ooh, I read something interesting in Sheila Jeffreys' Anti-Climax the other day which I thought was spot on.
[disclaimer: women are just as visual as men. Ask any handsome man. Handsome men know women are visual creatures. It's the nerdy, geeky men who try to say "men are more visual; women prefer status". That's because the political system of patriarchy gives men economic power over women, which gives the geeky men reproductive opportunities that they would never normally have, because they can offer women material wealth and security.]
Moving on. Jeffreys mentioned that women just don't get turned on by the objectification of men in the same way. ANd I've noticed this myself. I can appreciate a nice face, Johnny Depp, but I know nothing about him, don'T know if he smells nice (pheronomones!) etc.. so I'm not going to waste my time thinking too much about him.
BUt men most certainly are turned on by the objectification of women. This is because nakedness i.e objectification represents a person's low status in society. A staple of porn is the men fully clothed, often in status clothes such as suits, next to naked or scantily clad women. Good examples are that Shameless ad campaign for Suit Supply last year , or even in classical art, The Picnic.
Anyway, women are taught from an early age to eroticize powerful men, and men are taught to eroticize women's vulnerability (this is why men like high heels and corsets etc. Anything that makes a woman look feeble).
So what turns men on, basically, is women's low status in society. WOmen's economic vulnerability, and their reproductive vulnerability, and the fact they'Re forced to interact with men in the workplace to keep their jobs (and the roof over their heads), or the fact that the best economic option for many women is the sex industry. All of this manufactured vulnerability gives men hard ons
It seems that for men objectification is a huge part of their sexuality.
Anyway, SHeila Jeffreys says that this is because heterosexual relations, especially sex, are based on the eroticization of power difference. You see this most clearly in SM. All sex, but especially in the BDSM world, exists in a context where there are real, tangible economic, political and social power differences between men and women: . They judicial system favours men. Male violence propes the entire system up. We live in a sadosociety where all heterosexual men are "tops" basically. And all women are automatically bottoms, by default of their femaleness.
It seems to me that most men are acutely aware of this power disparity, but that most women are in denial about it.
Back to the point! When a man is scantily clad for the camera, or even just posing seductively, the fact he is behaving that way that automatically lowers his status. Because a powerful person would never need to behave in such a manner. A truly powerful person would not be pouting to the camera or fluffing their feathers. IT's the sign of subordination, so when a man does it, or behaves like that, at a subconscious level, the woman associates that man with a low status.