‘Damn,Channing Tatum can move!’: Women’s accounts of men’s bodies and objectification in post-feminist times

Abstract

This paper explores how women think about men’s bodies as objects of desire. It reports on one part of a larger qualitative study on men’s bodywork practices in contemporary Australia. Drawing on material from three focus groups with 24 Australian women of varying ages, sexual orientations and backgrounds, the paper considers how women experience, understand and reflect on their desire for men and men’s bodies. It also explores themes such as the connection women draw between what a man’s body looks like and what it can do, how attraction is experienced, the meaning making women engage in as they think about men and men’s bodies, and the broader politics of sexuality and objectification that inform their perceptions and ideas. These experiences are set against ideas in post-feminist thinking on women’s sexual desire and debates on their sexual empowerment. The paper argues that these women are grappling with tensions between their personal experiences of sexual objectification and a feminist ethics relating to their active and reflexive projects of sexuality.

Keywords

Sexuality bodies desire post-feminism objectification

Introduction

‘39 Hot Guys Who'll Make You Pregnant Without Even Touching You: You’re Welcome.’

Buzzfeed, 2016, Jenna Guillaume

In 2001, an early article on what has since become its own field of inquiry examined the occurrence of muscular images of men in Playgirl magazine, finding that in over three decades men’s bodies had increased in muscle size and mass (Leit et al., 2001). Since then, further research has explored the potential for men, in particular heterosexual men, to be seen as erotic and desirable, and as sex objects for the viewing pleasure of women rather than only as sexual subjects. As Hakim (2018) noted, there has been an increased representation of men’s bodies in the media, in particular of the ‘hot’, presumed heterosexual, muscular man. With the advent of films such as Magic Mike (2012) and celebrity worship of male actors with idealised muscular bodies, the male body as an object of desire and attraction for women has become increasingly visible.

The visibility of men’s muscular bodies is accompanied by a wider, popular, post-feminist narrative on female (presumed hetero)sexual empowerment. Here, increased equality between the sexes is understood to extend to the opportunity for women to objectify the male body in much the same way that men have traditionally been understood to objectify the female body. This, of course, overlooks the ways in which women have taken pleasure in the bodies of men in the past, but also suggests that objectification composes a set of practices that can be coherently and meaningfully ‘taken up’, understood to operate across the gender divide, and look the same for women as for men.

Yet, there is limited research evaluating the experiences of women as they engage with the increasing visibility of men’s sexual bodies. Psychological and sociological analyses of women’s attraction to men’s bodies have generally focused on measuring or cataloguing women’s preferences for different male body types or muscularity (Sell et al., 2017). Such research suggests that men with ‘overly’ muscular bodies are viewed unfavourably by most women (Dixson et al., 2014; Zarzycki et al., 2018). In their methodologies, such studies enact the object-body as the natural and asocial basis on which attraction and attractiveness rest. However, beyond specific preferences for any particular body type, how do women experience and think about the opportunity to gaze upon and interact with men whose bodies are culturally available and on display as ‘sex objects’? How do the feminist politics encapsulated in the concept of ‘sexual objectification’ inform and shape women’s interpretations of the opportunity to ‘gaze upon’ and ‘consume’ men’s bodies as sex objects, that is, as things that exist for women’s pleasure? Moreover, what might such reflections tell us about the contemporary experiences of sexuality and desire for Australian women in so-called post-feminist times?

Drawing on material from focus groups with Australian women of varying ages and backgrounds, this paper analyses how these women described and interpreted the opportunity to gaze upon and enjoy the sexual display of male bodies, and on their interactions with men subject to new (or at least increasingly familiar) expectations about the power of women in sexual and intimate life.

Empowerment, post-feminism and women’s sexuality

In the 1970s and 1980s, popular and influential feminist academic discourse critiqued the objectification of women’s bodies as symptomatic of and central to the maintenance of men’s power over women (Dworkin, 1981; Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988; MacKinnon, 1987). This has been the dominant framework for decades now, with objectification configured principally as the negative and harmful rendering of women to the status of object or thing (Cahill, 2012). Yet, other feminist scholars have been critical of the tendency to frame heterosexual women’s bodies as constructed only for the consumption of men (Cahill, 2012; Valverde, 1989). Valverde (1989: 237) provided a thorough critique of Mackinnon’s work on sexual objectification, in particular, questioning the extent to which ‘patriarchal relations determine our sexual fantasies and practices, and to what extent can we as individuals develop “free” sexuality?’ Valverde argued that MacKinnon’s theorisation of the objectifying male gaze largely ignored female sexual desire, resulting in a denial of the possibility that women might reclaim sexuality that lies outside male control.

In the mid-2000s, sexual objectification and questions of sexism were being addressed through feminist and public debates on the ‘sexualisation’ of women and young girls. These debates precipitated feminist scholarship critiquing hypodermic models of the unilateral power of the media as well as ‘post-feminist’ pronouncements on women’s sexual empowerment (Gill 2008, 2012, 2016). These latter pronouncements are understood to reflect the incorporation of the recent feminist objectification critiques, with women regarded as authors of their own objectification through the neoliberal construction of beauty practices as freely chosen and empowering investments in self-improvement and self-worth (Evans and Riley, 2015; Gill, 2008; Gill and Orgad, 2015). Such discourses are part of a ‘technology of sexiness’, producing an ‘up for it’ femininity (Evans et al., 2010: 115) through which sexual adventurousness and confidence have become ‘a compulsory part of normative, heterosexy, young female subjectivity’ (Gill, 2012: 746).

