The Neglect Of Male Beauty

In plenty of entertainment, romantic relationships, and events in everyday life, the male body is emphasized less than the female body and may even be described as if it is a humorous, repulsive thing.  Western culture clearly fixates on the female body as if it is useful for little other than receiving sexual appreciation from men and simultaneously ignores the male body to a large extent.  The examples of this are on full display in the world of media, but they can also be observed in everyday reactions between random women and other women, random men and other men, and random men and women.

If the camera lingers over someone's body in order to emphasize its sensuality, the body probably belongs to a woman (and this is not degrading unless the motive is to degrade her!).  If a random person publicly compliments someone else's appearance, the recipient of the compliment is probably a woman.  If someone jokes about how "unpresentable" someone else's body is in a film or in daily life, that body usually belongs to a man.  The female body is regularly elevated on a pedestal in entertainment and in other aspects of culture as the opposite is done to the male body.

There are not male and female psychological needs.  There are human needs that men and women both experience regarding how they want their bodies to be perceived by others.  Many women want to be seen as more than their aesthetic appeal, and many men want to have their bodies recognized for their sensuality and aesthetic potential.  As prudery becomes less mainstream in Western culture (despite all of its retreats, it is still very much alive in the West) and more people become comfortable with sharing their true selves as gender stereotypes are rejected, these two facts will be embraced more widely than they already are in some circles.

The same aesthetic perceptions are not shared by all people, but even if they were not dictated by subjective or cultural factors, it would still be fallacious to believe that men and women possess differing levels of physical beauty or sex appeal based on gender.  Different individuals, some being men and some being women, might be more objectively beautiful than others (not that subjective aesthetic perceptions can ever establish what makes something physically beautiful, if objective beauty exists at all), but this has nothing to do with perceptions of beauty, personal preferences, or a person's gender [1].

This does not mean that female nudity and the female body in general need to be celebrated less, although there are many people who need to realize that there is nothing sexual about the female body, clothed or unclothed--and that the female body is not more sensual than the male body.  It means that both the male and female body need to be recognized as nonsexual and sensual if individuals and cultures are to have a right understanding of the matter.  Open appreciation of the male or female body does not have to pretend like one is more aesthetically perfect than the other.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-beauty-of-both-genders.html