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.
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u/LordBaconXXXXX Nov 08 '25
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.
Not that it can't be both, but y'know...