Noting the significance of objectification as a concept for feminist politics, Cahill (2012) asks why being a passive recipient of an active gaze is fundamentally dehumanising. She is critical of feminist accounts of objectification that unwittingly reproduce a notion of the self as disembodied, noting that such ways of thinking ‘cannot account for the pleasure that can be derived from being treated as a body, and thus make ethically problematic that which in fact appropriately enhances a flourishing sense of self’ (2012: 32). Other scholars have pointed to the contemporary visibility of feminist activism and a resurgence of feminist discourse and debate in feminist-driven media, in particular on issues of sexual objectification and questions of agency (Lumby, 2011; Whelehan, 2010). These debates accompany increased opportunities for women to gaze and reflect on men’s bodies as sites for an expression of their own sexual desires and empowerment, sometimes framed by the notion of a ‘female gaze’.

The ‘female gaze’

Feminist and sociological work has explored the mediatisation and marketisation of sexualised male bodies (see Waling et al., 2018, for a review) and has to a lesser extent described women’s increased sexual autonomy in relation to the sexualisation of the male body. This includes research exploring the sexualised display of male bodies in cinema, the phenomenon of male strip shows for female audiences, women’s use of pornography, and their participation in ‘fandom’ cultures.

Early accounts of men’s bodies in advertising (e.g. Bordo, 1999; Mort, 1988; Simpson, 1994) noted the emergence of a heavily stylised and muscular male body ideal. Simpson’s (1994) essay on the ‘metrosexual’ highlighted a new male media figure reflecting opportunities for men to use the kinds of products that were once exclusively the domain of women, suggesting a greater concern among men with their own sexual attractiveness and noting an indebtedness to gay men’s earlier uptake of such practices. Bordo (1999) critiques the notion that such shifts were emblematic of gender equality, arguing that advertisements featuring exposed male bodies drew on standard and conventional notions of masculinity equating muscularity with strength and power. In addition, rather than being ‘passive’, male models were posed in active confrontational stances undermining any sense of being feminised or reduced to the status of objects. A critical analysis of the representation of men’s bodies in men’s magazines demonstrates an increasing focus on the sexualisation of men’s bodies, and what this means for reimagining understandings of male sexuality (Waling, 2018, Forthcoming).

The erotic male body has long been analysed in work on cinema (Dyer, 1986; Jeffords, 1994; Tasker, 1993). Recently, Smith (2002) argued that such scholarship focuses on the male body in film becoming the object of the gaze largely through a queer lens as the visibility of gay men increased in society. This queer lens provided a longstanding framework for discussion of looking on such men’s bodies and, for a time, it foregrounded the gaze on them from both women and non-homosexual men. It also relieved the male actors of any direct responsibility for being gazed upon, even though it rendered the eroticised male body suspicious of underlying or foundational homosexuality. Smith (2002: 83) recommended an alternative to this queered gaze by exploring women’s sexual interests in male strippers who perform live for female audiences, e.g. The Chippendales, who ‘are not offering a version of sexuality freed from gender inequalities but they perform male sexuality as fun, expressive and, crucially, desirous of women’s pleasure and approval’. She suggested that male strippers’ erotic performances, their athleticism and skill – not just their bodies – connote male desire and desirability. However, the extent to which male stripping facilitates an empowered female gaze has been questioned in light of the fact that women’s experiences of looking at men’s bodies in such places are highly regulated and constrained (Worsick-Correa and Joseph, 2008). Female sexuality is still surveilled and controlled (Pilcher, 2009, 2011), and the women in these spaces remain ‘objects’ for the male strippers (Waling 2018, Forthcoming). There is no simple role reversal here.

Women’s use of pornography has also been of interest to scholars keen to challenge narrow critiques of female sexuality and of pornography as used solely by men. This research has demonstrated the tensions women experience negotiating the heterosexist features of mainstream heterosexual pornography (Marques, 2018, 2019). For instance, Ciclitira (2004) found that women struggled to reconcile feminist anti-pornography discourses with the pleasure of viewing pornography. More recently, Neville (2015, 2018a) analysed women’s use of gay male pornography, finding that many reported frustrations with heterosexual pornography and its exploitative, abusive and male-orientated perspective, and its lack of exploration of female pleasure. Some participants in Neville’s study preferred male–male sex as they felt attracted to the male bodies on display and could identify with either the ‘top’ (insertive) or ‘bottom (receptive) partner in scenes of intercourse. Neville concluded that women play with the power of their own gaze, their sexual orientation and their gender identification when watching male–male pornography in ways they cannot do in male–female pornography because male–male pornography is less riven with gendered issues of power and exploitation. In the same way, ‘fandom culture’ or ‘slash fiction’, a form of online erotic fiction, explores sexual relationships between same-sex characters from television shows, books, comics and movies. Fandom culture comprises mostly younger women, whose interest is configured as a way either to avoid adult female (hetero)sexuality (Neville, 2015, 2018b) or to reject socially mandated gender roles (Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2010). Gazing on men’s bodies and writing about and illustrating them as erotic fiction provide some women with a space in which to construct men as sex objects for their own erotic consumption.

However, beyond advertising, cinema, pornography, stripping and slash fiction, relatively little has been said about the quotidian ways in which women might actively experience the opportunity to gaze upon the sexualised male body or interact with men who view themselves as subject to any such female sexual gaze. Aside from measuring women’s attraction to men’s bodies (e.g. Sell et al., 2017), it is timely to ask how women think about, reflect on and engage with the increased visibility of male bodies as ‘sex objects’. How do women negotiate feminist discourses on the ethics of the ‘gaze’ as a form of control and dehumanisation of a material subject, post-feminist discourses on gender equality and ‘equal-opportunity objectification’, and men who are themselves reflecting on the body as a site of female sexual attention?

