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steinrokkan posted:My entire lived experience as a person living in the world, though I agree it's not as compelling as a video by a minor LP youtube account. I've had the lived experience of being a gay man in a society made by and for straight men, watching entire rooms full of grown-rear end men freak out and throw tantrums at the merest suggestion of a man being the one under a gaze rather than the one gazing. I've watched an entire racing forum lose its poo poo (LOSE. ITS. poo poo.) at an offhand throwaway joke I made about replacing half of the grid girls with scantily clad men. I've had the experience of having to install mods to create male characters who don't look like they're 37 and haven't showered in two weeks in video games with character customization. I've watched shitlord otaku blow the gently caress up because in this particular anime it's not pretty girls being paraded in front of the screen, screaming about how their animes are being taken away from them. I've lived with the knowledge that the way I look at a man's body is considered horrifying by most men, that their fragile little minds cannot bear to see a man that way, and then seeing those fragile men turn around and dismiss women when women express annoyance at constantly having to see themselves and their fellow women through the hetero male gaze, and fail to grasp the irony. This poo poo is real. I will not let you casually sit here and splain it away to me. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Oct 8, 2016 |
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Oct 8, 2016 21:39
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steinrokkan posted:And he assumes that the people who design those things are either completely unaware of the audience to which they should be selling, or actively working to undermine their marketing by pandering to the sensibilities of people who have no stakes in the marketing campaign. That's sort of the point. Male standards of beauty are designed to appeal to male concepts of what attractiveness is, the change in aesthetic towards poorly shaven men in sweater vests with a chin you could break rocks on is simply another facet of that. You are intended to want to be the man. Female standards of beauty are also designed to appeal to male concepts of attractiveness, for all that there has been a small divergence towards representing a greater range of appearances in advertising and modelling and such, it is still heavily dominated by what appeals to men, or the kind of men who design the advertising, at least, which is still, broadly, slender white women. Perhaps less slender than a while ago and perhaps slightly less white, but still coherent to the theme, and there is still a strong element of that image of beauty being validated by its appeal to straight men, rather than a thing that women may wish to be purely to satisfy their own sense of aesthetics. They are intended to be attractive to the man. I can't say I've noticed much divergence from this trend, I think the analysis still very much fits. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Oct 8, 2016 |
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Oct 8, 2016 21:43
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OwlFancier posted:That's sort of the point. Woolie Wool posted:I've had the lived experience of being a gay man in a society made by and for straight men, watching entire rooms full of grown-rear end men freak out and throw tantrums at the merest suggestion of a man being the one under a gaze rather than the one gazing. I've watched an entire racing forum lose its poo poo (LOSE. ITS. poo poo.) at an offhand throwaway joke I made about replacing half of the grid girls with scantily clad men. I've had the experience of having to install mods to create male characters who don't look like they're 37 and haven't showered in two weeks in video games with character customization. I've watched shitlord otaku blow the gently caress up because in this particular anime it's not pretty girls being paraded in front of the screen, screaming about how their animes are being taken away from them. I've lived with the knowledge that the way I look at a man's body is considered horrifying by most men, that their fragile little minds cannot bear to see a man that way, and then seeing those fragile men turn around and dismiss women when women express annoyance at constantly having to see themselves and their fellow women through the hetero male gaze, and fail to grasp the irony. This poo poo is real. I will not let you casually sit here and splain it away to me. Standard of beauty are a matter of marketing. And they change depending on who the marketed to person is in the aggregate model of the product. If you focus on products made for men, then yes, you will find that the male models used are conforming to male ego. What a shock. As for women's campaign, well, there's currently a conflict over the motivation to look a certain way, and a lot of not only models, but also consumers will tell you that they choose a certain look for their own gratification. Its interesting, since superficially yes, the standards of female beauty are male-oriented, but at the same time how can you address the fact that so many women do in fact choose to follow fashion tips for their own sake. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Oct 8, 2016 |
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Oct 8, 2016 21:46
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If you focus on products in general then I think you will find a disproportionate amount of them are marketed to men and that this informs a disproportionate amount of advertising, even for things that have very little need to be gender-exclusive. You also find that there are some quite key areas where products marketed to women remain informed disproportionately by male standards, rather than female ones. Fashion and beauty being probably the most significant. If you exclude that disparity then things do look better I suppose but I see little reason to do that, that disparity is part of the issue.
