Magic Mike is a movie with a plot (or so I hear), as well as a bunch of buff dudes covered in Crisco. When it came out in theaters a few weeks ago, women started getting together in groups to go see it, and apparently hooting and hollering ensued. Of course, women getting excited en masse about overtly sexualized dudes makes other dudes uncomfortable, and has led to dudes complaining that if dudes did the same thing for a movie about female strippers, people would get all offended.
If there was a movie being released about a bunch of hot female strippers, there is no way straight guys would get away with the kind of consistent excitement that has been expressed via detailed Facebook and Twitter posts, as well as casual conversations. The feedback would be all rolled eyes and “You’re sexist!” comments.
This is a false comparison, because there would never be a reason for guys to go en masse to see a movie with hot, buff actresses. There is no point in complaining about Magic Mike, and here’s why: I don’t have to look to find female sexuality and/or nudity, because it is everywhere, and the media brings it to us. I can look anywhere in the whole damn world. “Gratuitous nudity” almost always means female nudity, and frontal nudity is almost exclusively female in mainstream movies. Let’s not pretend that one popular movie with an extensive array of well-oiled pecs somehow upsets this overall balance.
Just one example from the past week is Michelle Jenneke, “The Beautiful Dancing Hurdler.” An animated GIF of her doing some sort of warm-up wiggle dance made Mashable’s list of “Top 10 GIFs of the Week” (BuzzFeed has ten more GIFs.)
I hope she does well in her career. By all accounts, she is a very good runner, making her more Maria Sharapova than Anna Kournikova. This is very common in women’s athletics, which tends to focus on the hotties. To use one example from the men’s sports world, David Beckham is a very good soccer (football) player. He is also quite the handsome fellow. When he plays soccer, though, you know what you can’t see? His abs. (A better example might be beach volleyball, where the difference in uniforms between men and women is, uh, striking, but Beckham has good name recognition. In place of Beckham, picture Karch Kiraly if you must.)
Sometime soon (probably during the Olympics), another young hottie will make an inadvertent internet debut. A movie will have gratuitous female nudity. Tabloids will report on how women’s beach bodies are looking (they’ll report on men, too, but in a much more forgiving manner.) Depending what Hollywood learns from the experience of producing Magic Mike, we may not see another overt dudes-on-display movie for a while.
So chill out, guys. You don’t have to make a special trip to the theater to see a T&A parade. Just turn on your TV or load Firefox. The gravy train of boobs will continue for the foreseeable future, probably picking up speed. It may have benefits to society in some way. Eventually someone will unlock unified field theory by studying Kate Upton’s jiggling boobs, and that person will win the damn Nobel Prize.