Methodology

This paper emerges from a study analysing the implications for broader, gendered social relations of shifts in the apparent possibilities for men to work upon and relate to the body as an aesthetic and erotic object. This main study involved interviews with Australian men on their bodywork practices. In addition to an exploration of the health, self-improvement, cosmetic and exercise repertoires increasingly available to Australian men, we also conducted focus group discussions with 24 Australian women to explore how they made sense of and relate to men engaged in such bodywork. This paper focuses specifically on these focus group discussions. We chose focus group discussions as a method because these would allow the participants to interact and discuss relevant issues with each other, tell stories and offer a range of views on the research topic, and thereby build on each other’s ideas and conversations (Plummer, 2017). Such discussions are unique in that they allow participants to hear and respond to a range of perspectives, generating ideas that might not be revealed in one-to-one interviews. While the focus group discussion was developed as a somewhat ‘light’ research tool for market research – still a major use – and has become popular in social research, it can have unexpected strengths. For example, focus groups have also been noted to be productive settings for doing sensitive research on issues of sex and sexuality (Frith, 2000), particularly when fostered through careful group leadership and good planning. As a ‘collaborative performance’ (Montell, 1999), focus group discussions become shared productions of new ideas and thoughts at the same time as they open possibilities for exploring emerging forms of social and political resistance. It is this performative aspect of the method that is important in assessing its value and contribution and was especially generative in our research in light of the tensions in some of the women’s efforts to navigate feminist ethics of desire and sexuality. These tensions are evident in the quotations provided in later sections of this paper. We want to acknowledge the part played by the research method itself in developing these women’s ongoing personal and collective engagement with debates on women’s desire, the ‘problem of men’, and the broader fields of gender and sexuality.

Data collection

Recruitment was undertaken via social media, paid advertising and informal networks. Potential participants were directed to a Wordpress website that described the project and provided an online form to use to contact the research team. Participants who contacted the research team were sent an explanatory statement and pre-screening questionnaire that asked postcode, age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and relationship status. Eligibility criteria included: residing in Melbourne; being between 18 and 60 years of age; identifying as female; and having (or having had) sexual attraction to men. This pre-screening questionnaire was also used to diversify the sample and ensure that all participants were able to attend a focus group discussion in person. Ethics approval was provided by La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee #S15/23.

Each focus group lasted approximately two hours. AW facilitated the focus groups with the support of a female colleague who took notes during each session. Participants were issued a nametag with a number to support the note-taking for later transcript verification. Female facilitators were chosen to create a sense of solidarity and a safe space for the women involved. Facilitators briefly shared their own experiences of attraction to men’s bodies to help start the discussion. A range of more and less sexualised images of men’s bodies (in terms of body size and shape, ethnicity, transgender and cisgender) were projected in a PowerPoint presentation. Such images were used to assist the discussion but were not the basis of specific questions posed by the facilitator during the focus groups. Participants were then asked six key questions to prompt the discussion:

Men’s bodies: do you care what they look like?

What do you think about men’s grooming and fashion?

Do you think men want to be looked at?

Do you think men’s greater interest (or lack thereof) in their own bodies affects their relationships with women?

Do you think pornography affects how men view their own bodies?

Do you think the extent to which men care about their bodies affects sex with women?

In this paper, we focus specifically on the questions, ‘Men’s bodies: do you care what they look like?’ and ‘Do you think men’s greater interest (or lack thereof) in their own bodies affects their relationships with women?’ Focus groups were audio-recorded, then professionally transcribed and verified for accuracy.

Participants

The sample included women from various ethnic and class backgrounds, occupations, relationship types and sexual orientations. Table 1 summarises the demographic characteristics of the participants.

Table 1.

Demographic characteristics of participants (n = 24).

Demographic characteristic	No.
Sexual identity
Heterosexual/Straight	14
Bisexual	3
Heteroflexible (mostly straight etc.)	4
Pansexual	1
Unsure	1
Did not say	1
Age
18–25	2
26–30	6
31–35	7
36–40	5
41–45	2
46–50	1
50+	1
Suburbs
Eastern suburbs	6
Inner city	2
Northern suburbs	9
Southeastern suburbs	2
Western suburbs	4
Regional Victoria	1
Ethnicity^a
Anglo-Celtic Australian	16
Brazilian	1
Chinese	2
Irish	5
Italian	1
Maori	1
Northern European	1
Portuguese	1
Russian	1
South African	1
Unknown	1
Relationship status
In a relationship	19
Single	5
Occupation
Clerical/Administrator	2
Community and personal services	4
Managers	2
Professional	8
Sales worker	1
Student	3
Technicians/Trades	3
Homemaker	1
Recruitment
Radio	1
Email	4
Facebook	12
Friend/Snowball	6

Numbers add to more than 24 because some participants occupy more than one ethnicity/cultural heritage.

Of the 24 women, 14 identified as straight/heterosexual, 7 were aged between 31 and 35 years, and 19 were in a relationship. Most of the women were well educated with many having completed at least an undergraduate university education. Most readily engaged with popular feminist discourses, either through the work they did or in their social lives, e.g. using social media. As such, the perspectives of these women were in many ways already framed by feminist ideas on sexuality and other aspects of social life. While we had not deliberately recruited participants who saw themselves as feminists, studies on gender and sexuality might be more likely to attract participants involved in social movements such as feminism (Strassberg and Lowe, 1995).