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Oct 8, 2016 21:48
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As I said, in many regards the male and female preferences on female beauty standards are identical, or even sustained primarily by women's interest. To what extent it's caused by some internalized cultural burden, I can't tell, but it seems to be a pretty undeniable matter at hand that won't go anyway any time soon, and has led if anything to women reclaiming the supposedly male-oriented fashion market for themselves. There doesn't seem to be any grounding to the assertion that women choose to groom themselves some ways exclusively to cater to male preferences.
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Oct 8, 2016 21:54
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I am not sure that male-oriented female beauty standards being marketed as empowering for women and encouraging them to pursue them as a matter of empowerment while also just coincidentally aligning near perfectly with previously established extremely patriarchal beauty standards is something I would describe as "reclaiming". Because divergence from those beauty standards is still heavily discouraged by society, far moreso than male divergence is. Reclaiming beauty standards would be for variety in female beauty to be as ranging and acceptable as it is in men. I really don't think that is the case. It remains quite monolithic.
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Oct 8, 2016 21:57
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DeusExMachinima posted:What alternative forms of male beauty are being marginalized here? They wouldn't happen to be body types that belong to people who visit fat pride tumblrs would they? Both men and women are seen as disgusting for being too overweight but for men you can be slightly into clinical obesity and seen as normal and acceptable while women who are in the normal weight range are seen as disgustingly fat. Both men and women being seen as unattractive for being fat is only equal if you are thinking about really hyper obese people.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:04
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There are like two male model templates (a skinny dude with a strong jaw, and a muscular dude), and like two female model templates (a fragile one, and a hearty blood and milk one) that get deployed depending on the marketing mission statement, discounting the entirely separate world of catwalk fashion shows on both counts.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:05
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steinrokkan posted:There are like two male model templates (a skinny dude with a strong jaw, and a muscular dude), and like two female model templates (a fragile one, and a hearty blood and milk one) that get deployed depending on the marketing mission statement, discounting the entirely separate world of catwalk fashion shows on both counts. Yes, and all four of those are oriented around a male perspective. The former two are to be embodied, the latter two are to be desired. I think this is fairly fundamentally inequitable.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:07
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OwlFancier posted:Yes, and all four of those are oriented around a male perspective. The former two are to be embodied, the latter two are to be desired. Maybe if you live in 1980, or if you have very patronizing attitudes towards women. I feel you are not really talking about the contents of media representation of sexuality, you seem to be rather projecting some sort of idea of sex in general where any male participation is inherently active and female participation is inherently passive, which is obviously problematic. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Oct 8, 2016 |
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Oct 8, 2016 22:09
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I live in 2016 and the place I work only sells cosmetics for white women, uses thin white women to advertise all its products, and stops selling women's clothing at something like my equivalent size while the male range includes what amounts to clown trousers on me, and I'm hardly trim. But yes, sexism is over.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:11
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In my experience the size cut offs tend to be driven more by a desire to keep the lower class riff raff out than by sexist considerations.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:17
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Anyway, this started as an argument about whether muscular male models are intended to be empowering to men, and I don't see how the obvious fact that women are put under a greater deal of scrutiny than men in the fashion department follows from that. In short, I'm just saying that male models aren't really as inspiring and awesome to male customers as you seem to think.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:19
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I work in a place whose entire business model is catering for people without very much money or time to spend shopping around, so I don't think classism is the reason for those practices. The very idea that women are under more scrutiny than men in terms of their looks is a result of male dominance in setting beauty standards. Unless you're suggesting that women are just for some reason holding themselves to a higher standard than men entirely of their own volition, rather than being subject to male beauty standards as a function of general male societal dominance whether they want to or not.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:23
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I dunno, I've heard enough women say they vhoose to look certain way because they like it themselves that I find it hard to not see the lines between male gaze and female self realization blurring in the consumer sphere. THen again, I do realize that women can be agents of the patriarchy.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:28
