Aren’t Men Objectified Too?
jesuismilena writes in response to my last post:
Don’t we also see a lot of shoots where the guy is shirtless, dripping in sweat, basically an image of post-coital awesomeness? Where is the critique on that? I get that naughty schoolgirl is a tired cliché, but we seem to get up in arms only when something affects women. So far, I haven’t seen one single lady complain about shirtless hunks in Cosmo. This will be worth reading when we talk about how objectifying both genders is crap, rather than being “Oh no! Cory Monteith is fully clothed and the girls are half naked!” Yes, read it into it all you want— there are cases in which the opposite is true and nobody says anything about it.
Anyone can be objectified, but in this instance — as in most instances involved mixed-gender sexual imagery — it’s the women who are being sexualized. Just because guys are also sometimes objectified doesn’t mean that there’s not a double standard. The difference is that for women, it’s so expected. Scantily clad photos of men are in the pages of Cosmo, sure, just as there are hot chicks in Maxim, but shirtless dudes don’t usually it to mainstream publications like Rolling Stone, which serves readers of all genders. And when you look at advertising — even advertising that targets women — a lot more of it has naked chicks than it has naked men. And hell, even when it comes to Cosmo, it’s still heavily airbrushed, busty women gracing the covers, not guys.
Of course, that doesn’t make it right for Cosmo to reduce men to a set of pecs. I can’t speak for all women or all feminists, but I think promoting the muscular, bronzed standard for masculinity — or any standard, for that matter — is just as harmful and ridiculous as any of the ideals to which women are subject. Most of my colleagues in the latter camp have said as much themselves. (At the turn of the decade, Amanda Hess looked at a decade’s worth of shifting masculinity ideals; the male feminist blogger behind Critical Masculinities regularly posts great thoughts on the topic; and theorist bell hooks wrote The Will To Change, an entire tome on how the promotion of machoness is bad for all genders). And there are also body-image-related problems that are much more difficult for men: the difficulty of being diagnosed with disordered eating, the struggle to come to terms with a not-so-masculine sexual orientation, the list goes on.
I think that a valid critique is a valid critique, whether or not it incorporates every potentially oppressed group out there, but it’s worth point out in this case that when it comes to body image, no one wins with oppressive beauty standards.
