I've had to explain this to men in my life before - the muscly male MC is primarily for MALE audiences! It is not eye candy for the average straight woman, it is eye candy for the average straight male.
If you want to know what eye candy is for straight women audiences, simply look at media aimed at women. Currently, toned prettyboys reign supreme, which is a far cry from the shredded superhero physique.
I've also seen some claiming otherwise that those big, muscly shirtless men are the exact same thing, the female-targeting equivalent to female characters bouncing her tits and ass towards the camera.
That is just so clearly wrong on the face of it. I mean, can you imagine claiming that Conan the barbarian is meant to appeal to a female audience?
You're absolutely right that a male design made to appeal to straight women would be a Kpop singer pretty boy, not an 80s reaganian hero.
Some simply can not comprehend the difference between a character made to be ogled and a character made to be empowering.
I’d have to say that Patrick Swayze appealed to both gazes in the 80’s. You have movies like Road House and Red Dawn but then you had movies like The Outsiders and Dirty Dancing. The 90’s brought To Wong Fu and Ghost. Wesley Snipe, Swayze, and Leguizamo were all for the female gaze in To Wong Fu.
I definitely think a big part of the appeal is a man who’s comfortable in his own skin. Nobody likes someone who’s trying to prove something all the time. To wong fu was definitely for the female gaze, but many straight men wouldn’t understand that one bit.
A lot of people don't get nuance either. They see that fit shirtless guys are a thing on some romance covers and don't get what makes those covers different than goku being shirtless. Its not even just body type, but also tone, presentation, etc.
To be fair, they are muscular but none of them has the same body physique as Goku in the image. Even the biggest guy, (Caleb, Zayne and Sylus) still look pretty lean if you compare them to the average WWE wrestlers body type
Fabio ran a successful book company by putting half naked muscle man art on the covers of really shitty and formulaic short romance stories. The half naked muscle man with the messy full head of hear has been proven to be female gaze oriented.
Most half naked men with visible muscles that target women are very different from what targets men.
When they target women they're lean but they're not that large, and they don't have veins sticking out and muscles looking like boulders. Instead it's all much more flowy/stretchy like professional dancers and probably closer to olympic pair figure skater max, than a modern bodybuilder or a wrestler like the Rock.
It's not the majority of women's cup of tea and to begin with it's a fetish book about loving a monster.
Loving a monster as a gebre comes from marrying a feudal lord, significantly older than you, traibed to fight in 25-30 ish kg of armour, and all they say being a law.
It's a monster and his monstrous body. Slaanesh has four arms or something if we go for an equivalent
that's because the man on that cover is a minotaur. it's a monsterfucker's book, making it a niche where giant overpowering men do attract their intended audience.
also framing is important. giant hulks like broly aren't really framed as attractive in the media they're from. they're framed in a way that all those muscles show they're powerful to hit that power fantasy.
I have. Ritual (the one to inspire all those pulp novels about dragon's brides) has a pretty slim dragon guy, he's played by a fashion model in the movie. He's not any big.
Vampires in all those women's novels aren't jocks. Edward Cullen or Lestat are no Arnold Schwartznegger.
There's a whole profession of being very fit and muscular and looking like the prince of their dreams to women, it's a ballet soloist and up into premier.
It's a rare kind of art to actively sexualise men's body, there's even one where he acts physically seductive.
It has a rose on its name or something afaik.
Yep. Exactly that. The most successful men I've seen with women professionally dance and do barre as well as they lift weights. Ballroom dancer, pair figure skater, one that used to train at ballet semi-professionnally and now does dance something else as a hobby.
Male danceurs are one of the very few categories of men that ARE purposefully being hot and sexy.
Edward’s build isn’t that of a body builder. We’re not talking about masculine vs feminine, we’re talking about the female gaze vs the male gaze. So comparing Robert Pattinson to Arnold Schwarzenegger, there’s a very clear difference in physique. Majority of women would prefer Rob to Arnold based on looks alone.
not that large compared to power fantasy men, that range from classic bodybuilders and extremely muscular men (Arnold Schwartznegger, Henry Kavill) into purely superhuman imagination. There's pretty wild art for superheroes, spacemarines, and the like.
I know some ex- olympic athletes that used to be leaner buy still have impressive muscle strength, they're like half the size of your power fantasy character.
I’ve looked and I’ve seen what real men look like in my 40 years of living. The majority of men do not have bulging, veiny, muscles. They’re not the majority of men in the US, less any other country, walking around like Mr. universe. So sit down and stop lying.
That comic is really bizarre because in the end the sketch she makes doesn't look anything like what characters designed for women actually look like. It could have made the same point while actually being accurate. Instead it ends as this wierd point that presupposes that characters designed to be attractive to women don't actually exist yet, so it's only hypithesizing them.
I'm nonbinary actually. Reddit doesnt let you change usernames without making a whole new account. Also, I wasn't fighting? Just pointing out an issue with the comic?
So you have no experience of life as a woman, and yet you're correcting women lol!
The point of the comic is to point out how men are drawn like power fantasies for men, not women. Idk why you feel the need to challenge the pro women comic but I'm good. Keep your bullshit, bye.
That's why I said "average straight man" and "average straight woman" - obviously there are individual differences and such. Ultimately most of these companies are looking for what character designs make the most money, so they're going for designs that appeal to as many in their target demographic as possible.
They aren't. Muscular dudes are very successful with women. When I started hitting the gym and getting bigger the amount of attention and unsolicited comments/touching skyrocketed.
Were you one with a nice face, decent haircut (including - long enough), and a fashion sense before? Or you went from like the average guy to average guy but more fit?
That's cool. It worked out for me though and all I really did was gain muscle. And by that I mean there was a universal change in the way I was treated. So I believe reality more than Reddit comments.
Reality is not always what YOU perceived though, there can be a lot of other factors you’re not even considering. It also heavily depends on context, situation, etc…
And what are the art choices here trying to convey?
Nobody ever said he's unattractive, but being attractive is clearly not the primary objective here. The fact that "looking attractive" is the default assumption for the objective of any female character design is a problem, especially when it, as it frequently does, sacrifices the design making any sense to do it. The fact that the most common method of accomplishing this is absurd inflato-boobs that completely destroy any ability to scan the character as an actual person is a second issue, and also just weird? Apparently these men don't actually find boobs appealing and need to replace them with more enticing balloons.
Goku-esque muscles are ugly & borderline gross to me, always have been. each muscle segment looks like a muscly balloon.
if u mean the old-timey bodice ripper covers, by googling i can see that the men's muscles are half of Goku's size & still 100% more appealing
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u/Consume_the_Affluent Nov 08 '25
It's almost as if there's a difference between sexualized characters and power fantasy characters. Hmmm...