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I would suggest that the entire point of the social construct of beauty standards is to make people feel validated by adhering to them and invalidated by violating them. Liking your adherence to a beauty standard is not indicative of it being self actualization, or at least it is not indicative that the standard itself is not being dictated by others to you. You would perhaps see more contrast in those who do not adhere to beauty standards and the differences in their experience based on being male or female. Speaking from the male perspective I get absolutely zero poo poo for how I look despite looking a bit odd. All my friends get poo poo because of their appearance from men and other women however they look, and even then the ones who do adhere to the archetypal standards still do it out of a desire to look that way, they just suffer for it regardless. I think there's perhaps some systemic imbalance there.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:33
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A lot of marketing actually targets women, including products for men. (Because it's expected that most customers will be wives buying them for their husbands rather than men buying them for themselves.) There's certainly a large part of androcentrism in society, but things aren't as simple as a few slogans and handpicked examples. And as far as marketing is concerned, there is one and only one thing you should be sure of: marketing targets everyone. Why wouldn't they target women? Go to any mall and estimate the male/female proportion in the customers. You'll most probably get a majority of women. This is a known fact, it has been known for a long while, and it's only changing very slowly. Why would marketing target only men in this situation? Here, this might interest people who think advertising is all by men, all for men, all the time: https://www.linkdex.com/en-us/inked/10-women-in-advertising-on-marketing-to-women/
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Oct 8, 2016 22:45
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Again the issue is not who marketing targets, it's what it says. A lot of marketing does indeed target women, but what it sells them is a male-dominated vision of society, as desirable.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:47
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OwlFancier posted:You would perhaps see more contrast in those who do not adhere to beauty standards and the differences in their experience based on being male or female. Speaking from the male perspective I get absolutely zero poo poo for how I look despite looking a bit odd. All my friends get poo poo because of their appearance from men and other women however they look, and even then the ones who do adhere to the archetypal standards still do it out of a desire to look that way, they just suffer for it regardless. I think there's perhaps some systemic imbalance there. *I don't recall exactly, but I think I remember some study that showed that this ideal wasn't exactly representative of the average man's dream woman. Not that it would be a great win for equal rights if only we could portray women how men actually want them to be/look, I'm just saying that the fact that even if these images aren't meant to be aspirational for women, that doesn't mean they're then necessarily designed around what men want.
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Oct 8, 2016 22:51
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OwlFancier posted:Again the issue is not who marketing targets, it's what it says. The problem is this gets really murky when you try to pin it down as a gaze thing because being desirable is something women respond to as emulative marketing. The issue if that society still largely pushes gender roles that say women are supposed to be pretty sex objects to the point where that's still heavily internalized, so of course marketing materials are going to appeal to that, it's what sells. Whereas the gender roles regarding being a desirable man encompasses a much larger cross section of things than physical beauty and marketing materials reflect that.
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Oct 8, 2016 23:02
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Woolie Wool posted:I've had the lived experience of being a gay man in a society made by and for straight men, watching entire rooms full of grown-rear end men freak out and throw tantrums at the merest suggestion of a man being the one under a gaze rather than the one gazing. I've watched an entire racing forum lose its poo poo (LOSE. ITS. poo poo.) at an offhand throwaway joke I made about replacing half of the grid girls with scantily clad men. I've had the experience of having to install mods to create male characters who don't look like they're 37 and haven't showered in two weeks in video games with character customization. I've watched shitlord otaku blow the gently caress up because in this particular anime it's not pretty girls being paraded in front of the screen, screaming about how their animes are being taken away from them. I've lived with the knowledge that the way I look at a man's body is considered horrifying by most men, that their fragile little minds cannot bear to see a man that way, and then seeing those fragile men turn around and dismiss women when women express annoyance at constantly having to see themselves and their fellow women through the hetero male gaze, and fail to grasp the irony. This poo poo is real. I will not let you casually sit here and splain it away to me. Sounds like you just hang out with fucken weirdoes to be honest. Also please link any of your examples, because they all sound like tumbr kiddi wildl over exaggerations to me.
