So there I was, searching the iTunes App Store for some mindless fiddly-fiddly games to while away the workday, and what's topping the "most downloaded apps" charts?
iPasties - Women wearing pasties!
Pocket Girlfriend - A woman wearing underwear! (And she says "dream girl lol" snippets about loving shopping for tools and hating foreplay, hurrr. I never got the whole "guys hate foreplay" meme, most guys I've been with seemed to be having a pretty good time, perhaps they were all just great actors. Geez, now I'm going to worry.)
Naughty Hotties - Women basically just standing there!
Beautiful Boobs - According to the reviewers, one single picture of a woman and she has clothes on!
Naughty X-Mas Hotties - Women in Santa suits!
Now I've got no problem with boys liking sexy women, I kind of enjoy it when they include me in that category, but there's something missing here, isn't there? So I searched on "sexy men," and to my surprise, there were a few apps listed. Nothing compared to the giant heap of million-download "sexy women" apps, but a few. To my total non-surprise, more than half of them were tagged "gay."
The explanation I usually hear is "oh, women are horny, but they're just not visual." Frequently followed by bemoaning how women never notice them because they don't look like Hugh Jackman. Also, I haven't noticed any sleazy iPod apps where you simulate a deep emotional connection with a sexy man. (Well, there's some Twilight apps. Eurgh.)
And then again. Much as I want to deride this thole thing as sexist and ridiculous, there's an inconvenient fact here--I found the sexy men apps, I noted them for blogging purposes, and then I didn't buy them. I don't collect pictures of sexy men. I don't Google for them. Looking through my computer and my DVDs, you'll find plenty of porn of couples having sex, but not a lot of standalone men. Most pictures of a guy just standing there posing don't appeal to me that much. The other women that I surveyed in a recent intensive five-minute study of my house (n=2) don't really fixate on man candy either. We like our men to look good, yes, but we don't go nuts about them if that's all they do.
So maybe women aren't visual, at least not in the centerfold-admiring way that a lot of men are. I really hate to admit any kind of psychological gender difference, and I can feel my brain already scanning for ways to blame it all on Society, but this one seems to be staring me in the face. And it's wearing a sexy Santa suit.
Don't worry. We are having a good time at it.
ReplyDeleteMyself, I'm not all that into a chick just standing there. I like porn. I like naked chicks, & if one's just standing there, I'll look for a bit, then move on. Activity is much nicer.
Nicest of all, of course, is activity my girlfriend & I are in the middle of.
http://community.livejournal.com/picspamahoy
ReplyDeleteNever underestimate thirteen-year-olds who have discovered the Internet.
I've never been able to get into ipod porn... it's just the wrong format for me. (screen to small). Most of the women I know who are into visual porn dig looking at naked chicks; couples getting it on; and gay guys getting it on. The dude getting naked all by his lonesome doesn't seem to be a big crowd pleaser... but this is a totally unscientific, annecdotal observation. To each their own.
ReplyDeleteI do in fact save random pictures of hot guys from the internet so I can look at them (literally just look) later.
ReplyDeleteFor actually gettin' off I need video. And, like most women, I don't especially care about a guy's junk unless I am personally acquainted with it, which is why www.beautifulagony.com is the BEST THING EVER.
In conclusion: I enjoy "standalone" men if they are in the act of wanking. Boy/boy action is a very, very close second.
I think I have a picture of Russel Crowe on my hard drive someplace, but it's one where he's all fully clothed in the movie Gladiator. (His character in that film made my elbows sweat.)
ReplyDeleteThe whole "looking at naughty pictures" thing is where I get my only really serious "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" moments. I don't have a problem with it; if my schmoopie wants to get his jollies looking at nekkid photos of some airbrushed somebody, then that's all cool, but I don't pretend to get it.
Tam - Oh, I have a picture of Bruce Campbell shirtless on my wall. But the distinction is that he's up there because he's Bruce Campbell, not because he's some shirtless dude--if I didn't enjoy his acting and public persona, I don't think I'd be that impressed just on looks.
ReplyDeleteThere are, indeed, many psychological gender differences.
ReplyDeleteNow, trying to figure out which and how much thereof are determined by societal pressure vs. genetic imperative...that's when the fight gets started.
