Consider how difficult it has been to reverse the situation [objectifying men]. Bob Guccione and the Penthouse empire tried to sell beefcake to women the way he sold cheesecake to men. He produced a magazine called Viva in 1972. It featured sexually explicit accounts of women’s sexual adventures punctuated with male nudes. […][Female readers] said,”These guys look gay.” The producers of Penthouse did everything they could to make sure that this would not happen.
They knew that if you spread a woman’s legs and put her looking at a camera, she’ll look sexy. But you can’t do it with men. So they tried everything. They had him in forest settings. They had him looking out into the distance to make him look like he had control over the whole environment. They had him on horses so that he could look like the Malboro man. And they still “looked gay” (quotations added). This is not to cast aspersions on my gay brothers, but rather to say that when women looked at these pictures, they did not see what they considered masculine by conventional standards. My point is that if you reduce a woman to tits and ass, she’ll look like a woman, but reduce a man, and he will not look masculine according to our standards.”