[OC] Same thing?

[u/EmployeePractical514]

[u/VinnyBoy45]

I wouldn't know how to overly sexualize a male character.
On the other hand, I know how to sexualize a female character.
On the third hand, I do not know how to draw so it does not matter.

[u/369122448 → u/VinnyBoy45]

It's kind of hard to overly-sexualize a man in media because we don't really have a cultural view of men as a sexual commodity like we do for women.

You could try to ramp up sensuality, but that's a more complex (and often unisex) form of expression, and not sexualisation exactly.

Sexualisation, unfortunately, is pretty impossible to divorce from the centuries of history of women's exploration by men.

[u/ExpandoD0ng → u/369122448]

"It's hard to sexualize men" Simply wrong. Sexualizing a man is easy as fuck. Men just don't want to be caught drawing other men like that. Search up bara yaoi and you'll see men sexualized in every possible angle.

[u/ArsenicArts → u/ExpandoD0ng]

That's male gaze though. It's not the same thing.

https://ms-demeanor.tumblr.com/post/151068279457/bifca-justplainsomething-nakedsasquatch

[u/Character-Poetry2808 → u/369122448]

I think this is a huge part of it, men arent taught to see themselves as 'sexy', to be desirable. Men are taught homosocial ideas of status and signifiers to achieve and then devalued by other men for not meeting those goals. And one of those aspects its a control of the expression of sexuality. Men are taught to outwardly want a very specific idea of a woman, and if they admit to liking outside that box, theyre shamed for it. (And this includes men who might be bi, or simply find a single other man attractive). They dont get to be seen as a desirable person, in some weird ways I think a lot of media makes men almost devoid of desirability, and instead they are power fantasys where youre not meant to identify with the male hero as desirable or even sexual, youre only meant to identify with his performance of masculinity.

So the minute men are put in a sexual gaze they tend to think its gay since they have no other framework.

[u/ptwonline → u/369122448]

The one example I can think of is something like Tarzan running around the jungle buff and in a loin cloth.

[u/369122448 → u/ptwonline]

Is that actual sexualisation, though?

The appeal there (insofar as it exists) isn't Tarzan's body/sex characteristics, but the sensuality of being held close to the skin someone more powerful, combined with a rush of danger from them being the thing keeping you from falling.

You could switch the sex there and it would still work, but the female Tarzan could be not sexualised and the sensuality would still exist, while also being able to be sexualised.

I don't think most people get that horny over Tarzan fwiw, but where that appeal exists it's more complex than appearance alone.

[u/CosmoBrockington → u/ptwonline]

Another example is any romance novel with a dude on the cover.

[u/liquidfoxy → u/ptwonline]

That’s a masculine power fantasy, not overt sexualisation 

[u/aoibhinn-mw → u/369122448]

There is male strippers dressed like cowboy ain’t there