So I’m reading this post on Jezebel about increasing cultural acceptance of the female gaze, and it’s got an interesting line in it:
For example, many men don’t realize that their girlfriends might lust after Lautner or Gosling — and still be attracted to their own less-than-perfect male partners.
Y’know, there’s a damn good point there.
I think most of us can distinguish between fantasy and reality. We don’t think that Team Fortress 2 gives us the right to kill people with amusing accents any more than we thought that Super Mario Brothers gave us the right to stomp turtles to death. Likewise, most of us get that the imaginary sexual partners of our fantasies have little in common with the real sexual partners of our realities, and that’s a good thing. However, I don’t think we talk about this disconnect enough, and that leads to some hurtful misunderstandings.
Now, look, my own personal sexual ideal, aesthetically speaking, is either this:
This:
Or this:
Deep, I ain’t.
And yet as of this writing, according to my Fetlife profile, I’m involved with five women, none of them are named Thora, Bettie, or Clara, and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. They are lovely, brilliant, sexy, unique women, and I’m constantly grateful for all of them.
I think this is something that gets overlooked in a lot of the (legitimate) criticism of the female body images presented in the media. Just because Ivy’s tits have gotten more ridiculous in each Soul Calibur sequel, and I think we can all agree that they have, doesn’t mean that a guy can’t stop playing that game, look at his actually-human and subject-to-gravity wife, and feel overwhelmed with how lucky he is to have her in his life. Just because Angelina Jolie is sold to us as “the sexy one” doesn’t mean that men literally expect all the women they know to look like Angelina Jolie does on a movie poster. In the real world, most people seem to maintain a healthy awareness of the difference between fantasy and reality. Thank goodness for that; fantasies are bullshit, it’s their nature.
And yet.
There’s a weird pang when the ladies in my life go all wibbly over Christian Bale’s abs or Cillian Murphy’s cheekbones or Taye Diggs’ smile. Despite my own awareness of fantasy and reality, on some level, I feel like if they want to fuck Johnny Depp (and let’s be honest: who doesn’t?) they must not want to fuck bald, overweight me. This despite the fact that they, y’know. Do. I don’t pretend this disconnect makes any sense, but I still struggle with it all the time.
I think a lot of men feel this. We see an underwear ad and wince a bit, knowing we damn well don’t look like that with our shirt off. We see Antonio Banderas grin at the camera and feel a little smaller. We look at Captain America, whose actual superpower is having a perfect body, and feel less than we are.
This is not to draw an equivalence between male and female body issues, of course. In our society, the female body is sexualized far more often than the male body. We’ve developed a pretty good toolset over the years for unpacking how these images and issues hurt women, and I’d have to agree that the damage probably is worse on the women’s side. (Pop quiz: who are the female celebrities as conventionally attractive as Seth Rogen, Zach Galafinakis, Gene Hackman, etc? Trick question. Women are conventionally pretty or they just don’t exist.)
However, as I’m fond of saying, I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet, then I continued weeping because his foot problem did not actually solve my shoe problem. Women’s body image issues are really awful, but that doesn’t make men’s body image issues somehow okay. The point is that people, of whatever gender, can often separate fantasy from reality in their own desires, but still feel personally inadequate compared with a fantasy.
Most of us really can distinguish between fantasy and reality, and frankly, most of us would prefer to keep our fantasies as fantasies. I’m sure if I actually met Thora Birch, we’d have nothing in common, and if I actually met Clara Bow, I’d be arrested for grave desecration. We would, most of us, much prefer to fool around with real people rather than imaginary ones, and yet we too often don’t understand that our lovers feel the same. How many others have had this experience, that weird doublethink of simultaneously thinking “I love so-and-so exactly how he or she is” and “But they’d love me more if I looked like that“?
I am guilty of the weird double think and I am fairly certain (but not possitive) that my partner has done the same thing. It is illustrated neatly by the following anecdote. My partner and I have many things in common mentally, physically not so much. I am short, he is tall, I have woman bits and he has man bits that sort of thing. We both, however have ‘tummies’ and one day after some absolutely wonderful sex we were lounging about naked and I was carressing his tummy. It feels nice, it has hair on it which also feels… Read more »
Well now I come looking for a flow chart “showing how MRAs and anti-feminists decide what to contribute to discussion threads” and find a flow chart detailing the supposed Feminist Critics decision making process. I guess since the majority of the folks at Feminists Critics are neither MRA or anti-feminist Amp must have brought up the wrong chart (he could have at least had the courtesy to link it).
