Jim notes that most art, even advertising art, seems to include the female
more than the male body (especially if nude).  Is this because most artiss
are men, or could it be that both men and women prefer or are more interested
in the female body, or find it more attractive than the male body?  Women and
men, can you tell him whether you prefer to look at one or the other?

87 responses total.

Aesthetically, women seem more attractive -- it's just nicer to look at 
curves. Most art that I've seen is definitely geared more towards women as
subjects, but even the more explicitly drawn art that depicts males (I'm
thinking of Japanese comics here) seems to definitely depict them in a
female-like style. 

Now, if you're talking what looks best sexually, guys. :-) But -- if you're
talking just as objects of art , then girls.

Bodybuilders are the horror of those can appreciate a well-developed 
body, whether it's male or female.
Sexually I am into women, aesthetically both (think of classic 
sculpturing).
What I think is most beautiful in women it is the 'wings': the part of 
the torse running from the shoulders to the hips, especially 
where they go over in the curves of the hips. 
  

It has been proven that men are more turned-on by *visual* things
and women respond more to *feelings*, like music, stories, or
touch.  So it makes sense that men would buy a car that had a woman
wearing a skimpy red halter dress sitting on the hood, whereas a
woman would buy a car that said soothing things during rush hour
traffic and left a rose for her in the glove compartment.  ;-)

When I went to pick up my new car, the woman wearing the skimpy
red halter dress was *GONE*!

One theory about why both men and women respond to the female body --
especially the breast, is because both men and women were once infants and
the their mother's body came to symbolize a great deal to them emotionally.

I have no idea how well founded in reality that it -- but I like the sound
of it -- it makes sense to me.

Hmmm.  Well, if the MGoGo tribe back in the stone age couldn't do much more
than keep it's young women protected, healthy, & well-fed, then the MGoGo's 
future was pretty well secured.  If the MGoGo couldn't manage that, however,
no other "success" would last very long, because the tribe would die out.
If all the MGoGo felt that women (esp. young & healthy ones) were attractive, 
that would encourage them to divert resources in a way that would confer a
survival advantage.....

That's an interesting take...

The female body has a certain amount of appeal to women.  It has lots of
appeal to men.  The male body doesn't really appeal to hetero men much at all.
I suppose it could be percentages.  

A number of years ago I read an interview where a famous
director, I think it was either Scorsese or Coppola, was
asked why there were so many more nude females than males
in movies.  He responded that the female anatomy was warm and
gentle where the male anatomy was hard and angry.

Angry?  Like, certainly he wasn't talking about the penis
here, I hope.  I mean, all a woman has to do is look 
at it and giggle and it shrinks faster than a salty slug.
And I think that's the heart of it really.  Men are
extremely uncomfortable with displaying a flacid penis.
And male directors are empathetic.  Angry, yeah, right.

I *like* male bodies.  They never struck me as "angry".  

But I bet it would be hard to show a male body as warm and gentle without
making it seem 'un-masculine', whatever that means, to the guys in the
audience. 

And the Big, Bad, Machismo God would probably be able to turn out far
more offended followers than female nudity ever turned out amoung the
feminists.

Though I do get the feeling that Hollywood is basically a bunch of males
making movies primarily for males.  What sort of stuff a good, mostly-
female movie company could produce for mostly-female audiences would be
interesting to see.

I would like to note that I have never laughed at a flaccid
penis...although, "Oh!  It's so *cute*!" escaped my mouth when I was
eighteen and drunk.  I regret that to this day...  =)

I think what he meant by "hard and angry" was that sharp lines and
features are often described as "angry" in the Art World.  Plus, a
woman's body has flowing lines and curves as opposed to the male
form being interrupted by that thing just sitting there waiting for
a party.  Granted, I LOVE the male body, and I can't emphasize that
enough, but from an art standpoint women are more appealing to the
eye.  

This could also be why more women can get away with saying, "God,
she's *beautiful*" since it's more socially acceptable for a woman
to admire a woman's body.  I have been known to drool and get
weak-kneed over certain actresses even though I would never make
love to them.

