Thorns

On metafandom there's a rather flawed but still interesting post The Female Gaze (NSFW! Contains porn of guys) In the comments there's a link to men_in_full (SFW) which celebrates overweight men.

Looking at that I thought "Well that's fine I guess though there's plenty of positive images of overweight men getting hot chicks in romantic comedies etc". But thinking about it, the goal there is to give men someone to relate to, there's never any sense that the audience is expected to find the man attractive(*). You do sometimes have "female gaze" scenes(**) where the man's body is shown to be attractive but in such cases the man is pretty much always fairly conventionally attractive: 25-40, well built, not-too-skinny-or-fat etc.

I mean personally I find it all a bit hard to judge since my taste in men is very specific so most "attractive" guys don't do much for me anyway, but I do think about men's body image issues sometimes. I get the feeling the pressure not to be fat isn't anywhere near as intense (though it definitely still exists, especially once you get above "a little chubby") but the pressure not to be too thin/unmuscled is more intense.

Anyway, not very deep thoughts, but thought I'd get them down before I forget.

EDIT: ithiliana's post got me thinking some more, and as outfox ppints out, it's all m/m which is obviously only a subset of what women find attractive. That guy is making a m/m for women magazine so that makes sense in this context, but I think it would also be interesting to explore the female/male POV on m/f and f/f.

(*)The fact that the hot chick is supposed to is a whole nother thing. Obviously (good) women just care about personality. And anyway, female character's motivations don't have to make any sense, they just exist as a male fantasy *mutters*
(**)Plus the odd "gay man's gaze" in Queer as Folk etc, which has different rules afaict. I'm not sure which was in "Casino Royale" :)