Who's a sexy girl, then?

I read this article on star.com today. I actually hadn’t realised that the FHM ‘sexiest women’ list was out, clearly I’m kinda behind the times on this stuff. Forgive me?

Let me present the sexiest woman of 2008, Megan Fox:

By any chance does the styling and the pose remind you of anything?

In some ways I do agree with Stephen Marche who wrote the opinion piece:

For Him Magazine, and the other lad mags like Maxim and Umm, occupy a strange, liminal place in the territory of contemporary male desire. They exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

But I think what troubles me is this – Marche clearly has more faith in men than I do. Or more faith in humans I guess, because what we’re talking about is people’s ability to ‘stay true to themselves’ or be individuals and resist the influences of socialisation and peer pressure than tell us to Be A Certain Way and Like A Certain Kind of Woman.

He says:

FHM is not a men’s magazine like GQ or Esquire. It’s a magazine for lads – for 15-year-olds. It serves adolescent boys with the fantasy that there is something or someone out there who is the “sexiest,” a comforting norm of male desire which does not exist and has never existed.

If only it were so simple. Men (as opposed to boys) know that male desire doesn’t fit any pattern; it changes unpredictably, sometimes over years, sometimes over an afternoon. Male desire is particular – some men like women in tutus, others like women who are morbidly obese. Who can say what men are attracted to? It could be the second joint of the middle toe, or green eyes, or a certain ineffable way of walking.

To me, that is completely and utterly untrue. You can’t write off this ranking of samey lifeless women as ‘just for lads’, however much you might like to. I think in reality, for most men, it’s the opposite. ‘Lads’ and teenagers are so flush with hormones, and at the age when sexuality is so new and exciting that it colours absolutely everything they see.

To a teenager everything is sexy. Womanhood is just plain sexy. You lust after any number of people – your friend’s mum, your teacher who wears retro glasses but has a great rack, cartoon Princess Jasmine, the girl next door. All the different forms of woman are sexy because the drive (for heterosexual boys) towards women is so overwhelming.

But with time and media saturation and socialisation our culture teaches men(and women to an extent) that this is not sexy. Because it’s not socially acceptable to find different women with small boobs and no brazilian wax sexy. What is sexy is this list of shiny, groomed, FHM babes. What is sexy is Megan Fox. And that’s why all the other desires – like chubby women, or a dominatrix, or freckles and glasses – begin to seem weird and dark and unnatural, and have to be hidden away or admitted with embarassment.

It takes a really strong man to resist that tide of persuasion. I know far too many men who have been swept up in it – no ‘real’ woman can compare to their vision of the sexually desirable woman unless she too is groomed and shiny and plastic and hairless.

And the saddest part is that this feeds into the way that women are socialising themselves – we will soon all be convinced that women are for looking at and lusting after. They are not for lusting or being sexual so much as being sexualised. Their value lies in their outsides only, and those outsides must meet this one universal standard if they ever want to be wanted.

So Marche wants to know what will happen -

How this ranking of the parade of gleaming pneumatic women will affect young men isn’t clear. Will it terminally limit their budding libidos or only provide a kind of temporary simple-minded refuge from the gathering deluge of sexual complications they’re about to face? As with everything when it comes to male desire, nobody knows.

The great Victorian art critic John Ruskin, a man who spent half his life among pictures and sculptures of naked women, was nonetheless shocked to discover on his wedding night that his bride Effie had pubic hair. On coming into contact with a real woman, the poor man actually went into spasms. We can only hope there’s a better fate for the lads whose first image of womanhood is Megan Fox with one x.

I think I already know.