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Oct 11, 2016 23:49
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steinrokkan posted:I dunno, I've heard enough women say they vhoose to look certain way because they like it themselves that I find it hard to not see the lines between male gaze and female self realization blurring in the consumer sphere. THen again, I do realize that women can be agents of the patriarchy. When china outlawed foot binding they had to go around arresting women because it was women that wanted to keep doing it because they were taught their whole life having ugly regular feet was disgusting whore stuff and people would rather break the bones in their own foot than be seen as disgusting and undatable.
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Oct 12, 2016 01:49
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504 posted:Sounds like you just hang out with fucken weirdoes to be honest. It's not my job as the gay person to listen to you straightsplain to me and then have to go scouring the internet to dig up things I read two years ago on ephemeral internet forums and social media platforms. This is purestrain splaining and privileged denialism, right down to the jokes about Tumblr. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 12, 2016 05:25
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AARO posted:At one point it used to be totally normal for people of the same sex to shower together after sporting events or gym class or after going swimming. But by the time I was in high school, this had changed. No one showered after gym at my school and people who even changed completely (changed into new underwear) were called gay by the other kids. This rarely ever happened. Everyone knew the unwritten rule that it was absolutely forbidden to let other people see you naked. My classmates and I just put on our other clothes covered in sweat after gym. Some of the kids just wore shorts and a t-shirt under their normal clothes and then put their other clothes back on on top of them after gym. For reference, I graduated high school in 2001. Probably depends to a large extent on region, I think. Woolie Wool posted:It's not my job as the gay person to listen to you straightsplain to me and then have to go scouring the internet to dig up things I read two years ago on ephemeral internet forums and social media platforms. This is purestrain splaining and privileged denialism, right down to the jokes about Tumblr.
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Oct 12, 2016 05:41
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IronicDongz posted:makes you sound like a jackass and makes it harder to take you seriously. Don't worry, anything marginalized people do can be used as an excuse to not take them seriously. If he was less dispassionate you'd claim he was freaking out or making a big deal or whatever.
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Oct 12, 2016 19:31
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Huzanko posted:I've seen this said elsewhere, and I've even seen a dumb little comic that says the same, but it's pretty stupid to make claims about what is objectively attractive. You're doing the same thing you claim the media does, but regarding a different "type." Actually asking gay men and straight women what they find attractive is often a good measure of what they are attracted to. By and large it's not the Arnold types. Quite a lot of women really, really have a thing for Brad Pitt in Fight Club and he's almost the complete opposite to the muscle bound image that's designed to appeal to straight men. http://foxhoundstudio.com/blog/fitness-lifestyle/the-ideal-male-physique-—-what-girls-want-want-guys-want-to-be/ That link has a pretty good breakdown on what physique appeals to women. It's not the same thing that is advertised to men.
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Oct 12, 2016 19:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Don't worry, anything marginalized people do can be used as an excuse to not take them seriously. If he was less dispassionate you'd claim he was freaking out or making a big deal or whatever.
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Oct 12, 2016 20:15
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Rush Limbo posted:Actually asking gay men and straight women what they find attractive is often a good measure of what they are attracted to. By and large it's not the Arnold types.
