OK, maybe I should back up a bit.
Ladies, you know how good it feels to know you look good from the skin out? I know I do. I’ll spend an hour cleansing, shaving, moisturizing, grooming, scenting. Maybe even a bit of makeup. Next comes my underwear – a bra that makes my boobs look round and perky, panties that complement my butt just so, and the two match. Trifecta. I’m sure you have your own routine, but whatever it is, you get to walk around with the sexiest secret ever under your clothes, and that makes you feel fierce.
Now, I know that this appreciation of our appearance can go/has gone too far. Trust me, I have a whole series of posts on the commoditization of sex and the female body simmering on the back burner. I’m not talking about valuing a person’s body more than other aspects of their personality, I’m talking about that extra little confidence boost when you can say, “I’m an intelligent, valuable human being, I improve the world and people’s lives around me, and to top it all off, I look damn good today.”
Now for the downer. What if I told you that guys (straight guys, at least) don’t get to feel like that? They don’t get to walk around with a sexy secret. If a guy comes up to his guy friends and announces that he feels good because he knows his “butt looks good in these jeans,” he’s not going to get the round of agreement and applause that I would get from my lady friends. He’s going to get weird looks and awkward silence.
The significant other and I had been dating about a year when I realized that for every four times he called me the sexiest thing he’d ever seen, I might compliment him once. I’m a bad girlfriend. So I set about fixing that ratio, and was surprised when he was visibly uncomfortable with taking compliments about his body. He had a whole slew of body image issues – didn’t like this, that was the wrong shape, etc etc etc.
Being the sensitive, empathetic person I am, I decided that what worked to make me feel better must make someone else feel better. Both boxers and whitey-tighties are pretty hideous, after all. So I started looking for sexy underwear for him. You know what I found? The stores with actual sexy underwear for men seemed to be designed for gay men (judging from the easy-access assless undies) and featured undies that propped up and puffed out the junk so much that they looked… uncomfortable. The ones for straight men (judging from the presence of women in some of the pictures) were almost entirely silly. Like, the garment is shaped like an elephant head and the trunk is the penis sleeve. That kind of silly.
Now, don’t get me wrong, a good sense of humor and not taking oneself too seriously is dead sexy. But I kept getting the idea that men’s sexiness is kind of a joke. That a penis is a punchline, not something arousing. That my man couldn’t be sexy.
If you are a lover of masculine bodies, this should be tragic to you. Thank heaven for the oiled-up goodness that is the Magic Mike series, but for the most part, our guys are being told that they don’t get to be physically attractive – that that’s reserved for ladies.
There are probably lots of reasons for this (hello, commoditization of female form), but one of them is that men are socialized to be the initiators of romantic/sexual contact. In a hetero pairing, the man is expected to ask the woman out, initiate the first kiss, pursue her for sex, propose marriage, etc. Any deviation means lack of manly-man-ness. Part of this process of pursuing is that the man must be more forward with complimenting his partner, training the ladies through compliments to pay attention to their appearances, while the ladies feel no obligation to return the favor.
(I could speculate that this principle applies to gay men as well – that, since gay men are still men, they are still socialized to make their partners feel physically attractive, so the partners of gay men are trained to pay attention to their looks. But I’m not a gay man, so this is guesswork at best. Any gay guys out there want to school me on this?)
But back to my own problem. I’m going to have to find another way to make my man feel sexy, because not only does his straightness apparently relegates him to balloon-boxers and elephant-trunk penis jokes, after I actually talked to him about the issue, I found he felt too uncomfortable to even try out some of the options I’d pulled up for him. I’ve started a compliment campaign to see if I can loosen his self-consciousness a little, but in the meantime, I’m left appalled at this shocking gap in the clothing industry.
What do we want? Sexy man-underwear! When do we want it? Now!
