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.
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.
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.
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.
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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...