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Oct 12, 2016 20:22
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Rush Limbo posted:Actually asking gay men and straight women what they find attractive is often a good measure of what they are attracted to. By and large it's not the Arnold types. Yeah but Arnold types haven't dominated male-focused marketing since like.... Brad Pitt became a thing in the 90s edit: Woolie Wool posted:It's not my job as the gay person to listen to you straightsplain to me and then have to go scouring the internet to dig up things I read two years ago on ephemeral internet forums and social media platforms. This is purestrain splaining and privileged denialism, right down to the jokes about Tumblr. If you were claiming that advertising is primarily heteronormative then you'd be both correct and perhaps justified pulling this poo poo, but you made a much more expansive claim then that. Jarmak fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 20:35
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Rush Limbo posted:Actually asking gay men and straight women what they find attractive is often a good measure of what they are attracted to. By and large it's not the Arnold types. That survey, where the men included are implied to be the kind that would read bodybuilding mags and thus are well outside the mainstream, still said 40% of the men liked the Pitt body, and from a cursory GIS of men's health magazine covers, I'd say the Pitt body, or something very close to it, is the dominant body type advertised to men. Bodybuilders are on some of the covers but so was Bieber. Like, aside from a couple superhero movies (and probably not the majority), which male-oriented movies or media are telling men to look like Arnold rather than Jason Statham or Matt Damon, which while more muscular than Pitt in Fight Club (although not so crazily lean), are certainly far closer to the women's ideal from that survey than the bodybuilder? For most of my life I don't recall being told through advertising that a steroid freak monster was an ideal or appealing look. Definitely in the 80s, but then it shifted to Fabio before shifting to Pitt and then McDreamy and now he's dead and I'm married so it looks like my belly won. I mean, I'll admit that maybe I'm not getting hit with the ads meant to appeal to dudes but I can usually tell when commercials are skewing male during certain shows and most do not seem to push the Arnold look barring the purposefully weird Old Spice commercials, although some do push Dwayne Johnson.
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Oct 12, 2016 21:39
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Zachack posted:For most of my life I don't recall being told through advertising that a steroid freak monster was an ideal or appealing look. Body dysmorphia is a real thing for males and I have a few friends who are in to "physique training" which basically means looking like the monster in the picture on the right. If you don't think there's a huge market out there catering to those people I'm jealous. I don't think those extremes are about what people are attracted to, it's just a manifestation of mental illness. Hard to think otherwise when you start looking at the health consequences of making your body look that way.
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Oct 12, 2016 21:41
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NewForumSoftware posted:Body dysmorphia is a real thing for males and I have a few friends who are in to "physique training" which basically means looking like the monster in the picture on the right. If you don't think there's a huge market out there catering to those people I'm jealous. I don't think those extremes are about what people are attracted to, it's just a manifestation of mental illness. Hard to think otherwise when you start looking at the health consequences of making your body look that way. I agree that what you're describing exists, I just don't see evidence that it's mainstream or a huge market, although the latter is slippery to define. I used to have a golds gym membership, I saw more than a few of the hulkazoids, but most people there weren't trying to get huge and at no point was that look pushed as sexually desirable or even a normal goal, it was really only if you were already into that. And the golds/GNC crew is staggeringly outnumbered by gyms that push the Pitt physique at best, most seem to go for a "well-toned vaguely attractive" look as their advertising. I've known men and women with pretty severe dysmorphia and I've known people who got pretty huge (not holy poo poo huge but definitely pumped) without any mental issues and in both segments they never seemed to pick up those ideas from what I would consider the mainstream.
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Oct 13, 2016 00:15
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IronicDongz posted:I graduated highschool in 2013(21 now), and I changed clothes in front of other guys for gym class, as did a bunch of other guys. This was at both the large public school I went to for a bit, and the smaller charter school I went to after that. Also I am actually gay so my fears of being found out were probably quite a bit higher than a straight guy's fear of being called gay, maybe your experience is less typical than you think? You're definitely right, it's 100% regional, but I think this thread has established that being afraid of changing in front of each other is a widespread phenomenon in modern America. This fear doesn't seem to have existed a few decades ago. So we are still trying to figure out what caused the cultural shift that left many or most of us afraid of nudity while we were not previously afraid of this.