Analysis

Analysis for the present article was guided by the following question: in the context of the increasing visibility of men’s naked, athletic or explicitly sexualised bodies, how is ‘female sexuality’ being articulated by women negotiating mainstream contemporary feminist accounts of objectification, and post-feminist discourses inviting them to ‘objectify’ men as an aspect of gender equality? To answer this question, we drew on Foucauldian discourse analysis. From a Foucauldian perspective, discourses enable and constrain what can be thought, said and done, and legitimise existing power relations and social assemblages by privileging particular versions of social reality (Burman and Parker, 1993; Willig, 2013). A Foucauldian discourse analysis enables a questioning of the relationship between how individuals think and feel, the practices they engage in and the social relations within which their experience is located (Willig, 2013). This approach exposes the availability of discursive resources and the implications of their use. Analysis began with AW completing a research diary noting preliminary thoughts on each focus group. Transcripts were read by the research team, and several team meetings took place to discuss initial impressions of the data and strategies for analysis. The transcripts were then coded using NVivo software and its thematic analysis procedures (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Coding involved annotations on the transcripts themselves and added memos with comments and reflections. A key theme to emerge in the analysis was an apparent tension many participants revealed in articulating attraction to or desire for the bodies of men. This included discomfort with ‘treating’ men as objects, or ‘reducing’ them to their bodies. We show how women both experienced and sought to ameliorate this ethical problem.

The women’s accounts of men’s bodies and looking at them

The women engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of men’s bodies and their reactions to them. We shall present these in the following themes: what a body looks like and what it can do; beyond the physical; relationship material; negotiating casual sex. Quotations from the participants will include brief descriptors in parentheses after the pseudonym assigned to each participant with age, sexual identity or orientation, and relationship status. The quotations refer to the images presented in the PowerPoint slides, as well as specific men in participants’ lives and men’s bodies more generally.

What a body looks like and what it can do

In describing the bodies of men whom they found attractive, the women in this study did not break men’s bodies down to individual parts, as is central to Dworkin’s and MacKinnon’s original theorisations of the male objectification of women. Rather, they tended to eulogise or perhaps euphemise the overall shape, movement, or action of men’s bodies, emphasising the contour and movement of a body as central to its sexual attractiveness. When they did talk about the parts of men’s bodies they found attractive (including chests, abdominals and bottoms), they revealed a desire to avoid any suggestion that they were treating a man only in terms of his individual parts:

Lauren (38, heterosexual, in a relationship): I like the general body line, like, I noticed the other day I had-I work in a home office and we had a guy delivering a package up and down the stairs directly towards me. And I did notice he had a great, like, just the general shape of his body … Even the shape of the arms and the line of the arms, like, aesthetically it was just really lovely to look at. And I looked a little too long because my husband noticed. But, yeah, I think it's really that line, especially with bums as well, it's just a lovely curve and the same with arms.

Lauren drew on language more often used to describe art – 'body line’, ‘a lovely curve’ – focusing more on the aesthetic of the man’s body. Nonetheless, she still noted a sexual attraction in having ‘looked too long’, at least as far as her husband was concerned.

Other women described body parts not usually sexualised as attractive:

Kylie (30, fluid/bisexual, in a relationship): I guess the thing that if I notice something that would turn me on, it would be something in particular, like, I like a really good nose. So, if someone’s got a really beautiful kind of Roman nose, I’m like, ‘Oh, look at that nose, it's a great nose’. Or, so, I think it's kind of contextual, and sort of much, like, runs at a deeper level, I guess.

Like Lauren, Kylie hinted at an aesthetic appreciation of the male body and noted an attraction to a body part not usually regarded as inherently sexual, recognising that, for her, there was more than just the look of the body, something ‘deeper’. The ethical dimensions of context and depth in this description of attractiveness point to the ways in which participants resisted the expectation that they should take pleasure in the abstraction of men’s bodies from wider fantasies about and discourses on masculinity and men’s attractiveness, while endorsing sexual conventions aligning sex in intimate relationships with greater social value.

This was reflected in the value women placed on evaluating the attractiveness of a man’s body according to what it could do, rather than just its appearance alone:

Kaitlyn (24, bisexual, single): I think hands are where you connect, like, someone connects to something else. And so, like, I can become fixated on somebody’s hands because it shows how they're interacting with the environment, or how they're interacting with my body as well. So, hands are, kind of, like, the edge of someone if that makes sense, like, that’s where they start touching and interacting with the rest of the world.

Elsa (33, mostly straight, single): That’s very poetic, the edge of someone.

Sylvia (34, heterosexual, in a relationship): Also, like, they touch things and they do things.

Kaitlyn: Mm, yeah, they do.

Harriet (29, pansexual, in a relationship): The extension of that, like, I don't know sometimes when people hold something, or they point to something, and now it just looks silly, but it's really hard to describe. So, I’m just trying to remember the last time I was perving at somebody’s hands, but-

Elsa: Well, the barista making you coffees, does he have nice wrist movement?

Harriet: Yeah, nice wrist movements, yeah, making the coffee, something about, like, this whole, sort of, forearm part, it's like the doing, yeah.

Elsa: And it shows competence and skill and, yeah, a lot of my sexiest memories are like hands just touching a shoulder or a neck, like just that.

In this exchange, the women saw hands as an extension of a man’s body, as active, and as something that spoke more broadly to some idea of who the man might be. For Elsa, hands were representative of competence and skill. In addition, Kaitlyn connected this attraction to her own body.

Later, Harriet offered a related comment on the film Magic Mike (2012), a film about a male strip club featuring Channing Tatum as ‘Mike’:

Harriet: … Magic Mike was fun, you know, if you're kind of having a bit of a drink, because he actually dances really good, his actual dance moves are really good.

Kaitlyn: He was a professional dancer.

Harriet: Yeah, such good dancing.

