Some weekends, a lady needs a little TLC: large doses of science fiction novels, a mani-pedi, movies of my childhood purchased at the Blockbuster down the street that's going out of business. So if today is a little girlier than usual, that's why, and fellas, bear with me (if you're gay, this post has treats for you too, if not, I promise my analysis is just as good when applied to Reese Witherspoon rom-coms as it is to science-fiction epics).
Amber recently had a post pointing me to Flick Filosopher, which I hadn't read previously but am now, and in particular to this set of posts, intelligent eye-candy for girls who like to look. In popular culture, there's so often something off, or exaggerated, about women who look upon men with purely sexual or aesthetic desire. They're cougars—predatory older ladies acting out roles that are fine for men to play, because it's what guys do, because young girls are luscious—sex fiends; or sexually starved women like Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love, devouring with their eyes because they're unpracticed, unsure, or afraid to act. Playgirl's much more for gay men than it is for women, and there is no equivalent of Maxim aimed at a heterosexual female audience, which may be a good thing given how dumb both the staging of the pictorials and the words are. Even mainstream women's magazines tend to fetishize other women's bodies as a means of comparison, rather than giving us male bodies arranged as a means of pleasure.
But men are lovely, delightful, varied. And as female viewers, we don't always have to love them for their minds, or the quality of their performances, although those things always help.