It's an ongoing problem. No one agrees on what makes men attractive, even when hyper sexualized. Some people will point to Hugh Jackman on the cover of Good housekeeping as an example of a mans thirst trap. But that doesn't exactly feel equal to the kind of thirst traps we see with women.
You absolutely can, and it's done regularly, it's just done in a completely different way. It's certainly not the obvious physical way of exaggerated features and skimpy outfits.
For example, my wife is watching a show called "The Sex Lives of College Girls", and one of the characters is the male coach of a women's soccer team. The women regularly yell things to him like "take your shirt off!" and reply "yes daddy!" when he asks them to do stuff, and it's played up for laughs.
Or recall that video of the fire alarm going off at the romance book convention. 4 male fire fighters entered the building to the catcalls of like 800 women and none of the video commenters batted an eye.
Of course, there are significant historical power differences to consider in this, and most of those men have never been made to feel physically unsafe by women in their lives.
I say all this out of concern as an uncle of young nephews. I don't spend a lot of time on the short form content socials, but there seems to be this pervasive theme that it's 100% okay to post aggressively thirsty comments about men, and to publicly judge men on their appearance.
It feels like popular culture learned nothing from the decades of girls and women struggling with body image issues and decided it's just fine to publicly comment on men's appearance
That's not equivalent to sexualization of the female body, because that's just men looking attractive. And the lack of as much visual arousal by the opposite sex from the same areas of the male body is just the opposite extreme of how much pressure females feel to look so sexy. It's not any better and certainly not as much sexualizing for males. Many men hate the visual sexual desire disparity and greater acceptance of being so revealing for females in the same settings than males have had for so long. That's a very passionate desire having been mismatched with the genders.
The same areas of the male body being as revealing is treated as more obscene, because fewer people wanting to see that makes it seem to them like men being more perverted and imposing. Men used to often wear crop tops, high shorts, and swim briefs before the 90's. Meanwhile decades before that women got acceptance of wearing butt showing swimwear, casual uncovered compression wear and the like, even in Christian gatherings, because of the principle that lust depends on the viewer.
> Men used to often wear crop tops, high shorts, and swim briefs before the 90's.
I honestly think the main reason this changed was normalization of gay men. And not even from a toxic/homophobic perspective (though maybe that too), but as a straight man you don't want to be gay-coded, just as a practical thing.
I think the stereotype about men being more 'visual' is true, men are more inclined to overtly sexualize based on image alone. Which going back to gay men is why they are more image-focused, and sort of co-opted revealing clothing
That's part of my gripe. Seeing that as automatically gay instead of just as normal for straight men to want to feel as attractive for our bodies and to feel more comfortable in warm weather. All men had to do was keep wearing that stuff and get as revealing as women had earlier, and it would have stayed normal to people for straight men too. Gay women wearing the same revealing things didn't scare straight women from association with gayness. Too many men are too body conscious and stupid.
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u/mace30 16h ago
All I get from this is we lack interesting and varied ways to sexualize men.