feminism and men’s underwear

from issue 10: still a twenty-something teenybopper

There’s nothing like seeing shots of your friend flexing his muscles in tighty-whiteys on an online dating site to leave all your opinions about sexism, objectification and swimsuit mags with thoroughly bruised elbows.

An odd introduction to a first column? Perhaps I should set my scene.

It’s a crisp winter’s day in Sydney and I’m in the Vibewire office, innocently chatting away on MSN Messenger between responding to emails and writing up Very Important Documents, when my friend (sitting in an office across the city, also chatting on MSN between writing up Very Important Documents) asks me if I’d like to see the pics on his new Gaydar profile.

Gaydar (gaydar.com.au, if you’re going to check it out — gaydar.com alone might leave you with an unwanted pornographic surprise), for those of you who don’t know, is a popular online dating service for gay men. Profiles span everything from musical tastes to personal qualities to penis size. And, of course, photographs.

That I was being offered a glimpse of his profile was no great surprise. What did come as a surprise were the full-length, headless shots in the aforementioned tight white underwear, from front and back, with lots of, erm, detail.

I responded in precisely the way Cosmo says you should never react to the sight of a man in his underwear. Hysterical laughter.

But big whoop. Young fag hag sees picture of guy she knows all oiled up in his underwear online and giggles about it. No real story there.

But it’s not like my friend is the only one doing it. Gaydar is full of young, buff, flexed-up guys posing like bodybuilders and porn stars. I’ve seen the pictures time and time before and thought absolutely nothing of it. And not once did it occur to me that I might think anything of it, despite the fact that had it been my female friends posting pictures of themselves in their underwear on the ‘net I would have furrowed my brow and struggled to find a polite way to tell them that they were turning themselves not into human beings who happened to be sexual, but into sex objects.

It’s pretty fashionable around Feminismland at the moment to emphasise the positive elements of what were once seen as unrespectable, and later as disempowering, acts for women — posing for men’s magazines, stripping, porn, pole dancing and talking in detail about your sex life to Rolling Stone. If you pay me to prance around in a bikini because I’m hot, more power to me, so the logic goes. And if I do pout my lips and pull the waistband of my jeans down that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a brain, it just means I’m not one of “those feminists” — you know, the ones who hate men and are all hairy and stuff.

Now, personally, I don’t agree with that. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as sexy woman = exploited woman, but I do think it’s a bit naive to forget that only certain types of women are considered sexy in that FHM way and, just as importantly, the men buying the magazines and looking up at the Windsor Smith billboards aren’t generally thinking “wow, she must be really smart to exploit her own flesh like that”.

So if I feel queasy about the idea of my girl friends posting pictures of themselves in their underwear online, why do I just laugh when my guy friends do it?

Sure, doing a quick survey of my guy friends, the popular response regardless of sexual orientation is that they’d love to be seen as sex objects; but some women delight in being sex objects too, so that can’t be the only reason.

I wondered if it was because, in our society, people look at and evaluate women all the time. You’ve got your men’s mags, your New Weekly reporting on the latest celebrity weight gains and diets, guys at parties telling you that if only you grew your hair long and curly, you could be mind-numbingly beautiful (thanks for the tip — and maybe if you had a face and body transplant you could be vaguely attractive too). My good feminist boy friends comment snidely on women’s resemblance to Barbie in up-market bars. I like boys, but I can tell you without hesitation that I think Rose McGowan is hot.

Yet, for the most part, guys are spared from this constant surveillance. They look and they judge, and to some extent they too are looked at and judged, but for the most part they can walk happily down the street without someone propositioning them or telling them they look like a horse. Colin Farrell’s weight fluctuations barely rate a mention next to Lindsay Lohan’s.

On the whole guys do the looking, while girls know they’re being looked at. But on Gaydar, it’s not like that. Everyone’s looking, everyone’s being looked at. So by posting pictures of yourself all oiled up in your undies, you’re not just asking others to look at you — you know you’ll be perving on them in exactly the same way in 20 minutes. There’s not the same power imbalance.

But that’s not quite true either. Some men get to do more looking and more evaluating than others. More attractive, whiter, richer men are often in higher demand than less attractive, less white, poorer men. And if everyone’s being judged on how they look with their shirts off, where does that leave the guys with less defined pectoral muscles?*

My jury’s still out on this one, and my feminist elbows still most definitely bruised.

*Of course, many people in the gay community don’t choose partners based on how they look in a pair of speedos. But it does go to show that it’s not just women who are reduced to their appearances in the eyes of prospective partners.

Rachel Hills, 23, is an editor for Vibewire.net and a writer on gender and media issues.