Sylvia: I haven’t seen the whole movie, but I have heard good things about it, and I have watched – something I was reading on the internet was like, blah, blah, blah, the pony dance from Magic Mike is an example of this. So, and it had a link, so, I was alright, well, so I can understand this thing that I’m reading I’d better go watch this YouTube video, and I was, like, damn, Channing Tatum can move!

Harriet: He can move.

Sylvia: Like, oh, my goodness!

‘Mike’ was eroticised for his good looks; but Harriet and Sylvia also noted that, while Tatum’s looks did not necessarily appeal to them, they nevertheless found his ability to dance very appealing. Thus, while taking ribald pleasure in the objectification of these men’s bodies, participants drew on more conventional ideas linking masculinity to extension and action, thereby avoiding treating men as just ‘things’.

Beyond the physical

There were times in the discussions when the focus shifted from men’s physical attributes to their intelligence, confidence and emotional capacity. During these moments, there was a privileging of the disembodied self over the physical body, particularly in the context of men as potential partners. For example, when discussing what women find attractive in men, Yu said:

Yu (19, unsure/pansexual, in a relationship): … for me, it's not the ripped body. There's not, like, a perfect amount of muscle, or a certain amount of tone, but confidence is a big part of it … Orlando Bloom and people like that, they have a confidence. And he’s not buff, not all the time. And you can be a bit overweight or not toned or you know a bit flabby or whatever, but if you're confident in yourself, that is something that’s attractive.

This was echoed by Kaitlyn (24, bisexual, single):

Yeah, if someone is-I agree with you on that-someone’s confident in their body and they project it that way, then I think that’s sexy no matter what shape or size they are. But I think it also depends on the context. It's, like, why am I looking at their body? Why am I-you know, is it because I want to have sex? Is it something I’m watching to get me off? What is the context that I’m using? It really makes a difference in terms of what, probably, I’d like to look at.

Some noted a preference more for emotional compatibility:

Scarlett (30, heterosexual, single): My main form of attraction comes from an emotional perspective first, not the physical attraction thing first. And I’ve only come to realise this recently, that my brain works differently to everybody else’s brain … I’d look at them and go, yeah, that’s aesthetically appealing to me, and I see that as appealing, but I don’t feel a sexual response from that. I get that from the emotional connection that I make with the person. And so, yeah, for me it's, sort of, I’m looking for the personality in the picture of their body and I’m not getting that necessarily from someone that posts a picture of their washboard abs.

This comment was offered in response to other women’s ideas on what they found physically attractive. In situating her attraction in emotionality, Scarlett thought of herself as unusual in needing that emotional connection. However, here there were echoes of a more conventional discourse of women’s greater ethical appreciation of sexuality as encompassing not just body parts but the whole person.

Others noted attraction to certain perceived attributes in men:

Elsa (33, mostly straight, single): I’m definitely attracted to men. I like men’s bodies, but the things that attract me to someone are usually the more subtle things, like, if they're wearing glasses I’m, like, ‘Oh, you're intellectual. I like you’. Or, you know, the way they smile. There's a couple of blokes at my work. One of them’s definitely traditionally handsome. The other one I don’t even know, but he’s just got a killer smile, and so I notice that. So, whenever I see him, I light up, he lights up, and I’m like ‘Oh, yay!’

Similarly:

Scarlett (30, heterosexual, single): On the assumption of being not necessarily intellectual, my preferences tend towards piano player fingers and really fine dextrous hands and stuff like that, and more that, like Tom Hiddleston, sort of, lithe strong figure as opposed to really built muscly figure. I’ve always tended towards that. And that sort of, I don't know for me implies intelligence and that, sort of, fine mind as well as fine dextrousness, and that, sort of, strong but not necessarily big at the same time.

These comments reflect thinking about men’s bodies metonymically, based on perceived notions of kinds of bodies being associated with certain practices, skills and personalities. They also illustrate the ways in which these women narrated attraction as more than a sexual response to the male body-as-object. While they took pleasure in the bodies of men, they more-or-less resisted the idea that sexual freedom was expressed in those bodies independent of the wider meanings, social conventions and ideologies about romance, intimacy, sex, sexuality and gender in which all bodies are made meaningful. In doing so, they variously fell back on gendered discourses to explain a female sexual response, framed themselves as deficient or unusual, or contested the notion that such a response was somehow more natural, essential, or human, and now available to women as an expression of gender equality with men. Rather, they sought to esteem more ethical ways of relating to the bodies of others based on the common-place notion that to treat someone as just a body was superficial, unethical or harmful.

Relationship material

Participants differentiated between the kinds of men they might sexually fantasise about, such as those visible in the public eye (e.g. in Magic Mike) and those they actively imagined or sought as romantic or relationship partners. Meaningful sexual attraction was framed by conventional ideas on sex and romance, often focused on connection and compatibility:

Yu (19, unsure/pansexual, in a relationship): I’m not sure if I have a preferential body type that I particularly like, but I guess if someone’s like super muscular, I don’t think they're like a douche bro or anything, but, like, I guess it gives me the impression that they really value fitness and stuff. So, that’s not really, particularly within my interests … because I have geeky interests I guess and, stereotypically, people who value fitness do not do geeky stuff.

Yu noted that a highly muscular body could indicate that a man’s interests might not be compatible with her own, a judgement she attributed to stereotypes of muscular men (‘douche bros’) rather than the practical reality of such a difference itself. Yet, she acknowledged the simplicity of such stereotypes, such as some of the images presented in the PowerPoint slides of muscular and fit men, at the same time as they legitimised her judgement.

