It's all overly shredded men with insane proportions doing ridiculous poses.
I think another angle of it is that men aren't as against being sexualized and unless it overtly appeals to them because their gay/bi. they just gloss over it. Conan, jojo, fist of the north star, "manime" in general, etc.
If you find no appeal in the male form like me, this shit is just cool. Im just aware that this is kind of the same thing as above.
Almost naked greasy buff dudes doing goofy poses while doing stereotypical manly things, with their junk regularly emphasized.
edit: I want to add a little addendum to this.
If you read this whole mess of a thread, i think (or atleast I hope) you might take away not so much as changing your entire world view, but rather the nuance of what I'm trying to get across.
I have my opinions, you have yours, but i hope at the very least the nuance of it is something that can be communicated. Even within this thread I have reached agreeable conclusions with those i was debating.
At the end of the day I suppose the only thing we can ever take away is our own conclusions.
That is an excellent point. But the same is true of men, but we can still tell when something is designed with the goal of sex appeal.
In Arakis case the first half of Jojo is classic buff protagonist power fantasy stuff. While the second half is designed to appeal to his specific love of fashion.
It can be hard to tell the difference between art designed for sex appeal and art as power fantasy but as someone who's seen a bit of deliberate sexualisation of men in her time, I can tell you Jojo's ain't it.
It's a complicated topic. Sex appeal itself is kind of inherently gendered a lot of the time. Which is why it's really hard to depict men as sexually appealing without it coming across a little bit gay.
If you're okay with that happening you can lean into it and go full bara. Which is unmistakably gay and unmistakably sexual. But it's very tricky to do it without it being a bit queer.
This was kinda frankly my opinion too but as a cis het man I don't feel as inclined to voice it
But it does genuinely feel like what is considered a "sexualized" male character for the female gaze typically tends to just be masculine male bodies encased with typically "feminine" tropes, like soft facial features or scantily clad revealing clothes or what a cishet man might consider "gay"
There is a certain irony in the idea that both straight men and straight women ultimately are sexually attracted to feminine traits, just on different types of bodies
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u/jbyrdab 14h ago edited 10h ago
I mean if we wanna be fair.... Araki...
It's all overly shredded men with insane proportions doing ridiculous poses.
I think another angle of it is that men aren't as against being sexualized and unless it overtly appeals to them because their gay/bi. they just gloss over it. Conan, jojo, fist of the north star, "manime" in general, etc.
If you find no appeal in the male form like me, this shit is just cool. Im just aware that this is kind of the same thing as above.
Almost naked greasy buff dudes doing goofy poses while doing stereotypical manly things, with their junk regularly emphasized.
edit: I want to add a little addendum to this.
If you read this whole mess of a thread, i think (or atleast I hope) you might take away not so much as changing your entire world view, but rather the nuance of what I'm trying to get across.
I have my opinions, you have yours, but i hope at the very least the nuance of it is something that can be communicated. Even within this thread I have reached agreeable conclusions with those i was debating.
At the end of the day I suppose the only thing we can ever take away is our own conclusions.