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Oct 14, 2016 04:20
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Woolie Wool posted:It's not my job as the gay person to listen to you straightsplain to me and then have to go scouring the internet to dig up things I read two years ago on ephemeral internet forums and social media platforms. This is purestrain splaining and privileged denialism, right down to the jokes about Tumblr. "Oh poo poo, they noticed better start yelling and hope they don't notice I cant back anything up" Are you the one posting all the STDH stories on Yahoo where a young child has a deep and complex discussion with a relative that just happens to be about whatever the relative is obsessed with?
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Oct 14, 2016 19:44
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Rush Limbo posted:Actually asking gay men and straight women what they find attractive is often a good measure of what they are attracted to. By and large it's not the Arnold types.
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Oct 17, 2016 12:22
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Cicero posted:But popular media mostly DOES have dudes who look like Brad in Fight Club; looking at that picture he's lean but still muscular. The "Freaky Frank" picture there looks nothing like the male leads in major video games/movies. Are you kidding? Maybe you have a point with movies, in that we seem to have moved past the bodybuilder action heroes of the 80s/90s, but video games have majorly muscular dudes. The Batman games, God of War, Gears of War, any fighting game, etc.
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Oct 17, 2016 14:00
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I was thinking of games like Uncharted, Overwatch, Infamous, Assassin's Creed, etc. You're right that there are some games with very muscular dudes, but they seem outnumbered by normal-sized (but usually very fit-looking) guys. http://www.gamesradar.com/new-games-2016/ The games on this list that appear to have a male lead mostly have them normal-sized: Hitman, Zelda, Deus Ex, Ghost Recon, Uncharted, Quantum Break, Dishonored, FFXV, Homefront. The ones where they're super muscular would be Gears, Doom, Crackdown, and possibly Lawbreakers (although it looks like Lawbreakers doesn't really have a 'lead' and there's a mix of body types for men).
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Oct 17, 2016 14:39
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WampaLord posted:Are you kidding? Maybe you have a point with movies, in that we seem to have moved past the bodybuilder action heroes of the 80s/90s We have moved from 80s body builders where the body builders were constrained by having to have actual physical human bodies to an even more nightmare world where a lot of the popular action movies use suits and CGI to literally give actors unreal musculature that don't exist.
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Oct 17, 2016 15:40
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AARO posted:You're definitely right, it's 100% regional, but I think this thread has established that being afraid of changing in front of each other is a widespread phenomenon in modern America. This fear doesn't seem to have existed a few decades ago. So we are still trying to figure out what caused the cultural shift that left many or most of us afraid of nudity while we were not previously afraid of this. Have we actually established that? I mean I believe a lot of the people 50 years ago were also afraid of changing in front of each other, but the rules at the time were simply a lot more rigid about doing it anyway. And as I pointed out, there were a lot more people who simply never went to high school or middle school at all, or if they did they dropped out quite early. So even if they were afraid of doing changing in front of other people, it wouldn't come up. Plus society used to be way more rigid about what you had to actually wear in public. One can hardly say people were "less afraid of nudity" in times where it was expected that men would be wearing long sleeved shirts and pants all the time with a hat, or where women were expected to wear super long dresses and barely show their arms or chests in comparison to modern acceptable clothing for school/work.
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Oct 17, 2016 15:53
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Maybe this is a stupid question, but where do you change in gyms if not out in the open? Every gym I've ever been in was dudes changing out in the open. The showers were open in cheap places but you'd get stalls in more expensive ones. Younger guys generally just turn towards their locker and change but old men will just wander about talking to eachother in the nude. Generally a towel or nothing in the sauna, which was again mostly old dudes. It's no naked swimming, but gyms have always seemed to me a place where its societally acceptable to be naked around strangers (of the same sex).
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Oct 17, 2016 21:55
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