Some women knew they wanted a more ‘average’ or ‘ordinary’ man, often described as having the ‘Dad bod’:

Harriet (29, pansexual, in a relationship): I really love that dad bods are in … there's this one picture of Leonardo DiCaprio and he’s got like, he’s shirtless, his top is off and he’s running in like some sort of green pasture. And he’s got, like, a water gun, and he’s just running there with reckless abandon, this cheeky grin on his face. And I just remember feeling like, wow, yeah, I want to be with Leonardo DiCaprio in France … but that’s the perfect body, you know, guys who are just kind of, like, funny and having fun and a little bit of a tummy and just like running around.

This valuing of ordinary, everyday, ‘normal’ men contrasted to a mistrust and negative stereotyping of men whose bodies were ‘too perfect’, such as those featured in magazines. Muscles were defined as forms of armour designed to put women at a disadvantage by concealing personality flaws. Men who took an interest in their bodies were thought to lack intelligence, be self-interested and, hence, selfish.

When these women did regard attractive, muscular men’s bodies as desirable, these were not necessarily the bodies they wanted in long-term relationship partners:

Gabriella (33, heterosexual, in a relationship): I think if I’m walking on the street and I see a guy who’s got a ‘muscletic’ [sic] body, so, lean muscles, I think I would say: ‘Wow, that’s really attractive’. But having said that, when I think about my own experiences of dating people, I’ve dated guys who are really thin, guys who were a bit overweight. So, for my personal relationship that didn’t really matter, but when I’m walking on the street and I see someone who is tall and seems to be, you know, muscly but not bulky, muscly in the sort of, you know, yeah, that person goes to the gym, that catches my attention more than a normal guy.

Similarly:

Elsa (33, mostly straight, single): I’ve been attracted to a very different range of people. Most of my ex-boyfriends have been, I guess-Dad bod actually does describe it reasonably well, like a little bit of weight, not super muscly. Some of them have gained muscle while we’ve been dating. Some of them have lost muscle while we’ve been dating. And it's never really worried me as long as they have actually hands, eyes and mouth, as long as they’ve got nice hands, like, I can look into their eyes and feel a connection. The rest of it isn’t super important.

These women experienced a tension between appreciating the physical aesthetic of the body and liking the whole person. They revealed the pull of men who are muscular and conventionally attractive. However, both had dated a ‘range’ of men and invoked an ethics of desire in their choice of partners that rehearsed the commonplace of ‘not judging a book by its cover’.

Other participants drew a strong distinction between ‘real’ and fantasy men. The latter were ‘muscular’ and ‘superhero’ men, i.e. defined in terms of physiques and as fantastic and unrealistic:

Jane (34, heterosexual, in a relationship): Yeah, I want my superman to be really big, like, all ripples and everything. But I think if I was married to someone that would feel a bit uncomfortable, like, I wasn’t keeping up my end of the bargain type thing.

Jane’s reflection on her own image and physique as part of a ‘bargain’ for an athletic and muscular man was revealing of the interrelatedness of desire. Another woman was quite direct about the relationship between her body image and sense of sexual subjectivity and whom she could desire:

Lydia (28, heterosexual, in a relationship): I feel that that’s part of my childhood, never even like considering a relationship with a hot attractive guy, because I’m just like: ‘No I’m the fat girl, it's never going to happen, don’t even bother’. So, I grew up with that sort of mentality going: ‘Oh, I’m not attracted to the playboy guy because I would never go for him and he would never go for me’. So, you know, just get rid of the Chippendale straight away.

Many participants spoke of how they felt about their own bodies in the process of talking about what they found attractive about the bodies of men. For Lydia, such beliefs were tied up in cultural notions of fatness as ugly and the idea that certain body types ‘go together’. At other times, participants talked about men’s bodies as indicators of lifestyle choices and/or personality traits, raising issues of compatibility. For many, ‘Dad bods’ spoke to less demanding standards of body comportment and of ‘being active without being obsessive’ about the body. Consequently, many regarded men who embodied their own sexual fantasies as unsuitable relationship material by being too preoccupied with sport, fitness or diet, and with themselves. Moreover, men’s work on their bodies could contribute to women’s anxieties about their own bodies. While women were concerned to gaze ethically on the bodies of men, men who courted the gaze of women were generally attributed with more agency than women typically have in the prevailing, populist critique of objectification. Whereas women may be thought ‘sluts’ for appearing excessively sexual or immodest, men could also be thought untrustworthy, excessive or vain. In other words, men were understood to maintain power over women even when evaluated in term of their bodies.

Negotiating casual sex

Despite these comments about confidence, personality and movement, participants thought to enjoy a man’s body, just as a body, independent of his other characteristics, could be valid and acceptable in the context of casual sex. This idea was raised with some uncertainty, but it opened possibilities for transgressing the conventions of women in sexual relations with men:

Kylie (30, fluid/bisexual, in a relationship): You don’t have to answer this question because it's incredibly personal, but if someone else wants to answer it … Because I was just thinking about ‘Grindr’ [a geosocial networking and online dating application geared largely towards gay men] where like men just post their penises and then it's just, like, yeah, I’m on my way, and women are, like, mm, no, I think I need to go out with someone that’s a bit more deep and meaningful from this photo. I’m not sensing it. And then I was wondering if you were just, like, I just need a pick up right now, if you saw a washboard stomach, would you just be, like, yeah, I’m going to tap that in about half an hour?

Here, Kylie reifies and juxtaposes an unrestrained (gay) male sexuality with normative ideas about female sexuality, and questions conventional gendered expectations, given the context in which online technologies make visible and available the bodies of prospective male sex partners. In gendering the question according to these oppositions, Kylie reveals the ongoing salience of norms of female sexual performance and propriety, yet gestures to the space for female sexual desire as legitimate beyond an emotional or romantic connection.

