By reliably announcing the same presentation of masculinity, over and over, as the BEST kind, this tradition of SMA is just shoring up the many ways that beautiful people are rewarded in countless ways in our culture. Some men look really good in dresses, just for example.
What if we just acknowledged there’s a huge spectrum of what people actually consider sexy in a man, without trying to fit the term into a one-size-fits-all container? Different people are attracted to different body types, different orientations, different presentations of gender. Where’s the sexiness in that? As Tracy Moore wrote in Jezebel, “ sexy is a construct, and unfortunately, in this world, it’s a very very very unimaginative, narrow, boring one that fails to address many sexy things and focuses on other, boring things that have been sexy for so long I’m willing to suggest right here they might have even lost some of their sexy.” As she points out, “we’re so conditioned toward the fake image that it has become normalized as Definitively Sexy.” It’s worth noting that a bunch of SMAs subsequently made headlines for pretty troubling reasons.
The magazine’s tradition began in 1985 with a candidate whose appeal, I think we can agree, has not aged well: Mel Gibson, now infamous for his antisemitic rants. But now? Not so much.Īnd when you consider the enduring ubiquity of People, its insistence on shaping our taste in men feels less funny. Men can be objects of lust too! Maybe that was (arguably) a subversive statement in the 1980s, when Playboy, Penthouse and other magazines imposed a misogynist ideal of sexiness at the newsstands. And by making their subject male, they’re tacitly saying: See, we’re not objectifying women, we’re so evolved. So it’s a winky joke that People offers up its own tastes as if they are everyone’s. Sexiness, by its very nature, is subjective. Think about the inherent ridiculousness of declaring anyone the sexiest person alive. The annual cover is a lightweight honorific that worked its way into the public consciousness as way more legitimate than it actually is.
0 kommentar(er)
