Every Friday one of my friends posts a picture of a semi-naked man on Facebook. Sometimes I click on the image to take a closer look, but mostly I don’t. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a well-defined six pack or glistening glutes as much as the next girl, but I prefer these things up close and personal. If I can’t touch it or taste it, I’m not that interested.

Pixels or ink are all very well, but they’re not particularly erotically engaging. Let’s put it this way – there may be much to admire, but pictures don’t get a visceral reaction from me. I wondered if I was the only one who felt this way so I decided to ask around and get some opinions.
Do women appreciate pictures of hot men? In a word: yes. At least that’s what my snap-poll found. But for the most part our appreciation is aesthetic, not sexual. Ask a woman and chances are she will tell you that finding a man attractive and wanting to have sex with him are two different things. While there may be a correlation between a man’s looks and our desire for him it’s not direct cause-and-effect.
Consider the histories of Playboy and Playgirl magazines. While Playboy was a cultural force that reshaped sexual attitudes in America and beyond, Playgirl magazine was not – and that’s despite being founded smack-bang in the middle of the feminist revolution that was redefining the sexual mores of women across the developed world.
Even if we like and appreciate photographs of naked male flesh, on the whole, women seem unwilling to spend money on them. In fact, many of the women I asked claimed that if anything, naked photos were a turn-off. The reason – they look a bit gay. Not in the pejorative sense of the word – in the homosexual one.
There is, of course, a big market for magazines and websites featuring hot naked men, and yes, it’s mostly for other men. Even Playgirl, which is basically like Cosmo with pecs and penises, would have died years ago if it wasn’t for the fact that around a third of its readers are gay men.
The British writer and cultural commentator Mark Simpson coined the word ‘sporno’ to describe the gay porn aesthetic guiding photographs of certain sports stars. Think of Freddie Ljungberg’s advert for Calvin Klein or David Beckham’s for Armani. These adverts are designed not so much with female viewers in mind as with male.
The Paris rugby team Stade Français does the best example of sporno – or possibly the worst, depending on your point of view. Since 2001, they have been producing a calendar and DVD called Dieux du Stade (Gods of the Stadium). These photos don’t subtly suggest homoeroticism – they
scream it.
Nothing wrong with pictures of well-oiled men tackling one another in the buff, of course, but they are unlikely to appeal to women. Straight women and gay men may have the same sexual object – men – in mind, but our sexual responses are not the same. Like everything else in life, when it comes to erotic photography, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
There’s a good reason for the homoerotic aspects of much nude male photography – money. Publishers, manufacturers and advertisers try to appeal to the widest possible market and spending patterns differ depending on our age, sex,
race, class, sexual orientation or family status.
Marketing analysis from America shows that married women with children make the major household purchasing decisions, such as what car, appliances, health insurance, clothing and food the family needs. They don’t, or can’t afford to, spend on luxury goods while childless professional gay men can. Underpants are a necessity; designer briefs are not. Calendars are useful; semi-naked ones are inappropriate around children. Depending on what you’re selling, it is often the case that there is far more money to be made from gay men than from straight women.
It would appear that photos don’t do it for most women, at least not in the same way centrefolds, Page three girls and erotic pictures supposedly work for men. The question is ‘why?’.
The common sense answer is that, sexually speaking, women are just not as visually driven as men. While men respond to looks, women want something more – substance, intelligence, personality or the all-important good sense of humour.
Vicky summed it up nicely: “Sexy for me is a combination of aesthetics, personality and intellect. A man can be sexy because of his outlook on life, his intellect or his kindness. Of course if he looks stunning, all the better. So from an erotic photos point of view, I’d look at a semi-naked man and think ‘nice’ but I won’t think sex, or sexy, nor would I get randy about a photo.”
Common sense isn’t exactly what you’d call irrefutable proof though and scientific studies suggest that things are a whole lot more complex than we might have supposed. In fact, it seems that women are turned on by visual stimuli – the problem is we just don’t know it.
A while back, scientists in Canada checked the reactions of men and women to various kinds of pictures and films to see what actually turns us on. Unsurprisingly, straight men liked watching straight porn and most enjoyed seeing some girl-on-girl action too. Heterosexual women, on the other hand, reacted to just about everything – straight sex, gay sex, lesbian sex and even monkey sex!
If you think that’s surprising,
read on...
What men said they liked and what caused a physical reaction – an erection – lined up pretty closely; what women said they liked and what they actually responded to – measured by blood flow to the vagina – didn’t match at all. For the most part, women said they enjoyed sex scenes with a romantic or relationship context, but their bodies told a different story.
The boffins’ best guess as to why is socialisation. Boys and girls are raised, or socialised, differently, by their parents, teachers and society at large. As a consequence, men and women are supposed to have different sexual standards, expectations and ideals. From the time we are girls we hear that men are pigs who will have sex with anyone given half a chance, but that women are more discerning than that. It would seem that thousands of years of repressing our natural desires means that many of us are no longer in touch with them.
These days we tend to think that men have stronger sex drives than women, but it wasn’t always so. Some of the earliest medieval religious writings in English deal with sex and all of them blame women for being far too carnal – unlike men, who had their minds set on loftier topics. Apparently.
If monkey sex really does turn us on, you have to wonder – maybe they had a point.