(http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2011/11/07/open-thread-if-xkcd-was-a-pop-song-edition/)
During a half drunken conversation at a party once, my friend asked me why girlfriends didn’t have a little more “umph” (cupped his chest) and a little less “hmph” (grabbed his ass). I asked him why he only dated twig girls. He decided it must be because he had always struggled with his weight, whereas I had always been extremely skinny, so weight meant nothing to me. That was strange for me, I had always pictured him as having the male ideals – good looking, a weight lifter, a wrestler, great at Tae Kwan Do (plus all around smart with… Read more »
@clarence: When you are always hearing things that no one else seems ever to have heard of , yes, it’s going to be natural for people to either : A. Doubt you Or B. Wonder who you hang out with. I’m usually in the “B” camp , but then I remind myself -it’s Denmark! Not a word about my ‘elite circle’ I see. Anyway, I didn’t get this from Danes, I actually hear it more often from English speakers, on webpages and interviews and stuff like that. Like the Greek female statues being called plump here, while the males are… Read more »
AB:
When you are always hearing things that no one else seems ever to have heard of , yes, it’s going to be natural for people to either :
A. Doubt you
Or
B. Wonder who you hang out with.
I’m usually in the “B” camp , but then I remind myself -it’s Denmark!
Si, signore. Yo parlo un pu se piccolo. Molto pu e molto piccolo. 😀 E solo male. And I have been to northern Italy. I used to live in Spain and a friend of mine lived on a rabbit farm in a nice little town beside a very beautiful range of what I thought were mountains at the time, but were possibly just hills. It’s north and (and I think west) of Venice but I think it was still in Veneto. Maybe a little sub section of Vicenza or Belluno? I couldn’t tell you, I was about eight at the… Read more »
@clarence: I don’t care where your alleged Greek Statue admiring people come from. So now their alleged? Listen, I don’t care where you think they come from, but I care about you calling them ‘elite circles’, contrasting them with a poor section of a city, and implying that they’re some kind of rich snobs. I simply say that in my experience in the USA the meme that women should take any beauty hints from Greek masonry is rather small and unknown. Perhaps in Denmark it’s different. But then Denmark seems different in many ways. It’s not a meme in Denmark… Read more »
Jay wrote:
Bravissimo….you know some italian, have u been in Italy? 😀
Its J-Day (julebryg comes out, its a chrismas beer…so basically its beer day. And usually the first bottles are free) in denmark and I start my shift in five minutes (im also a DJ) and im super tired….yaaawn. Couldn sleep last nigh, and I havent taken my siesta…to much stress.
AB:
I don’t care where your alleged Greek Statue admiring people come from. I simply say that in my experience in the USA the meme that women should take any beauty hints from Greek masonry is rather small and unknown. Perhaps in Denmark it’s different. But then Denmark seems different in many ways.
@clarence: AB: It truly is very obvious you do not live in the US. I don’t say that to be mean, it’s just practically every post of yours shows something good or bad that Europeans take as normal but people in the USA can’t identify with. You knew I didn’t live in the US, and yet you called my surroundings elitist based on US standards. I never said anyone needed to identify with going to museums, and FYI, I’ve never heard anyone I went to a museum with say anything about Greek statues representing perfection. In fact, the people I… Read more »
@ Kenshiroit
Fantastico! Di piu! Di piu! 😀 And that about exhausts my applicable Italian, signore. (and I don’t really know if I got it right. ) Grazie, for your lessons ‘di arte’.
@Flyingkal: You are moving the goalposts. The shape of Greek statues are unattainable, because being too small they are so for you. But the shape of Rubens motifs are unattainable because they are so for many (other) women. I don’t see how that’s moving the goalposts. Both ideals are attainable for a certain amount of people and unattainable for others. That’s why I don’t think it makes sense to label one a realistic body type and the other an unrealistic image. I think certain traits, like the pinched waist from a corset, the large (and hard) breasts on skinny women… Read more »
hmm forgot the quotes….
