Dec. 22nd, 2008

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On [livejournal.com profile] metafandom there's a rather flawed but still interesting post The Female Gaze (NSFW! Contains porn of guys) In the comments there's a link to [livejournal.com profile] men_in_full (SFW) which celebrates overweight men.

Looking at that I thought "Well that's fine I guess though there's plenty of positive images of overweight men getting hot chicks in romantic comedies etc". But thinking about it, the goal there is to give men someone to relate to, there's never any sense that the audience is expected to find the man attractive(*). You do sometimes have "female gaze" scenes(**) where the man's body is shown to be attractive but in such cases the man is pretty much always fairly conventionally attractive: 25-40, well built, not-too-skinny-or-fat etc.

I mean personally I find it all a bit hard to judge since my taste in men is very specific so most "attractive" guys don't do much for me anyway, but I do think about men's body image issues sometimes. I get the feeling the pressure not to be fat isn't anywhere near as intense (though it definitely still exists, especially once you get above "a little chubby") but the pressure not to be too thin/unmuscled is more intense.

Anyway, not very deep thoughts, but thought I'd get them down before I forget.

EDIT: ithiliana's post got me thinking some more, and as [livejournal.com profile] outfox ppints out, it's all m/m which is obviously only a subset of what women find attractive. That guy is making a m/m for women magazine so that makes sense in this context, but I think it would also be interesting to explore the female/male POV on m/f and f/f.

(*)The fact that the hot chick is supposed to is a whole nother thing. Obviously (good) women just care about personality. And anyway, female character's motivations don't have to make any sense, they just exist as a male fantasy *mutters*
(**)Plus the odd "gay man's gaze" in Queer as Folk etc, which has different rules afaict. I'm not sure which was in "Casino Royale" :)
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For those who saw him on Saturday or noticed me mentioning it in the comments of my last post: [livejournal.com profile] distantcam twisted his ankle and scraped his (other) knee pretty badly on Saturday while helping [livejournal.com profile] firvulag move. (He apparently wasn't much help from that point)

Anyway, it was very sore, he was stuck in bed all of yesterday, but it's a lot better today and he thinks by tomorrow he'll be basically better and up to going out (which is good, because we need groceries)

And that is all!

(nb the laziness I refer to is not doing his own post, he's allowed to lie around in bed when it hurts to walk :))

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