Salty slug...I loved that.  =)

I think you got a point, Sarah.
I certainly never heard a man admire another man by saying "God he's 
beautiful", unless he was gay.
At best it would be something like "He's handsome."
Most times however, "I don't regard men like that." or "I wouldn't 
know."
So, can't men be beautiful then?
The lack of words when it comes to men, seems on the other hand be 
vastly compensated by the rich vocabulary that comes to life when a 
beautiful woman walks by.
The getting away with it, is entirely rolemodel-based of course.
let's start by giving boys dolls for their birthdays.

One last remark: I also got the idea that the admiration for the female 
body comes from the very first stage of life in which a strong bond is 
being developed between the mother and child. That's in my view the main
 reason why women can get away with admiring other women.

This response has been erased.

Believe it or not, there is a rationale for that.  The issue
is whether the genitalia are exposed.  Full frontal female
nudity (i.e., a woman standing there facing the camera) exposes 
very little, and none of the actual equipment.  With men, it's
all hanging out there.  For a woman to match it, she'd have to
expose not just her clitoris and labia, but her *ovaries*.  

Re chick flicks, men have been dragging women to movies like 
Die Hard forever.  If you don't like 'em, don't go, fer chrissake.
Or at least retaliate by dragging him off to see Beaches.

Er, what the eye sees with either gender is the skin and hair which covers
the plumbing and egg/sperm production equipment.  So men are a little
more exposed because the penis isn't hairy.  Big deal.  That doesn't seem
to be an issue when it comes to male and female breasts. 

??

By which I mean if you really don't see the difference, and you
aren't just bein' ornery, I don't know what to say to you.  Btw,
I don't favor any kind of censorship.

Well, the rationale in #16 doesn't work for breast exposure, for
which the movie rating system (and public "decency" laws in
general) apply different standards for men than for women.

I agree.  The fact is that for some reason breasts aren't considered 
as naughty as the genitalia.  *I* think they're every but as
naughty, but that's just me.  ;-)

Btw, we saw the movie Wild Things recently.  Kevin Bacon has a full
frontal nudity scene (he shows his butt, too).  They show Denise
Richards' breasts, but she doesn't have a full-frontal scene, much 
less the spread-leg scene that would be comparable (homologous?) to 
Bacon's full frontal scene.  So, this is an example of "PC" movie
nudity.  Should we feel sorry for Kevin Bacon, being forced by the
producers to show his equipment to the world?

Depends on his equipment, I suppose.  ;)

What's that movie rated?

I somehow thought I'd seen movies with full frontal male nudity that weren't
rated NC-17, but I'm not sure.

Wild Things is rated R.  So was Lolita and At Play in the Fields
of the Lord, both of which featured full frontal male nudity.
Maybe therating doesn't have anything to do with it, after all?

Actually, the people who do the ratings won't tell you what they rate (images,
situations, language).  All they do is put a rating on a movie, and if you
don't like it it's your guess as to what to cut to get a lower rating.

The whole thing is too baroque.  It does seem to be easing up
a bit, though.  Midnight Cowboy and Clockwork Orange were both 
given X ratings at first, but they'd rate Rs now.

OK,

explain me the rating system.
All thgese Ns, Rs amd X-es confuse me.
In holland rating goes:
All (family stuff)
12 and older (the average mainstream action pack)
16 and older (violent, some nudity (frontal or no, as long as it isn't 
all about sex))
18 and older (x-treme violence, gory horror and porn)

In the US the system is:
G -- General audiences, must be squeaky clean
PG - Parental Guidance, can have some minor language and quite a lot of
violence (us 'Mericans aren't afraid of a little violence, ya know)
R -- Restricted, parents must accompany any children.  Violence, hidden sex,
some nudity
X -- seX!  

A newer addition is PG-13, a compromise between PG and R.

And violence will almost never put a film from R to X, unless it involves sex
somehow.