Some women described relationships and sexual experiences with men chosen purely on looks, yet these were described as shallow, superficial or ‘only’ sexual:

Jane (34, heterosexual, in a relationship): I’ve had one boyfriend who was like, massive, perfect. He was a rock climber and just always in the gym. And I’m, like, literally, I’d show him off to people. I’d be, like, take your shirt off and show the girls. He was amazing. It wasn’t a serious relationship; it was very shallow, very shallow. And, you know, we had what we wanted out of it, but, God, it was vain, like really gross, unappealing.

Lauren (38, heterosexual, in a relationship): Did you ever think about having a long-term relationship with him?

Jane: No, no way, he fulfilled a certain role and, yeah, fun.

Abigail (45, heterosexual, in a relationship): The ‘shut up and fuck me’ role.

The visceral superficiality of that relationship was readily recognised by these women, ascribing a role to the man in question on the basis of his appearance and sexual performance, but limited in (hetero)normative relationship terms to a bit of ‘fun’. Others took this possibility a little further:

Gabriella (33, heterosexual, in a relationship): Obviously, I’m pre-the Tinder thing. I’m thinking about the times I used to travel, go to hostels and, you know, meet people from all over the world. Like, the first thing I’d be attracted to, which was the case with my husband, is that he was good looking to me, or what I found good looking. So, he was tall, he was tanned because we were both travelling, and for just to have a bit of fun, yeah. I wasn’t going to think whether he knows about politics or things I’m interested in. I just want to go and see someone hot and what we’ve been conditioned to think is hot is someone who is tall, who is muscly enough, and who’s got glowing skin. And he ticked all of the boxes … I’ve dated people of all shapes and forms. But if I’m going out and I just want to have a bit of fun. Whatever, I feel [is] beautiful and beautiful here [is] what society has taught me to be beautiful, is the first thing that I’m going to be attracted to.

‘Going out … to have a bit of fun’ or travelling permits an exception to the normal rules governing ethical attraction. Being attracted to someone ‘hot’, ‘tall’ and ‘muscly’ is described as inauthentic, yet a predictable response to ‘social’ conditioning. Like Jane, Gabriella diminishes the value of such an attraction, while setting parameters to those times and settings when it might be acceptable to enjoy such pleasures (even though she met her own husband under such conditions). The implication that social forces shape (or perhaps distort) ideals of attractiveness is framed in such a way as to explain how attraction and desire are formed in those who gaze and take pleasure in the other-as-object. Here objectification becomes acceptable and ethical due to the context and nature of the interaction, which is presumed to entail reciprocity in objectification. Another participant highlighted context, suggesting some things are permissible in certain spaces:

Harriet (29, pansexual, in a relationship): Yeah, depends on the context … if it's someone that I wanted to, sort of, be, like, a regular fuck buddy, then I’d want someone who is a bit humble, on my sort of same level, you know good days, bad days, we’re just two human beings hanging out. If I perceive them to, sort of, have a lot of confidence, maybe back away, like, maybe one time and then back away. Maybe I’m wrong.

These participants invoked discourses that allow women’s sexual desire for and attraction to men’s bodies without an emotional and non-physical connection as legitimate in certain circumstances, e.g. for a one-time encounter, or when there is a reciprocity of intention such as when travelling. In these comments, participants described men’s bodies as objects for sexual pleasure only. Yet, they also registered some unease: Kylie sought some reassurance from other participants; Jane justified herself because they ‘both had what they wanted out of it’, i.e. he too knew the deal; Gabriella added the rider that she has also dated all shapes and forms; Harriet sometimes limited casual sex to ‘maybe one time’ just in case. These examples demonstrate the ways in which women can express desire for men’s bodies outside a heteronormative, traditionally female and romantic framing, yet exemplify a tension in negotiating sexual attraction and desire in a climate where to objectify another sexually, or to reduce someone to the status of a sexual body, is considered potentially unethical and harmful. However, given the agency attributed to men who court any female gaze, questions about the ethical treatment of men’s bodies were shaped by the broader difficulty and ambivalence these women expressed in being seen to objectify another at all. In practice, the act of gazing on and taking pleasure in the bodies of men appeared to intensify the bodily and ‘psychic labour’ of women themselves (Gill and Elias, 2014).

Discussion

What is striking in how these women talked about men’s bodies as sex objects is the ways in which their talk was often sprinkled with fairly conventional and gendered ideas about women’s desire, in the first instance from modern ideals of romance. Attraction and desire were often connected to seeking a life partner or a meaningful emotional union, not to experiences of sex and arousal. This became apparent when participants discussed the ethical tensions that suffused casual sexual encounters. These were described as contextually and temporally specific sites in which it was possible to experience the desire for another as a body. However, these encounters were also often framed as disappointing or shallow and shaped by the imposition of ideologies that ethical individuals should resist. Or, at least for some of the women, the appearance of such framings was seen as ethically obligatory. In addition, participants drew on conventional ideas about masculinity in that physical attraction was related to what men can do, rather than on what a man might look like. Esteem held for men’s confidence and competence reflected traditional and familiar expectations of men founded in character and performance, rather than their physical attractiveness. Indeed, participants differentiated between ‘real’ men, those they were intimately involved with and those who are present in their everyday lives, and ‘fantasy’ men such as the sexualised images of conventionally attractive male models we presented in the PowerPoint images. Such ideas reflect Smith’s (2002) observation about male strippers, noted earlier, that a male body’s movement and performance is what connotes eroticism and arousal for the female viewer; it is not just how a body looks as a sex object.

