Gendered objectification

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Hannibal & American Gods. Basically all Bryan Fuller all the time.
He is doing to the male form, the lingering cameras, the slow mo pans, the extreme close ups, all thats been done almost exclusively to women for the male gaze. So now its flipped, and its amazing to me thats its proving sooooo popular!

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Sorry, that wasn’t clear. I mean advertisers and entertainment producers depicting men in ways that had been reserved for women. I remember a paper I read that cited Calvin Klein ads as the first time the writer had ever seen a man posed that way in a mainstream ad.

“Despite their bisexual appeal, the cultural genealogy of the ads I’ve been discussing and others like them is to be traced largely through gay male aesthetics, rather than a sudden blossoming of appreciation for the fact that women might enjoy looking at sexy, well-hung young men who don’t appear to be about to rape them. Feminists might like to imagine that Madison Avenue heard our pleas for sexual equality and finally gave us “men as sex objects.” But what’s really happened is that women have been the beneficiaries of what might be described as a triumph of pure consumerism-- and with it, a burgeoning male and fitness and beauty culture-- over homophobia and the taboos against male vanity, male “femininity,” and erotic display of the male body that have gone along with it.”

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/Body/bordo_male_beauty.html

FWIW, things have changed a lot, and are still changing since the the essay was written.

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I am always here for a kilt. Always.

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Attraction, at least for me, is so unknowable. Particularly physical attraction. For example, I find this person:

very, very sexy. Look, I know very little about Goldblum, other than what I see on late night talk shows. If you have information that he’s been a horrible person, feel free to share, and that will likely change my mind, but given what I know now, there’s something very there for me with him.

I both applaud and am worried by the sexualization? objectification? appropriation? of the “nerd” by the mainstream. I know and love many “nerds” by the standard definition; FFS, I’m married to one who actually has a preference between “Ancient Aliens” and other, comparable TV shows.

In certain ways, I think this new infatuation with the male “nerd” is nothing more than an extension of putting glasses on a hot lady and calling her intelligent.

I don’t know. Thoughts?

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Agreed; Goldblum is one of those anomalies. He doesn’t fit into most of the usual archetypes that are spoon-fed to our society, yet he’s still quite attractive.

But then again, I did see him mostly naked in the remake of The Fly when I was still prepubescent, so maybe I’m biased…

But to your point, I’m also in favor of sapiosexuality being promoted in the media; It’s far better than ‘cute and stupid’ as the desired “ideal.”

(And no, I have no dirt on Jeff.)

:wink:

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All of the goths at my school signed up for cricket.

For half of the game, you’re sitting around doing nothing while waiting for your turn at bat. For the other half of the game, you’re standing around in the outfield hoping that the ball never comes your way.

And they let you wear a hat, so you can keep your moontan intact.

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I mean, at high school age when all this hits its peak, it’s all part of that lord of the flies type hierarchy that develops when you have a big enough group of boys with not enough supervision. So maybe don’t think of it too specifically in terms of homophobia because there’s not really a lot of logic to it. If some kid gets called a jew in an argument with just the right comic timing and delivery, it doesn’t matter if he’s irish or black, that’s it. He’s a Jew now. If they hear grown ups talking about pakistani immigrants but there aren’t any such students at school, one or two will be invented. The other day I heard one ten-year-old boy call another a pedophile.

So as far as violence goes, it’s just a big dog pile and the violence goes downward. And the whole shower fear, dressing room scenario is incidental to that. But it can also just be, like, modesty. It can be weird to be around a lot of dicks if you’re not used to it. When you see something new the natural reaction is to take a look, but you’re not s’posedta, are you? :scream: What if people see mine? Will they say something? Not really all that different from other kinds of shyness.

At the other end of the scale, shower fear can be homophobic. Somewhere in the middle I think it’s a dick-measuring contest like any figurative dick-measuring contest. If the Male Gaze can be boiled down to, “I’d fuck her,” then I think the equivalent Male on Male Gaze would be something like, “I’m as tough as he is”. A good contest. Doesn’t make you feel inadequate, doesn’t make you feel like a bully. Despite the name I don’t think dick measuring is all that sexual, but like the sexual gaze I think it’s pretty automatic, deep seated, difficult to control and it sometimes gives good Christian men uncomfortable thoughts.

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I totally agree, but as a lifelong “lady nerd” (god, I hate that term!), I appreciate having eye candy I would actually be interested in, finally.

The huge muscles that look like someone spends half the day in the gym and the other half of the day obsessing over protein shakes is not a sexy look, to me. If I can’t imagine myself having a conversation with the guy on at least a few thousand topics, and be able to spend an evening reading books in the same room without talking, then no thanks. Not appealing at all…to me.

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So it is baseball.

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I mean, The Fly was okay ,but it gets too gross later on to really work for me. What you really need for peak Goldblum is the 80’s sci-fi classic Earth Girls are Easy.

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No doubt, but certain images stick in one’s memory.

Oh, I saw that one too; the Fly is just better known and he showed way more skin in it.

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I like it that people are starting to recognize that nerds and geeks have our own subcultures. We’re not simply the rejects from the various high-school cliques of “cool” kids. That being said, I don’t want to be the gatekeeper of nerddom, and reject those whose interests aren’t sufficiently nerdy for me.

What I’m not fine with is all the people who claim they were nerds in high school. About 90% of people were apparently nerds in high school, because they wore glasses, or were in the marching band, or took the second highest math class, or whatever. This waters down the definitions a little bit, especially by conflating “nerd” with “not the in-crowd of the in-crowd”.

Yes, but this is assuming an actual nerd, not a Hollywood nerdface nerd.

Hollywood nerd is kinda like Hollywood ugly or Hollywood dateless.

It all comes down to this:

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Nope. He’s amazing. I hear he goes down to a jazz club in LA every week (or maybe it’s once a month) and plays. Just lovely.

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I was going to post a gif from Heathers, but then I realized I was confusing cricket and croquet. :frowning:

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Not really … Jeff Goldblum! Kidding but he is … extremely attractive. :cold_sweat:

I think there’s a lot less problem involved in recognizing nerd guys can be hot than the “take off the glasses and she becomes hot” thing. It’s a complicated topic but the symbolism is annoying. Women have to turn off some of their intelligence and become more of an object in order to gain acceptance.

For the guy in the equivalent trope, everyone just has to give him a chance and then it turns out he’s sexy and smart.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it though. :frowning:

I’ve seen a video. :heart_eyes_cat:

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An odd example:

I take a bus to work, regularly walk through a reasonably crowded mall, and live in a city that has two sizeable universities and a whole bunch of young government workers. What I’m saying is, there are a lot of attractive young women in the area. I sometimes see them and note that they are attractive, but it rarely goes beyond that.

And yet, a couple of days ago, I was walking again through the mall, heading home, and this woman passed me, walking the other direction, and, just… wow. The hair, the face, the dress, everything. I now understand what “stunning beauty” is. I’m still having trouble shaking it off (although it’s fading), and I couldn’t have seen her for much longer than ten seconds.

This “judging by appearance” thing is pervasive.

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If it helps, I have also sometimes had the same reaction to a beautiful woman. Although, I do play for both teams so that might not be as abstract as I was trying to make it sound.

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