Oops, I forgot the other new rating:
NC-17  "No children under 17".  This is a compromise, generally used for
movies that have obvious sex, but aren't really porno films.  Art films,
foreign films (from countries that obviously don't care enough about their
kids to protect them from sexual depictions), etc.  This way you can go to
a movie with some sex without the social disgrace of going to an X-rated film.

This whole system has (to my mind) a really unhealthy bias:  Sex is evil, but
violence is OK.  The worst almost any horror/gore movie can get is an R, but
if you actually show sex (not just some heavy kissing then disappear into a
darkened room) it's EVIL and will CORRUPT minors.

But that's not really true, either.  All kinds of very explicit
sex gets shown in R movies.  Is a puzzlement.

I didn't realize that the X rating still existed - I thought it was completely
replaced by NC-17

Has anyone seen a movie much more violent than kids' cartoons?  I watched some
old Tom and Jerry cartoons with a three year old recently and the characers
were repeatedly smashed flat.

Didn't one of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films manage to get an X by
topping it's "king of the bloodbath" action with cannibalism scenes?

My impression is that even very young kids can easily differentiate
between the phony Roadrunner/Coyote-style violence and the overblown-
but-basically-realistic stuff.  Not to say that exposure to the former
is harmless, but it's much less bad...

I think NC-17 replaced X, officially.  The problem, apparrently, was that the
organization that does the ratings had forgotten to trademark the X rating,
so porn filmmakers were using X, XX, XXX, etc. as advertising gimics, even
though the ratings people had never assigned those ratings to the movie.

I thought those were for t-shirts...

X, XL, XXL, XXXL

(grin)

Yes, cartoons can be *very* violent.  My favorite Tom & Jerry cartoon included
Jerry knocking out all of Tom's teeth with a ball peen hammer.  'Course, they
only made a few that were really violent.  Most were "normal".

Yeah, I can't say I enjoy many cartoons anymore, mostly because of the
violence.  But there is certainly a difference between cartoon violence
and live action violence; the first is more clearly fantasy, because
things happen which could never happen in real life.  Even little kids
seem to understand that.

Back in 1991, having not been around kids over 3 very much, I went to see
101 Dalmations in the theater.  I liked the movie a lot but was astonished
at how every time something violent would happen, like a car going over an
embankment, all the kids in the audience would just *roar* with laughter. 
That seemed to be what really got them worked up. 

It's worth noting that Grimm's fairy tales, for instance, are *very*
violent.  (In the original version of Cinderella the stepmother cuts the
heel off one of the stepsisters so her foot will fit in the glass
slipper.  The Prince almost marries her until he notices all the blood.) 
I would guess that stories told to kids have been violent throughout
history and prehistory.

So why do we tell such things to children?  I can think of at least two
reasons:

1. Teaching that the world is violent is a way of preparing children for
it.  I imagine that this is why cavemen told their children about great
hunts and monsters and wrathful gods - so they would grow up strong and be
able to deal with the fact that awful things happen in the world.

2. Parents tell kids what they like to hear about.  Parents get great joy
out of entertaining their children, and it's easier to entertain with
violent stories than without them.  Marketing executives know this and as
a result most kids' shows have a lot of violence in them.

According to some psychology stuff I've read, it's because humans by nature
have violent impulses.  In a culture where kids have those impulses and adults
(apparently) don't, the kids worry about it, and are frustrated and feel
guilty.  Apparently telling kids really violent stories with "morals" was a
way to help the kid know that those impulses aren't a personal perversion and
let them experience the release vicariously, while reinforcing the standards
that one must still do the right thing even when you're every impulse is
screaming to do the wrong thing.

I have no idea how well it holds up, since I was very much a "don't expose
kids to violence in any form" kind of Mom at the time and my parents didn't
trust or encourage reading and I discovered books on my own long after the
"fairy tale" stage of life.

(Man, when I say 101 dalmatians as a kid, the violent scenes freaked me out.
Cruella was _scary_)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss