The Nudity Effect On Men Versus WomenS

Last year in a post about the truism "sex sells," I asked:

But whose sex is sold? And to who?

"If it was simply that sex sold," I continued…


I argued that what was really being sold was men's (presumably heterosexual) sexual subjectivity, the experience of being a person in the world who was presented with images that were for his titillation. Women do not live in the world this way. They are not exposed everyday to images that legitimize their lust; instead, the images teach women that they are the object of that lust.


The Nudity Effect On Men Versus WomenS



…the portrayal of these thin models and I just get depressed… I'm very hard on myself, wanting to be that way.


I am disgusted by it because she is fat, but I'm also… I need to lose about 10 pounds.

I don't necessarily find her body that attractive… Her stomach looks like mine.


Personally I think she is attractive.

I like that.

Both men and women, then, knew exactly how to respond to female nudes: women had internalized their object status and men had internalized their subject status.

The Nudity Effect On Men Versus WomenS



Men responded by either expressing extreme disinterest, re-asserting their heterosexuality, or both. They did not compare themselves to the male nudes (like women did with female nudes), except to say that they were both male and, therefore, there was "nothing to see." Meanwhile, because men have been trained to be a lustful sexual subject, seeing male nudity tended to raise the specter of homosexuality. They couldn't see the bodies as anything but sexual objects for them to gaze upon.

In contrast, the specter of homosexuality didn't arise for women because they weren't used to being positioned as lustful. Eck explains:

When women view the seductive pose of the female nude, they do not believe she is ‘coming on to' them. They know she is there to arouse men. Thus, they do not have to work at rejecting an unwanted advance. It is not for them.

Many women also did not feel lustful when looking at male nudes and those that did often experienced lust mixed with guilt or shame. Eck suggest that this may be, in part, a reaction to taking on the active, consuming, masculine role, something they're not supposed to do.

Summarizing responses to the male nudes, she writes:


This is what it means to live in a world in which desire is structured by a gendered sexual subject/object binary. It's not just "out there," it's "in us" too.


Source: Eck, Beth. 2003. Men are Much Harder: Gendered Viewing of Nude Images. Gender & Society 17, 5: 691-710.Related Posts:

The Nudity Effect On Men Versus WomenS

This post originally appeared at Sociological Images. Republished with permission.

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