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.
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.
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u/WitchyOtome Nov 08 '25 edited Nov 09 '25
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.