#equal opportunity objectification

[ifitsbritishimprobablyafan]

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

[gogoartqueen]

[hands-of-blue]

So I think one of my favourite things about Girl Genius

is the equal opportunities objectification

Like, ok, Agatha gets loads of scenes in her underwear (which isn't that revealing but it's the principle of the thing) and Zeetha's armour and underwear scenes are kind of ott even if they are pretty much in character

but

Gil and Tarvek's si vales valeo scene is naked, Tarvek is wearing nothing but a sheet for half the castle scenes, Gil is naked at Gkika's, and they both get a wonderful ridiculous number of shirtless scenes for considerable lengths of time

I think basically it's just that Phil Foglio really really really loves drawing half-dressed attractive people

[notsosilentsister]

Equal Opportunity Objectification

The average dudebro's hate for less bulky masculine objects of female desire is a subject that holds endless fascination for me. On more than one occasion I've heard conspiracy theories that no girl could genuinely prefer the leaner, more graceful, more boyish types; those fangirls are all just brainwashed by some nefarious media plot to undermine true masculinity.

I think there are two factors at play here.

1) Unsettling focus on youth. That's the one I actually kinda get. I would also prefer any hypothetical SO to have celebrity crushes on women rather than girls. Maybe because youth has also a connotation of weakness, and what does it mean if my SO's attracted to that? Or maybe because whatever he admires in a woman might be something I could strive for myself, but I'll never be a girl again.

Alas, whenever I venture that theory, I immediately get shot down, because it's clearly absurd to consider that some women might just be attracted to signifiers of youth for the same reasons some men are (the charms of the fresh-faced ingenue, evoking a sense of protectiveness; a lack of jadedness, a sense of renewal by association); obviously it's just because those girls can't handle real masculinity. (And in a way that's true - some people are attracted to boys, because they feel they couldn't handle grown up men, just as some people are attracted to girls, because they can't handle grown-up women. Which, if those people in question are rather young themselves - and with the typical boygroup fangirl that's usually the case - makes perfect sense and should be applauded rather than mocked. Sometimes an obsession with youth is merely age appropriate.*)

(*Cue all the evo-psych enthusiasts falling over themselves to explain to me why it's perfectly natural for men to be attracted to youth and completely non-sensical for women, because procreation or something. Never mind that potency also declines with age and younger guys just last longer.**

**Which admittedly can be a bug rather than a feature if they're not particuarly skilled yet; but then again, you might expect the young buck to be more trainable; at least he won't have much to unlearn yet, which is often the hardest part of the battle, or so I've been told.)

2) Ideological refusal to acknowledge that there might be a difference between male power fantasies and female sex fantasies (Lift weights to impress your bros, switch to cardio to please the girls; you don't like that there's a trade-off all of a sudden? How inconvenient. I mean it's not like appealing to the male gaze can come with homo-social penalities for girls) and inability to handle the cognitive disonance resulting from any evidence that some women simply don't want what everyone has been saying that they're supposed to want. Yeah, no sympathy for that.

[agirlneedsgoals]

urbanfae: http://www.tencentticker.com/projectrooftop/2012/09/28/she-designhe-design-joe-phillips-white-queen-and-starfire/

Me: Male!WQ should totally wear that but male!SF just looks like a stripper.

urbanfae: Yes, to both. Tho to be fair, so does female!SF.

Me: Well, yes. But my POINT is, unf, White King.

[whenatbrown]

when the crew boys walk by

[isagrimorie]

For all of Smallville's faults one of the things I really about it is that most of the time it is the guys who have to take their shirts off, get manhandled and posed. I can't count the number of times Clark, Lex and Oliver walked around without a shirt on or chained up.

[leftboob-enthusiast]

TITS AND ASS AND DICK AND ABS

AW YEAH