Reply #149: Okay. Post #126:

[Warren DeMontague]

current depictions of sexuality on TV are REMARKABLY one-sided. You're right. They are. I'm all for broadening that. One thing that's nice is that the conversation about sexuality in our society has gotten much more tolerant and open-minded in recent decades.

Every other woman is hoe'd up while the men dress the same as they always have. First off, I don't think dressing sexy, or dressing in lingerie, or being naked, or having sex, makes a woman a "ho" (a hoe?) ... I don't know about "ho'ed up", but I do know that what men and women seem to like in terms of what they see sexually or erotically seems to be, in many cases, different. Are you saying you'd like to see channels full of buffed dudes in speedos? More power to you, but given (for instance) that the primary consumers of Playgirl magazine have been gay men, you may be in the minority. Another example: Lots of men like to look at naked women or half-dressed women. When a guy does that- like Congressman Christopher Lee (not to be confused with Saruman/Count Dooku Christopher Lee)- the guy is widely held up as an object of ridicule.. not by men, mind you, buy by women whose universal reaction seems to be "yuk".

Good Christ, look at Cosmo. Do men buy that? No. Women do. And what is all over that magazine? Sexy women.

Get it? I don't think women like looking at half-naked men, or maybe they prefer their guys in business suits, but the fact that you're not seeing them on tv may be more a reflection of womens' preferences than anything else.


I hate to beat a dead horse, but I've managed to make it through over 4 decades on this planet without ever watching an episode of either "Friends" or "Dharma and Greg". Honest. So I can't speak to the costume choices therein. Most sitcoms I've seen reflect what people in the real world actually wear. Now, maybe the people in the world wear that stuff because the tv tells them to, or the people on the tv wear that stuff because the people in the real world tell them to. Actual reality, as well as human sexuality, is a lot more complicated than the over-simplified ideological position papers on topics like "patriarchal male gaze" that come out of, say, Smith College.

The clear and unabashed message of nearly every media outlet in the world is that straight male sexuality is the dominant paradigm and that said paradigm should be constantly played to. See, but you're making the mistake of imagining that there is some grand conspiracy. I agree- most of the graphic sexuality you see is geared towards straight men. Seems the answer to that is to offer more choices to people who are interested. But I don't think that PETA is, in any way, shape, or form, part of the world patriarchal media outlet consortium.

The message we send to women Who is this "we"? See above.

You can sell sex without depicting one particular gender subject to the approval of another, or worse, as whores. If you saw that ad and thought "whores", that's in your head. That's not what occurred to me.