I was going to make a point before the jocular marsupial derailed us, if only I could recall what it was…
It seems to me that there are two main axes of (heterosexual) male appearance: first, there’s the desire to attract women. This is only natural, and nothing to be embarrassed about; after all, we all come from a long line of men and women who have been attracted to one another, and it’s only natural that we are going to aspire to look more attractive than the next guy, even if it only comes down to brushing our teeth and hair occasionally, and changing our clothes before they get too manky.
The other axis is about intimidating other men: making other men think that it’s not worth wasting their time trying to attract the woman that we’re attracted to, because we will defend our claim, and feelings — at the very least — will be hurt in the process. Yeah, this is very atavistic and embarrassing, but lots of other primates do it, not to mention a lot of other mammals and other critters, and it would be foolish to deny that almost all heterosexual men are aware of this axis.
From this premise it can be guessed that what is generally appealing to women and what is generally appealing to men about men’s appearance is almost certainly going to be different. Without getting too evo-psych about it, beyond a certain level, muscles are the male H. sapiens equivalent of a buck’s antlers: there to intimidate (or, impress, if you prefer) other men primarily, and win fights with them secondarily. How women feel about them is in a sad third place behind those other two purposes. And indeed, talking to women, generally speaking, though they appreciate a bit of muscle tone, men resembling great slabs of beef tend fall into the uncanny valley as far as many women are concerned.
Muscle-bound superheroes are muscle-bound to appeal to young men, not to women, as the men they would like to be. Lithe young women bent into pretzels to display both their buttocks and their breasts in nearly every frame are also drawn to appeal to young men, not young women, as the women they would like to play footsie and other fun things with. These two things are not equivalent. I don’t have a measuring device to tell me if they are equally damaging to the two sexes, but that’s not what’s being argued.
Now, women’s appearance probably has two complementary axes as well: one about attracting men, and the other… I’m not sure about. Maybe intimidatory/impressive in another way? But not about muscles, since, generally speaking, women don’t fight physically nearly as much as men do (for whatever reason, cultural or genetic or both or neither). In an alternate USA where women formed the market for comicbooks and male readers were ignored, we can surmise that the representations of the two sexes would be quite different. Men would not be muscular freaks, but probably only as lithe as, say, Brad Pitt; maybe Spiderman would be allowed to get as skinny as a, well, spider, I guess. What women’s bodies would look like, I can’t say, but almost definitely more varied than they’re allowed to be at the moment.
Meanwhile, men’s bodies would be twisted as women’s are in our universe, only to show off whatever women find attractive; lean, taut buttocks I’m led to believe are popular, chests not so much. Maybe groins; instead of featureless bulges or semi-permanently shadowed voids, maybe we’d all get to see which heroes are circumsized? Also, of course, they’d be drawn from porn by artists who are paid by the page, so we would expect to see some really strange anatomy, on the order of unsupported, helium-filled breasts with either invisible nipples or permanently erect ones drawn in the wrong places.
The fantasy of the above paragraphs is presented as something to mock, by the way, not an alternative proposal of the way things should be. I think what we’d all like is to see well-drawn, balanced views of fit young men and women doing heroic things and looking sexy when the narrative calls for people to look sexy and not in every shot, even when they’ve been brutally beaten and are on the verge of being defeated by the bad guy. (Really, that’s beyond tacky into creepy. Stop it, artist-dudes, please!)
Eh, I’ve gone on too long and done a wall of text. I hope some supporters of the status quo will read it anyway, and think about the fact that supporting the status quo is a political act, as has been pointed out not too far from here recently, every bit as political as calling for change, and think about what side they really want to be on, and what they really want to see in their comics.
