Who says there’s no female equivalent of being a butt man, a boob man or a leg man?
…It’s not because I’m not shallow. I’m as shallow as any ass, tit or leg man out there. But I haven’t had my sexual preferences catered to in such a cartoonish, excessive way throughout my life—and so, like a lot of women, I don’t really feel comfortable going around talking about it.
What does that look like, to have your preferences catered to? Think about the first time you opened a Playboy as a kid. You, men, have been fed hundreds of thousands of images of women in submissive, deferential poses in ads and art and porn and films your entire lives. There are entire songs written about women’s body parts: “Legs,” “Ass Man,” and “Baby Got Back” to name a few, to say nothing of various and sundry references to “American thighs.” In women’s corner is that one TV show I Love Dick, which is actually about a guy named Dick and was quickly canceled, even though it was critically acclaimed.
This steady gush of ass-, tits- and legs-ism has deeply shaped your way of thinking about women’s bodies. So when you sit around and rank women’s body parts by your personal preference, you are participating in something called “dismemberment,” which sounds pretty gruesome!
It’s cultural conditioning. In other words, it’s not that women don’t fetishize men’s body parts or their bodies. Hooboy, do we! We just don’t have the privilege of being indulged and encouraged, and in control of most art and media, so that we can sit around ranking this shit all day long as if we’re piecing together our dream guy like in that accidental documentary about misogynistic nerds called Weird Science.
Before you go parroting back some old myths about men and sex — that you’re more visual, that you need sex more, that you’re hornier, that you can’t help it — you should really read some Daniel Bergner.
He’s a man who did journalistic research interviewing dozens of experts and reviewing the existing literature and found that everything we think we know about female sexuality is probably wrong. Women are hornier, lustier, more visual and into more novel sexual experiences than men. They are far more bored by monogamy than men.
Tracy Moore
