I mean, if you ask a straight woman, “would you rather look at a sexualized image of a woman, or a sexualized image of a man?” Most women will pick the man.
So the question is why are creators using images of women to capture women’s attention?
I think because if it were a man, men would find it off-putting. Which I sort of get because I find it off-putting when it’s a woman. But women are somewhat conditioned to seeing women being eroticized in entertainment, so it may not be a deal-breaker for many of us.
I think it’s pretty well established that men are more visually engaged when it comes to sex. So I would agree with you. I’m just trying to work with the OP’s hypothesis that creators use women’s bodies to hold women’s attention.
There are shows where the target demographic is women that lean heavily into beefcake. So, you could say they have a female gaze. I don’t watch these shows so I can only speculate.
For shows that aren’t pretty explicitly about enticing women, what I see is less gratuitous T&A in general. Maybe I’m watching the wrong shows.
So I’m gay and naked female bodies don’t do it for me personally. Maybe this means I’m not qualified to have the following opinion.
But I think there’s an element of TV/movie nudity that isn’t directly sexual; it can telegraph “Adult” and thus “Serious” in a kind of shorthand. On TV it can even connotate “Prestige.” Would The Sopranos have been the same show without the T&A? That’s one way you know you’re not watching your mom’s and dad’s show. It’s attention-grabbing whether or not it’s erotic. Or at least it was.
I sometimes think Breaking Bad could have done with a tasteful amount of T&A for this reason, though it made out fine as Prestige TV without any, and that was perhaps a better choice for that show.
Yeah, that’s one reason I only watched one season. I don’t handle torture well, or cruelty, and definitely not sexual assault. The season I watched was pretty good but there were too many moments that really bothered me, and my understanding is it only got worse.
That’s funny, I can’t remember why but we were looking at a show on Starz, and their tagline is “we’re all adults here” which made me chuckle. As if there isn’t adult entertainment on every streaming platform including Disney, but they want to set themselves apart as having sex and swearing, okay.
Kind of a loaded question, isn’t it? People who enjoy the stuff wouldn’t consider it gratuitous.
But decidedly less so as the show progresses. It’s actually a common phenomena I call “T&A Bait and Switch” (or TABS for short) - a show starts out with large amounts of sexual content in the first season, and shows less and less in later seasons, if any. Examples include Westworld and Altered Carbon. It usually comes with a drop in quality, although I can’t prove the two things are connected.
Women in general seem to care more about how other women look, whether they are attracted to women or not.
Studies show that both genders think women look better then men, with even more women than men thinking women look better. So if you’re going to toss in pretty people as general eye candy, women are the better choice.
Male-male homophobia is pretty pervasive, discouraging sexualizing men without a nearby woman as essentially a “this isn’t gay!” signal.
And Seven of Nine was basically eye candy but her role became so much more, because science fiction. She was my favorite Voyager character, though that’s admittedly damning with faint praise.
Of course, Seven of Nine was also designed to insert sex appeal into the series, which has always been a part of the show since the days Uhura wearing a miniskirt and Kirk taking off his shirt. And for her part, Ryan accepted that aspect of the character. “The character was added to break Star Trek into the mainstream media. That was the publicity angle of the character,” she said of Seven’s look. “And they made no bones about that. They were very clear about that from the beginning, with me.”
Yet, as comfortable as she was with Seven’s look, Ryan refused to see her character as just an object to ogle, which explained her own interest in playing the former Borg. “Because the way the character was written, she was the complete antithesis of [being a sex object],” Ryan explained. “She was not that [catsuit]. So because of how she was written, and because it was so opposed to way the physical appearance of the character was, I was all right with it.”
And very much part of the Trek formula for a long time. But was Troi’s cleavage only for the boys?
I mean, my response to that stuff is to roll my eyes, so whoever it was for, wasn’t me.
There was some gratuitous T&A in the beginning of Supernatural that nearly put me off the show completely. “Oh, it’s going to be one of those shows.” Anytime I see something like that I assume it’s going to have poorly written characterization of women.
But I stuck with it and overall thought it was a great time.
I voted “for men but not for me”. I do like gratuitous female beauty in motion arts, but it doesn’t have to do with how much skin they are showing. If I could trade 10% of the sex and nudity in Game of Thrones but in return bump up the women characters 10% toward my ideal of beauty I would gladly take it. (More than that and not only would it seem weirdly homogenous, it would not seem very game-of-thronesy.)
I think both, but in different ways. I’m female and know nothing about oil, but like dramas and relationship dynamics. I am guessing the writers felt the only way to get women involved in the Landman story line and have men interested is to have the women be extra hot and have sexual undertones. No guy is going to care about what a female lawyer does unless she is hot or care about a spoiled daughter going off to college unless she wears a cheerleader outfit in every scene. So, they keep me by including some female dynamic and keep men cause they are all smokin’ hot. Granted I have no plans to watch the next season, but I watched the first two. Plus, I have heard that the stereotype of rich Fort Worth women portrayed isn’t that far from reality, but IDK
As the father of a college age girl I will just say that if my daughter got up to the things Ainsley and her mother does, I’d be in jail and her mother would be in her grave. (It’s hyperbole folks - I’m not threatening anyone)