughtfulness (without tragedy) part of the dialogue about women’s health. It’s something that is often missing. More often we hear about morality, or about rights, or about access, or about money. Rarely do we stop and listen to deliberations that women have to go through in order to make their healthcare decisions, particularly when they are in oppressive situations that limit their access. When thoughtfulness does come into the dialogue, it’s often as a way of casting women’s healthcare and health choices as something tragic, difficult, or heartbreaking in a way that men’s health is not (few people talk about how thought-filled the decision to get a vasectomy is, despite the fact that people probably put a great deal of thought into it).

 

Indeed the idea that “thoughtful” necessarily means difficult is simply wrong and unhelpful. We are thoughtful about many things. Sometimes they’re difficult and also positive (deciding where to go to college), sometimes they’re difficult and heartbreaking (whether to pull the plug on a dying relative) sometimes they’re not difficult at all and they’re just great (like trying to decide which flavor of cupcake to buy…that takes a lot of thought let me tell you) and sometimes they’re not difficult but they kind of suck anyway (like choosing to get a pap smear, which I always think about and always know what I’m going to answer and always hate the answer to anyway). We think about all kinds of things and we make decisions based on thought processes all the time. Saying that something requires thought or reflection doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t know what we’re going to answer or that it will hurt us or that it will have a negative consequence. It just means we wanted to make sure it was the right decision.

 

We need to create space for the ways that women actively navigate their lives, and the balance that they must constantly keep between their personal needs, their personal decision making, and the societal pressures around them. We need to keep in mind that while a woman might have really loved getting that abortion because it was exactly the right thing in her life, there are social repercussions and we should be empathetic to that. We need to keep in mind all the sacrifices that women make nearly every time they make a choice about how to exercise their autonomy. And the more we do this, the less we will have black and white thinking and dichotomies, and the more we will have a conscientious dialogue with other women about how frustrating it is to navigate the world we live in, in which there are almost no “right” choices, only better choices. I think that definitionally, as women, nearly every decision we make has to be thoughtful (obviously there are some exceptions, but when you’re part of an oppressed group you’re forced to be more conscious of your decisions). And because of this, we are always aware of the costs and the benefits of our decisions. Now we need to start recognizing that process in others.

Pinups and Pecs

“If you want to write something, or need a(nother) topic, I keep having discussions about if guys can do “sexy” and “pin up” photos like girls seem to be able to do. Proceed. I feel like you might enjoy that topic, somehow. I might be nuts. I probably am.”

 

So a friend of mine posted this on facebook as a suggestion of something to write about and it struck my fancy. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack in this discussion. So first of all, why do girls “get” to do pin up and sexy photos? Is that really ok? I’ve had discussions about this with others who are worried that even enlightened women trying to take back this trend may be contributing to objectification, or perpetuation a lot of old images of women. I think that that’s a danger, definitely. I think that if and when a woman chooses to do a pin up type photo, she should try to be subversive about it; in traditional pinups, women look submissive, domestic: they’re often shown doing cleaning, or in traditionally “female” settings. I feel a lot better about pinup calendars or pictures if the woman in it is being sexy in an assertive way, is actually looking the viewer in the face, is in a different type of environment than the traditional pinup.

 

And the thing is that I actually LOVE the idea of pinup type pictures. Because very rarely does the average woman get to do something that celebrates her body, her beauty, and her sexuality. I love that different body types can be celebrated in pinup pictures. I love the idea of something like suicide girls. I do wish that more types of women were celebrated in these pictures: I wish more women of color, trans/genderqueer women, overweight, older…all kinds of women got roped in when we choose to a pinup calendar or photo session.

 

But they aren’t. And I worry that’s because as hard as we try to do pinups for ourselves, to celebrate ourselves, and to be subversive, as woman showing off our bodies we cannot help but be subject to the male gaze. It’s just there. And no matter what we do about it, there will be men objectifying us. To me that’s just a really shitty thing that rains on my body positive parade, and it makes me really scared to promote or participate in pinup pictures because I don’t want to perpetuate objectification by using “the master’s tools” as it were.

 

So what about guys? I think that guys are in a really unique position when it comes to pinup pictures. Men really aren’t very traditionally in pinup pictures. There is the classic sexy firemen calendar, but those aren’t nearly as ubiquitous and don’t have the same vintage thing going where anyone can replicate the feel. You kind of have to be a fireman (or have a bunch of oversized hoses lying around) to do the sexy fireman calendar. So there is a blank slate when it comes to men doing pinup pictures. There’s no history of objectification (as far as I’m aware at least…anyone in comments feel free to disagree) that would put a historical lens on the pictures and make them problematic. And very, very rarely are male bodies put on display in a sexual way. Rarely are men told to celebrate being beautiful, being sexy, being hot. I think pinup calendars could be a GREAT opportunity for men to make body positivity part of the male conversation, and I think that particularly it could be incredibly beneficial to make it part of the straight male conversation, because generally flaunting your body is considered gay. Only effeminate men let people look at them and do any sort of objectifying apparently, because it’s a woman thing to be the object. But here’s the thing: BECAUSE men are not considered the object, because they are assumed to have autonomy and assumed to be an equal in any relationship (even the relationship between subject and viewer in a photograph), they can bend the traditional notion of pinup to be one that asks us to reconsider how we view women in pictures, how we view sexuality, and how much autonomy we grant those women we see in sexy pictures.

 

And just as I mentioned with women, this is a WONDERFUL time for different types of male bodies to be on display, to be celebrated, to be considered beautiful. Perhaps even more than women, men have a single body type that is ever shown as the pinup (mostly because all women’s bodies are more objectified), and so seeing more men as attractive and sexy and proud and embodied is a beautiful idea to me. Maybe I should go join a nudist’s colony. But it would also help young women to start to see a variety of body types and begin to understand the different bodies they might  encounter. More exposure to real bodies is the healthiest way to build attraction, sexuality, and honesty

 

I personally think that men in pinups is exactly the wonderful kind of subversive parody that Judith Butler would promote and love, but I think it’s even more active than a parody because it’s a challenge, and active question to the viewer about how they see the picture. If it was a genderbent pinup, then all the better (men in maids outfits anyone?). I don’t think that I want to see men be objectified the same way women have been, but I also don’t think that ever WILL happen. I think what IS important is to allow the power that a man’s body has to infiltrate the submissive space traditionally occupied by women, and to rebuild that space in such a way that says the space doesn’t have to be submissive or objectified. This is a place where I believe men can do far more for feminism and women than women can, because of the privilege that men already have.

 

So I personally think that male pinups are a great idea. I don’t think it’s an infringement on a female space, I think it’s a reimagining of a traditionally oppressive space, and I really don’t see how it would lead to the objectification of men since men are nearly always assumed to be the subject and have autonomy, complexity and thoughts. Very rarely are they reduced to a body alone.