The Beautiful and the Sublime

Exerpt from "Prettier Than Napoleon"

Men Are Sublime

The predominance of female nudes in art can easily be explained by the centuries of overwhelming dominance of the fine arts by men. Access to art training was a major factor, as unchaperoned women were unlikely to be left alone with art teachers, for obvious reasons. Similarly, until relatively recently it was viewed as unseemly for women to hire male models at all, much less nude models. Female models were easier for male artists to come by and might offer the bonus of being an easy sexual conquest for the painter or sculptor. Male artists, the majority being heterosexual, had both motive and opportunity to produce female nudes.

Setting aside the issue of whether centuries of male dominance explains the preference for female nudity, is (it) correct to assert that naked women are prettier than naked men? My first reaction to this assertion was to draw the parallel between the beautiful and the sublime.

Intrinsic in this view is our historical perspective of women as the weaker, lesser sex. Beauty is a property of the balanced, the pleasing, the graceful. The smooth contours and tidier genitalia of the female body meet this standard. But like many beautiful things, a female nude is not threatening. She lacks power to affect the viewer beyond the stimulation of the gaze. She exists to please: a beautiful decoration. The male nude is messier, woolier, more angular. Muscles, like the rolling thunderheads in a Turner seascape, threaten and awe us. With power comes danger, but with danger, desire. If the female nude is a lush landscape of rolling English hills, the male nude is the jagged mountain range. The women here, in their pale languor, may be beautiful, but they are not dangerous. Here, the male body retains a sense of dynamism and coiled power even while sprawled and still. One need not find the male body sexually attractive to appreciate its sublimity, but by definition a sublime image is less comfortable and more challenging than a beautiful one. Between the confrontational subject matter and the preexisting biases toward production of beautiful female nudes which aesthetically and (for the majority of creators and viewers) sexually gratify, is it any wonder that we have a dearth of naked males in media?

This sums up the explanation for sexual attraction, at least for one sense (vision), in my opinion. Quote "threaten and awe us": this is the reason WHY I love men. They are physically challenging, powerful, dangerous, angular, rough. Those are the adjectives that describe why I (and pretty much every other gay man on the planet) love the male form so much!