Boyeurism: how men became the new sex objects

Feminism has never been more popular. Even the sort of ideological shrinking violet who five years ago would have twirled her hair while mewing, ‘I’m not a feminist, but…’ is now sporting a Rosie the Riveter T-shirt and making eye-rolling references to Everyday Sexism. For those of us who grew up having to bulldoze our way through a world of tedious and stymying misogyny, it is a relief to find that the days of catcalls and phwoaring builders seem numbered. And how are we choosing to celebrate? By indulging in a massive, catcalling phwoar-fest of our own over the heroes of The Go-Between, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Poldark.

Poldark’s Aidan Turner started it with his pulse-quickening mop, chest rug and man tan combo. Richard Madden laid on the soulful-eyed vulnerability as Lawrence’s priapic gamekeeper, while the ridiculously attractive Ben Batt wasted no time getting down to the requisite skinny-dipping and bare-chested scything when playing Ted Burgess in the BBC’s new adaptation of The Go-Between. Well might Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer recently have observed that male actors are objectified as much as women, citing Poldark as a case in point.

Still, it’s not just the Sunday-night-chest-porn brigade, oh no. Various sub-groups of ogling feminist can be discerned, namely: the Pants Posse, who lust after Davids Beckham and Gandy; the Goslingites, for whom Ryan G is God; and the Boy Band Bints, emergent from 2010, when it somehow became socially acceptable for middle-aged women to fetishise a 16-year-old Harry Styles. Gandy, for one, resents his reduction to sex object: ‘You’re seen as a brainless idiot… I don’t want to just be known as the man in the pants.’

Better than being known as the man who removes the pants, perhaps? Certainly Channing Tatum’s second outing as stripper Magic Mike this summer led to a flurry of girlish interest from feminist quarters. The Huffington Post squealed on Twitter: ‘BEHOLD: The First Magic Mike XXL trailer (you’re welcome)’ — two weeks after declaring The Sun’s Page 3 ‘an injustice to women’.

Where once we experienced little lustful cultural lurches (Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise, waif-bodied DiCaprio in Titanic, butch Daniel Craig in his trunks), so today, women — legions of feminists among them — appear engaged in a permanent Diet Coke state of swoon.

I had thought I was immune to this, shall we call it, ‘boyeurism’: a staunch, old-school, committed non-objectifier. Then Prince Harry sprouted a beard, my posho/ginger radar twanged most piquantly, and suddenly I too was at it: tweeting images of the poor chap, vociferously lusting in print, lost in an erotic fervour in which dignity and ideology were somehow missing in action. I was ashamed; no less aroused.

A recent Jeans for Genes charity pop-up laundry on Newburgh Street recreated the famous 1985 ad starring Nick Kamen taking off his Levi 501s, and women flocked to it. What the hell is going on here, sisters? We 20th-century feminists came of age waging war on ‘the male gaze’, after critic Laura Mulvey’s contention that women were objectified in film because men were behind the camera. It was a theory expanded to take in not only the history of Western art but the prevailing attitude of patriarchal culture itself, in which men were the active subject, women the subjugated and sexualised object. In what way does it mix things up merely to trade places? Is this radical subversion, or dismal emulation of the most regressive sort?

For some, matters fall decidedly into the latter camp. A feminist friend who teaches at a prominent London university tells me: ‘I think older women think it’s OK because it feels like a subversive act to turn around the male gaze. However, they are just showing their age, as young men have been fairly fully objectified since the 1980s. I know from teaching men born in the 1990s that they feel extremely objectified and under pressure. So, to them, those women just come off like lecherous old men.

‘There’s often a jokey subtext of “lucky boy”, as if we struggle to think of young men as vulnerable, but automatically think of young girls that way. Personally, it makes me a bit queasy.’ Point very much taken, not least when out attentions are directed at the more nipperish types. One thinks of those poor, 16-year-old, sacrificial X Factor victims.

However, when it comes to adult males, with age and experience and dashing ginger face fuzz, I do think there’s a different dynamic taking place — and not just because it justifies my libidinous, House of Windsor-based activities. For a start, our behaviour does not come with a backdrop of millennia of patriarchal oppression and the latent, lurking power dynamic beneath.

Accordingly, when an older man remarks leeringly upon a young female colleague’s appearance and suggests after-work drinks, the implication is dodgy. However, when the younger woman tells male pals that they are ‘hot stuff’ she is being a generous friend, at worst engaging in flirtation. And flirtation is, of course, all fine and dandy, in a way that sexual harassment in the workplace is not.

Journalist Polly Vernon provoked a riot of interest in May when she published Hot Feminist: Modern Feminism, With Style, Without Judgment, in which men fancying women and women fancying men were hotly and heartily defended from a feminist perspective. ‘Fancying people is one of the purest joys around,’ she enthuses. ‘And, yes, I understand fancying sits on a spectrum which culminates with the most unpleasant notion of objectification, but I’d hate to think of it being eradicated in the name of political correctness.

‘Women do letch at men. We just do. Poldark, Harry Styles, Dustin Brown, José Mourinho, Benedict Cumberbatch (in Sherlock guise), Gandy and Becks in their pants...We look and we look. And it is OK for us to look. More than OK: it is good! Partly because it’s empowering. It’s feminist.