And now we know what make's Tam's elbows sweat. Now, how can I use that information for fun and profit?
ReplyDeleteBlack Ice: interestingly, in the book Whipping Girl, transwoman Julia Serano speaks about what it was like to start going on estrogen. She said (among other things) that the hormonal changes made her less visually oriented when it came to sex, but textures rose to the forefront. She also started being keenly aware of her partner's smell. So we know that some things are definitely built into us on a chemical/biological level.
ReplyDeleteI wonder, though, whether the needing-to-know-someone-before-they-turn-us-on thing that so many women have is a social construct? Growing up under the constant fear of sexual assault does seem like it'd build an innate need for personal connection into a girl. :P
As a man, I don't believe the men hate foreplay thing. My theory is that men tend to want sex more often than women. To pick some easy but not-intended-to-be-accurate numbers, if a man wants sex every second day, and a woman wants sex every fourth day, and they compromise on every third day, then the man is always in the extra-horny waiting stage and it's always a little soon for the woman. In that case, the woman needs more foreplay to get ready than the man, and you also get all the myths of women not liking sex from the same source.
ReplyDeleteOf course reality isn't going to be so cut and dried; real individual men and women's preferred frequencies won't be so predictable, lots of women will have higher preferred frequencies than lots of men, and there will be times when the desired interval is much less or greater than average, but still I think it may explain a lot.
My boyfriend and I loaded that fully-clothed-woman-with-breasts app and LOL'd at it.
ReplyDeleteI have a bunch of eye-candy of women saved in my iPhone, though just off the Web, not from apps. (I am a bisexual woman.)
Also, kind of riveted by this Yves ad (male full frontal)... YUM.
http://origen.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/yves_saint_laurent_m7.jpg
cheers,
flightless
Mousie, that still leaves the premise that men want sex more.
ReplyDeleteI think the apparent difference is that women are socialized away from wanting to fuck (usually, and some get over it, I should add in advance of counterexamples) and so foreplay gives these women an excuse, or rather a justification, for proceeding to sex.
If there is an actual difference, I think it's not that men don't want it and women do, it's just that en don't care and women do, so under this hypothesis a man will be willing to skip or curtail foreplay (whatever that would mean, there's not a sharp line between foreplay and sex) while a woman almost never would. But that desn't mean he demands to.
Also, I'm a man, and I don't like pictures. I like written erotica, I could probably get into narrative cartoons or videos that aren't sleazy/cheesy, though I've never found any (of either, really).
ReplyDeleteMy guess is everyone is different in their tastes for smut. I'm a bi woman and I've saved many gigs of everything from solo pinups to hardcore bdsm. Solo man pictures are the smallest segment of my collection, but I tend to find men like Figleaf much more attractive than most professional male models. There just isn't as much variety available when compared with female pinups.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really old post, but I feel the need to comment because it's something I feel quite strongly about!
ReplyDeleteI am fucking visual! Pictures of stand-alone men often do turn me one and I have many of them on hard drive. I can spend minutes staring at a nice ass, or whatever.
It's interesting that bi women (of which I am one) seem to often be more interested in pics of women than men (I'm not though), I have a theory about this. I think that we are all simply given more opportunities to discover that we find objectifying women hot (through the media :)), but very few opportunities to discover that we enjoy objectifying men. E.g. I had no idea I liked pics of men and their various body parts so much before I found Tunblr.
Honestly, as a pan woman, I just don't find as many vulnerable males in porn as I'd like. I like personality and cute smile, rather than stoic detachment. I like a bowed head or a bared throat, a soft belly (chubby is lovely~!), delicious round butt, thick thighs...or a girliness to them. There really isn't all that much mainstream variety out there, and it's all lit badly with terrible photoshopping and frankly, not very inviting expressions. That's why I love tumblr, art/erotica pictures and alt-porn...show off ALL of the bodies <3
ReplyDeleteI'd like to agree with the Anon from 2012. I'm pan and female-bodied, even if I'm not 100% sure about the gender identity (probably gender fluid). Since I'm arguing against it being a genetic thing, I don't think that should be an issue though. I personally save quite a few pictures of guys, it's just that it's hard to find ones that I'm actually interested in. If I find that, there definitely is a visual attraction, though.
ReplyDelete