The women in this study were also wary of not wanting to appear shallow or interested only in men’s bodies qua bodies because they were aware that women’s bodies are regarded and assessed in contemporary culture as artifice, as ornament, and for the viewing pleasure of others, mainly men. Ironically, because these women sought to avoid ‘reducing’ men to their bodies, they were once again bound by conventional discourses on women’s desire. This was experienced as a source of tension, particularly in those moments when the women celebrated the opportunities that they had to enjoy the bodies of men. They managed these tensions by distinguishing between men as fantasy figures or romantic partners, and by identifying unique rules in casual sexual relations. Men who might, for example, have embodied superficial or inauthentic qualities (perhaps being cultural dupes or untrustworthy cads) were thought to be self-obsessed, excessive in their investment in working out and poor relationship material.

Such unease suggests a tension between prevailing feminist accounts of objectification as a practice that involves ‘reducing’ another person to the status of a body or treating them as a canvas or functionary in the scripting of a sexual fantasy or event, and a post-feminist moment in which women are invited to experience pleasure in both the sexual bodies of men and the embodied realisation of the liberal feminist ideal of equality. In negotiating this tension, these participants consistently attempted to find ways to frame their attraction to men using non-physical attributes that cannot be reduced to the body alone. In doing so, however, they entered into a gender double-bind: in seeking to avoid reducing men to their bodies, they appraised them according to classic formulations of male social value, qualities that remain oppositional and complementary to established definitions of femininity located in and being of the body. This unease confirms Cahill’s (2012) concern that contemporary feminist analyses of objectification ‘leave us in a space where materiality and passivity are linked indelibly to a lack of subjectivity—a conclusion that places severe and ultimately untenable constraints upon subjectivity, agency, and personhood’ (p. 30).

Most women found it difficult to say what they found attractive about men without recourse to conventional markers by which men are evaluated. Even for these women, many with a heightened awareness of feminist ideas, considering what women’s sexuality might look like outside a patriarchal construct, or how women’s engagement with ‘male’ framings of sexuality can be understood as transgressive or positive, remained difficult. Hence, the challenge they face in negotiating sexual ethics determined not simply by the imperative not to treat someone as an object. Yet, they alluded to the possibility that casual sex can be about the body alone and does not have to be about the whole person. Indeed, their pleasure in objectification can be attributed to a realisation of a liberal feminist ideal of equality: the act of looking is itself the performative embodiment of liberal equality. This is especially expressed in the giddy pleasure these women described in turning their gaze on men and pursuing sexual desires more readily ascribed to men. This is liberal equality-as-sameness, in which objectification is enacted as an aspect of human sexuality newly available to women. Objectification (and a specific social and historical formation of male sexual practice) is thereby not only cast as natural but also evacuates ethical questions on objectification. Women are assumed to be without ‘the conceptual tools with which to explore and clarify the ethical harms of phenomena associated with objectification’ (Cahill, 2012: 31). This highlights the challenges women face in realising a model of gender equality and in embodying an ‘up-for-it’ sexual subjectivity (Evans et al., 2010: 115), while avoiding treating someone as a sex object. In this, they are striving for female–male sexual relations that are less polarised than in the conventional binary account of gender.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that these women reveal just how far women’s sexual liberation has come in just a few generations. The exchange of ideas and experiences among the participants in these focus group discussions is a long way from early feminist topics such as pre-marital sex, the advent and opportunity provided by the Pill, men’s sexual ignorance of women and misogynist attitudes, and orgasm and pleasure. The discussions prompted by our research focused on men’s bodies, men as sex objects pushing at the boundaries of conventional ideas on women’s sexual desires. Yet, some of these boundaries remain in play, sometimes as uncertainty, sometimes as a caveat, and sometimes as still relevant. The playing field in contemporary sexual politics is still neither even nor equal (whatever that might look like). The situation of these and similar women has changed as a result of societal shifts in gender relations in the last few decades; but, so too have the situations for men inter alia in their transformation into sex objects in a way that early second-wave feminism might not have envisaged. Just as post-feminist theory is grappling with these questions in the work of authors we have cited above and others, many women are grappling with the tensions embedded in contemporary sexual politics on a daily basis. It is hard to see what men have lost in the transformation if anything at all. What women have gained is still to be fully comprehended.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants who opted to partake in this study and share their experiences and stories. We also like to thank Wendy Heywood who supported this project and helped us facilitate the focus groups, and Andrew Westle who provided initial research assistance at the start of this project.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Projects grant #DP150103666.

Andrea Waling is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS), La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently working across a range of research projects involving explorations of men, sexuality and bodies; young people and sexual literacy, technologies, sex, and sexual intimacy, and LGBTIQ+ health and well-being. She is author of White Masculinity in Contemporary Australia: The Good Ol’ Aussie Bloke (Routledge Press, 2019) and is currently working on her second book, Exploring the Cultural Phenomenon of the Dick Pic (Masculinity, Sex and Popular Culture Series, Routledge, 2022).

Duane Duncan is a Research Fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS), La Trobe University in Melbourne, and Lecturer in Sociology at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. His research interests include sex, sexuality and intimacy; theories of ‘the body' and embodiment; men, masculinity and health; and, the critical study of gender, alcohol and violence. His research is informed by contemporary theoretical insights from feminist, poststructuralist and feminist new materialist and Science and Technology Studies scholars.

Steven Angelides is a Grants and Development Advisor in the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University. He is the author of The Fear of Child Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Gary W Dowsett is a Professor Emeritus and was the Deputy Director (from 1997 to 2019) and Chair (from 2006 to 2019) of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Australia. A sociologist, he has long been interested in research concerning men’s health and men’s bodies. He is author, co-author or co-editor of 7 books, more than 120 book chapters and academic papers, and over 100 other publications.

ORCID iDs

Andrea Waling

Gary W Dowsett

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