Where are the mudflap boys?

I'm becoming increasingly aware that the female body (or a pinched and bulged caricature thereof) is used as a shorthand for "sexy." I'm sure as hell not opposed to hot women, but I wish they were balanced with hot men. Nearly the only time male bodies are presented in sexy caricature is when they're aimed at a gay male audience.

This becomes really obvious in sex stores, where any item not explicitly marketed at gay men will have a hot woman on the packaging. Vibrator that's clearly designed for female body parts? Hot woman. Realistic dildo that looks exactly like a big damn cock and will only be bought by people who are comfortable with big damn cocks? Hot woman. Generic packaging logos that are supposed to convey "sexiness" in the abstract? Always, always, always a hot woman.

(I don't even like the sexy-male caricature, I'm so used to having sex with regular human guys that it's hard for me to associate any kind of arousal with cut muscles and square jawlines, but at least it would be better than the "sex consists of a hot woman observed by an invisible man" imagery.)

I suppose one reason for this is that men are stereotypically more homophobic than women. That's probably true, but I don't think we should be doing anything to honor it, and anyway it's a self-fulfilling stereotype--if straight men don't see men publicly sexualized, of course they won't be comfortable with it. (I've never heard a woman react to an image of a sexy woman with "that's so lesbian.") Another reason is the male gaze, the tendency of our culture to always cast viewers in the role of a straight male.

And there's a third, even worse reason: the assumption that women don't like titillation just as much as men do. We should want to be the sexy lady on the box, in order to arouse men, but apparently we shouldn't care about being aroused ourselves. That's a very weird message to get from a vibrator manufacturer.


Precipitating event to this post: hearing that Lifestyles Condoms was giving away free sexy posters. Well... they are. But if they're trying to offer a variety of types of sexiness, I think they're missing something.