iPorn.

So there I was, searching the iTunes App Store for some mindless fiddly-fiddly games to while away the workday, and what's topping the "most downloaded apps" charts?

iPasties - Women wearing pasties!
Pocket Girlfriend - A woman wearing underwear! (And she says "dream girl lol" snippets about loving shopping for tools and hating foreplay, hurrr. I never got the whole "guys hate foreplay" meme, most guys I've been with seemed to be having a pretty good time, perhaps they were all just great actors. Geez, now I'm going to worry.)
Naughty Hotties - Women basically just standing there!
Beautiful Boobs - According to the reviewers, one single picture of a woman and she has clothes on!
Naughty X-Mas Hotties - Women in Santa suits!

Now I've got no problem with boys liking sexy women, I kind of enjoy it when they include me in that category, but there's something missing here, isn't there? So I searched on "sexy men," and to my surprise, there were a few apps listed. Nothing compared to the giant heap of million-download "sexy women" apps, but a few. To my total non-surprise, more than half of them were tagged "gay."

The explanation I usually hear is "oh, women are horny, but they're just not visual." Frequently followed by bemoaning how women never notice them because they don't look like Hugh Jackman. Also, I haven't noticed any sleazy iPod apps where you simulate a deep emotional connection with a sexy man. (Well, there's some Twilight apps. Eurgh.)

And then again. Much as I want to deride this thole thing as sexist and ridiculous, there's an inconvenient fact here--I found the sexy men apps, I noted them for blogging purposes, and then I didn't buy them. I don't collect pictures of sexy men. I don't Google for them. Looking through my computer and my DVDs, you'll find plenty of porn of couples having sex, but not a lot of standalone men. Most pictures of a guy just standing there posing don't appeal to me that much. The other women that I surveyed in a recent intensive five-minute study of my house (n=2) don't really fixate on man candy either. We like our men to look good, yes, but we don't go nuts about them if that's all they do.

So maybe women aren't visual, at least not in the centerfold-admiring way that a lot of men are. I really hate to admit any kind of psychological gender difference, and I can feel my brain already scanning for ways to blame it all on Society, but this one seems to be staring me in the face. And it's wearing a sexy Santa suit.