A female reader quotes a previous male one:
The problem is that a guy who is not considered physically attractive is basically expected to “suck it up” and deal with it. We’re told to go to the gym, as if all the blame rests on the individual. No one would dare suggest such a thing about feminine beauty.
He’s got to be kidding, right? Maybe you could link to the thread sparked by the Louie episode with the actress doing the almost-monologue about being fat. I remember at least one reader comment about her having a choice in the matter and saw many more on other sites where I saw that clip.
Also, I’ve never written in about the discussions of short men. I’m 5’7 and have always been attracted to men about my height or shorter. I once asked out a guy who was 5’2. And I’ve many a time argued with girlfriends over their lack of interest in guys purely because of their height (or lack thereof), though I’ve never once changed anybody’s mind.
So I would be sympathetic … except. It’s not like there’s a huge number of guys willing to date a woman taller than them. Look through any dating site and the vast majority of profiles have a height cutoff for potential partners of their height or shorter. (Don’t get me started on their age cutoffs …)
A male reader has a very different take:
The elephant in the room here is another Dish-themed topic: male steroid use. All the evidence shows male objectification leads to youth steroid use, especially among gay teens, a development that ought to surprise no one at Jezebel who have cover the same effect on young girls. To me, steroids show why the ogling double-standard is the most egregious hypocrisy of feminism.
It usually results in stunningly half-baked logic, such as one writer who quite literally claims that “dangerous health risks and blatant exploitation” of steroid culture are real but ultimately don’t resonate because, when it comes to televised abs: “I LOVE IT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH.” Well, some of those players are gay. Do those writers condone the pressure on gay (or straight) teens to ‘roid up because of the images they might see on Jezebel?
The most basic test of an ideology is if it’s generalizable. When a child has body issues because of our culture, that’s unacceptable – whether that child is a girl or a boy, gay or straight. That’s the feminism I can rally behind. But anything short of this generalizable standard is just factional politics, another de facto interest group extracting cultural rents for their narrow benefit – “fairness” be damned.
Another woman:
I just watched the Orphan Black clip and yep! That’s the way we do it. So men be aware: we look. We just aren’t pigs about it.
Another might disagree:
I was stuck in the doctor’s office yesterday where the TV was tuned to The Talk. The guest was True Blood‘s Joe Manganiello. The hosts had trouble controlling the rowdy, entirely-female audience, which at one point chanted “take it off!” (CBS’s website is an ad-filled purgatory, but here’s the video.)
Yes, sex is Manganiello’s stock in trade, but it was interesting to think about the criticism a show would receive if the genders were reversed – an all-male talk show audience howling for a female guest to get naked would be creepy and vaguely threatening, and rightly held up as just another example of how our culture objectifies women. But because the “object” here was a big strapping man, it was treated as cute.
The Dish 