Keeping Women's Visuality In Mind

Erotic media and entertainment in general have done relatively little to directly challenge gender stereotypes unless the cultural context encourages it, so male appreciation of female beauty (in a sexual manner) has been portrayed as normal far more than the reverse.  This harms both genders, but there is a simple solution: entertainment, whether it falls into the category of erotic media or not, is not created with gender stereotypes motivating the creators.  There is nothing difficult or damaging about simply yielding to reason and reality when it comes to portrayals of sexuality and sexual expression.

Sexism against men in entertainment--of the kind relevant to the subject at hand--entails the association of selfish, aggressive expressions of sexuality with men and the dismissal of the male body's beauty and sensuality, whereas the sexism against women in entertainment entails the dismissal of women's visual nature and the belief that women's sexualities have no context or significance apart from pleasuring men.  The more accepting of women's visual aspects of sexuality those behind erotic media, cinema, and gaming are, the more women can feel represented as heterosexual beings and the more men can feel accepted as attractive.

There is a need for erotic media in all of its forms to emphasize more than female beauty and male attraction to the female form; in order to truly reflect reality, female visual attraction to men needs to be celebrated, and the same is true of the sensuality of the male body.  If this objectified men in the way that fools think emphasizing the sensuality of the female body sexually objectifies women, then it would follow that portrayals of women and men in erotic media are immoral if objectification is morally wrong.  Of course, objectification goes far beyond even intense sexualization, and there is a great deal of ignorance over what even makes something sexual.  What truly constitutes erotic media is not a matter of subjective perception or speculation.

Sensuality is not sexuality, and thus treating an emphasis on sensuality as "sexualization" is a false equivalence.  Moreover, sexualization is not objectification, as emphasizing or dwelling on someone's sex appeal (which is subjective, in contrast to the objective nonsexual nature of the clothed or nude body of either gender [1]) does not automatically mean everything else about a person is being actively disregarded.  Men and women can and need to be featured in movies, video games, erotica, and other kinds of entertainment in ways that sometimes emphasize the sensuality of both.  Keeping women's and men's visuality in mind is an easy way to avoid overlooking this.

Using entertainment as a whole and erotic media in particular to acknowledge that the male body can be sexy and that women are no less visual than men does not require trivializing female beauty or the visuality of some men.  It does not mean that any of the sexist norms surrounding how Western culture treats sexuality would be inverted, but this would mean that neither men nor women would be treated as mere objects of no use except for providing sexual pleasure to the opposite gender, as beautiful or unattractive simply for being one gender or the other, or as hypersexual or asexual by default.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/08/lingerie-is-not-sexual.html