As I did four years ago, I’ve been watching the World Cup with some interest.  I’ve grown to love the sport of soccer—the pace, the strategy, the incredible skill of the world’s top players.  I’ve also been deriving great pleasure from the erotic spectacle of the men’s bodies.  I’ve never been more thankful for slow motion replay as I am when I watch the bodies in motion--the strong legs, the fine asses, and the anguish and ecstasy on the players’ faces while they demonstrate skillful patience and stamina with their lower bodies.  Is it hot in here, or is it just me?  In case I’m not being clear, what I’m trying to say is that watching the World Cup makes me really—forgive me for TMI—horny.  I mean, really horny.  I am distracted by sexual desire that lasts well after the matches have ended each day.  

On a couple of occasions, men have confronted me about sexually objectifying the players and question whether or not my sexual objectification of the men is any different from men sexually objectifying women.  Irin Carmon has written a fantastic blog about this at Jezebel.com, so I don’t want to repeat what she said here.  Read it for yourself.  She’s spot on, in my opinion, about the politics of women sexually objectifying the players.

What I’m going to write about is how wonderful it is to have a regular visual feast of men’s beautiful bodies and its effect on me.   To be frank, in these weeks of the World Cup, I think about sex constantly—sex with the players, sex with my partners, sex in the morning, at noon, and at night.  And though I might think about sex more than the average person (it’s my work, after all!), this feels different. And given the way my friends talk about the players, I don’t think it is just me. 

I started to wonder what it would be like if my and my friends’ desire was hailed in this way all day every day—you know, what it might be like to be a straight man.  Look around.  Billboards, beer and car commercials, strip clubs, readily available pornography, women’s fashion; all of it constantly hails heterosexual men’s desire.

When I suggest to others that there should be a Sports Illustrated issue that features hot guys wearing close to nothing, laying prone, and ready for the ravishing, people—especially straight men—say that there is no market for it.  Women, they say, just aren’t visual and don’t think about sex as much as men.  My experiences watching the soccer hotties sweat and struggle and fall on top of each other made me realize that they’re putting the cart before the horse.  It is not because men are more visual or more sexual that we have a visual culture that constantly offers women as sexual objects for men’s pleasure and consumption.  Instead, men are more visual and preoccupied by sex because our visual culture is constantly telling them “look very closely, imagine, desire, and feel really good about yourself for doing so.” 

Imagine reversing this dynamic.  What if billboards, commercials, strip clubs--all of it-- constantly featured scantily clad men who, in one way or another, say to the audience, “I want you to look at me.  I want you to desire me.  I want you to fuck me, and I want you to feel really, really good about wanting to fuck me.”  What if a normal, formative experience for adolescent girls was to sit in their bedrooms with magazines or internet sites and stare at photos or videos of beautiful, naked men, contemplating each part of the splendid, masculine body in various positions so girls think about what it would be like to touch, to pleasure, to have those bodies in a way that would be physically pleasurable but also deeply affirmative of their budding femininities and sexual desires?   What if most, if not all girls have this as just a normal part of being a girl and their parents tsk tsk and say, “Well, girls will be girls”? 

I’ve listened to women talk about the visual feast of beautiful and desirable men offered up by World Cup Soccer.  Trust me when I say that women are perfectly capable of and derive pleasure from visually consuming men’s bodies and that consumption has an impact on their libido.   I have no doubt that, if all day every day, visual media served up image after image that hailed women’s sexual desire for men, women would be visual and feel pretty good about sexually objectifying men.

So why don’t visual media serve up men’s bodies to straight women? 

Well, first, the vast majority of the people making the decisions about what will “sell” are the same boys who pored over images of naked women.  They are so comfortable with and feel entitled to their hetero-masculine desire that they can’t even imagine having another perspective, let alone successfully produce imagery of the desirable, heterosexual, masculine body.  When Hugh Heffner says that he came up with the idea of 3-D Playboy because he thought, “What does everyone want to see in 3-D?  Naked Women,” there is a fundamental inability to see that “people” does not equal heterosexual men.  When I once said to a man that movies would be better if, once in awhile, they showed desirable, naked men in the throws of orgasm (as we do women), his response was, “No one wants to see naked men.  Everyone knows women’s bodies are better to look at.”  Umm, whom do you mean when you say “no one” and “everyone”?

More importantly though, I think it has something to do with the gender structure of sexual objectification and the role it plays in gender inequality.  What I mean by “the gender structure of sexual objectification” is a general pattern where the desiring person is always a man or perceived as masculine and the object of desire is always a woman or perceived as feminine.  Camera angles in film, billboards, straight porn; it all situates the viewer as someone desiring a woman’s body. Take a moment and bring to mind all of the images you can recall of a desiring feminine subject in relationship to a masculine sexual object.  Take your time, I’m done writing and it’s your time now.  My guess is that it took some thinking, and the images you came up with, if you could recall any, were so extraordinary that they stand out in your mind.  Now think of the last time you saw an image of a woman’s body that encouraged the audience to think, “She’s hot. I’d like to tap that!”  Even during the soccer matches, the camera operators constantly settle on beautiful women in the crowd.  Google “world cup images” and see what comes up.  What you’ll see are pictures of the cup, of men playing soccer, but also pictures of scantily clad women doing nothing but being sexual objects for the internet viewer.

How is this tied to gender inequality?  In Western Culture, subjectivity is the definition of personhood.  Persons make all the decisions, have rights and resources, and control objects in their world.  Objects are things that are used by person/subjects.  In a male dominant social system, the males/men/masculine are person/subjects and the females/women/feminine are the objects to be “known” and controlled.  A male dominant gender system can’t afford feminine subjectivity in relation to the masculine sexual object because that fucks with men’s entitlement to personhood and power.  In other words, it’s not men’s libido that makes them sexually objectify women.  It’s the privilege and power conferred to them through a gender system that systematically portrays women as objects of sexual consumption. 

Many feminists have been critical of the sexual objectification of women, and for very good reasons (those outlined above and others).  As I’ve said before, one strategy for dealing with the gender structure of sexual objectification is to get rid of images that eroticize women’s bodies.  As someone who has thoroughly enjoyed the World Cup precisely because of how fun and pleasurable it is to sexually objectify men’s bodies, I’m more inclined toward democratizing sexual objectification.  Instead of getting rid of the visually erotic body, let’s de-gender the relationship between the sexual subject and the sexual object.  Let’s produce and enjoy bodies of all genders as visually desirable.  Hell, let’s make the whole culture more sexual and visually erotic, but let’s make sure we all can participate in creating and enjoying it. 

I think we’re moving in that direction. Have you seen the Vanity Fair issue with photos of men of the World Cup in their panties or the San Francisco Chronicle article that features “Hotties of the World Cup”?   I, and most of my friends have, and it just wetted our, um, appetites. Why are we seeing things like this?   Because the status of women has changed and women are feeling more entitled to desire (Thank you, Feminism!!).  If I’m right about men’s visual desire being a result, not a cause for the constant barrage of images of women as sexual objects, then as the status of women changes, the visual images that express and hail their desire will follow, and maybe, just maybe, everyone will be horny and happy all day every day.

Alas, Vanity Fair and “Hotties of the World Cup” are almost aberrations in the sea of sexually objectified women.  So much more must change before adolescent girls are spending time in their rooms with images of naked men or I drive by a billboard for a strip club on Bourbon Street that features beautiful men who will dance just for me so I can imagine fucking them.  I’ll keep doing my part to make those changes happen.  In the mean time, this sexual subject is going to enjoy the hotties of World Cup soccer, ride the desire with pleasure and feel entitled to it, and look forward to the visual feast of the Tour de France.