AB I could never have a body like most Greek statues of women, for the simple reason than my breasts were already bigger than that when I was 12, despite not being overweight They were idealistic raffigurations of health and beauty. Masculine raffigurations were usually atletes or warriors. The underlining ideology was the harmonic perfection for both men and women, the idealitation of youth. if it wasnt harmonic it wasnt perfect. So men were also raffigurated with small penises, contrary to pompeian art with huge fallos. But they werent impossible to archive, contrary (I use a more contemporary comparission) to… Read more »
AB Kenshiroit, I would love to hear more about classical Greco-Roman art if it comes up later. I always had the feeling the Romans especially distinguished pretty harshly between ideal shapes (gods, heroes, athletes, pretty people made to be pretty) and their depiction of real people OMG, there are tons of volumes describing the various art form, whom at first eyes may seem similar, but to the trained eye they arent. A wery easy semplicistic explanation is the hellenes used art for “religious purposes” like the worship of the hero, the idealism, the beauty ect. The Romans instead used to… Read more »
Me, 40 year old, married, with children…I think it’s incredibly rude to “pang” (never quite heard that word being used like it is but I think it’s good and appropriate) over the sexuality of other people. It’s something I’d expect from young casual dating folk but not something from serious relationship styled adult folk.
AB:
It truly is very obvious you do not live in the US.
I don’t say that to be mean, it’s just practically every post of yours shows something good or bad that Europeans take as normal but people in the USA can’t identify with.
AB, again.
Although I agree with you that ” most body shapes are not easily attainable for people who don’t have them to begin with.”
But I still think that the main point of this thread was not to (be) compare/d to one ideal or the other, but to get to hear from your loved one that you are an attractive person and not just being taken for granted or as a “plan B”.
@AB: I could never have a body like most Greek statues of women, for the simple reason than my breasts were already bigger than that when I was 12, despite not being overweightI don’t find Rubens to be realistic, if by realistic we mean “not too difficult for common women to attain”. Many women at the time would not have had access to the amount of calories necessary to get that kind of body (which is usually considered the reason those bodies were admired to begin with), and many women around the world today still don’t. You are moving the… Read more »
@Clarence: Of course I live in a poor section of Baltimore city and I don’t travel in AB’s elite circles so I suppose that’s just my plebianism showing I don’t travel in many elite circles either. I use public transportation to get to Copenhagen, timing my departure to get the cheapest tickets, sleep on couches, mattresses on the floor, a deckchair, and once sharing a bed (with my head at her feet to make room for both of us) at friends’ houses, and use the free (as in free of charge) days to check out the museums of interest. Or… Read more »
@monkey: I honestly don’t know what to say, other than I have never met anyone who has said that Greek statuary was a “realistic” version of a female body type. And you’re the first person I’ve heard say that Rubens depicted realistic women. But I wasn’t suggesting people were necessarily saying they were realistic as in being ordinary, more that they’re often contrasted with modern ideas of beauty as being more natural, curvier, more like ‘real women’. On this thread, typhonblue mentioned that plump women were the ideal in every male dominated society, and later used the statuary of ancient… Read more »
By the way monkey, I back you up on never hearing anyone say anything about how Greek statues represent perfection for women to ascribe to. Of course I live in a poor section of Baltimore city and I don’t travel in AB’s elite circles so I suppose that’s just my plebianism showing. Maybe if you’d hang out with the right people (people who make constant trips to fine art museums I suppose) you too would hear tons about the ancient Greeks and healthy female weight, because I certainly never have nor do I recall Noami Wolf bringing this up in… Read more »
Rubens is overplayed, anyway.
The vast majority of painters of his time painted thinner women. I’m not sure there was ever a “fat” crush anywhere, heck, while some of Rubens stuff might seem obese, none of them that I recall have double chins. Men still like that pear shape.
@AB:
I honestly don’t know what to say, other than I have never met anyone who has said that Greek statuary was a “realistic” version of a female body type. But, and I don’t mean this as a criticsm, you do seem to find fault with a lot of things people say on here, to which I would ask, why do you still come on here?
@monkey: And it’s not like there have never been any other depictions of female beauty that have been more accomodating to realistic body types. Rubens, anyone? I don’t find Rubens to be realistic, if by realistic we mean “not too difficult for common women to attain”. Many women at the time would not have had access to the amount of calories necessary to get that kind of body (which is usually considered the reason those bodies were admired to begin with), and many women around the world today still don’t. Even more women would have to force themselves to overeat… Read more »