“It was an annoying comment for multiple reasons, not least of which was his implication that it was women’s responsibility to even the playing field.
“Some guy once told me that he thought the solution to neutralizing the male gaze was for women to simply objectify men,” she says. Superheroes and their rippling physiques are a power fantasy, and so this kind of onscreen imagery only serves to further entrench the idea that men’s bodies are totems of power, even if the internet sets about making thirsty GIF-sets of Chris Hemsworth’s torso at the same time.Ĭan there ever be such a thing as equal-opportunity objectification, then, when traditional gender dynamics carry such a historic power imbalance? I asked that question to Man Repeller’s Deputy Editor, Haley Nahman.
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Of course, showing a man’s bulging pectorals in an action movie isn’t quite the same as the camera lingering on a woman’s breasts or buttocks. Superheroes and their rippling physiques are a power fantasy, and so this kind of onscreen imagery only serves to further entrench the idea that men’s bodies are totems of power That uber-muscular ideal - which writer Mark Simpson, the creator of the term “metrosexual,” named “ spornosexual” - can be seen in the majority of leading men today (the internet still mourns the loss of Chris Pratt’s pre- Guardians of the Galaxy tummy), which is perhaps why the Tom Hollands and Timothée Chalamets of Hollywood are making such a stir. Cut to more than a decade later, and his torso in The Wolverine and Days of Future Past was hulking and vascular, presumably all the better to make this immortal character seem invincible.
When Hugh Jackman first donned those adamantium claws to play Wolverine in 2000’s X-Men, he looked tough as hell, sure, but still kinda cuddly. That isn’t to say cishet men in the public eye have been immune to increasingly unrealistic body standards. In a recent piece for Allure, writer Katelyn Burns described the constant societal policing of trans women’s looks as an “ impossible balancing act.” In fact, this kind of dissection often picks up speed the further you get from cisgender white men black, queer and trans women, for example, seem to face exponential judgment and punishment compared to their majority counterparts. Still, it’s relatively rare for the media to apply this kind of scrutiny to white male bodies in pop culture, an activity usually aimed at women. “Aside from the obvious – a straight twink can’t exist – the conflation of slimness and, for the most part, whiteness to success is problematic,” writes Dazed’s Dominic Cadogan, “not least because that is the way it has been for what feels like forever.”
It almost goes without saying, too, that slender white guys have carried cultural and sexual currency in the west for centuries. It’s not uncommon for straight people to go on safari in LGBTQ culture and come back with a souvenir, but what made this take especially lukewarm was the fact that Vulture writer Kyle Buchanan essentially wrote the same piece in June 2017. When The New York Times published “ Welcome to the Age of the Twink” by Nick Haramis earlier this month, it provoked a pretty strong reaction, ranging from derision from gay men who felt the term “twink” had been appropriated, to those who questioned the author’s assertion that a slender frame somehow defies traditional masculinity. Not since the dawn of the so-called “ dadbod” has there been so much online discourse surrounding the male torso.