A Feast for (Some) Eyes

Let’s start with Rudolph Valentino.

One of the biggest stars of the silent era, “Rudy” died young and beautiful at the age of 31. 100,000 people were in Manhattan for his funeral, and the crowd devolved at one point into a day-long riot. 

You’d better bet there was Discourse about him. 

You see, Rudolph Valentino was too attractive to women. For this sin, he was called effeminate and an example of the weakening of American men. An editorial that particularly infuriated Valentino asked, “Why didn’t someone quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmo, alias Valentino, years ago?”

The Beatles “looked like girls.” Some of this was due to their long-for-the-era hair. Some of it might have been that they were actually cute. But honestly, all that probably needed to happen was for girls to like them.

Girls aren’t supposed to be looking. If they are, they’re supposed to be appreciating the rugged, red-blooded male: Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I., or Burt Reynolds posing nude in Cosmopolitan. Even that can get you side-eyed. Women aren’t visual, the evopsych types tell us, men are. (Evopsych types usually don’t remember that people outside binary gender roles exist, because they’re too busy making up just-so stories…but I digress.)

It’s hard to tell, though, isn’t it, when every time women dare to look they’re treated as aberrations? Even when they are allowed to look, a taste for anything but the white male preference du jour is considered confusing, at best.¹ It might be okay to find a woman pretty, especially if you express a desire to kiss her while your boyfriend watches, but I’d bet most of the women reading this had at least one instance in her life where a guy got genuinely angry that she expressed attraction to the ‘wrong’ man. Any discussion of an “unlikely sex symbol” will invariably express bafflement that a woman expressed attraction to someone who wasn’t on the list of Approved Hotties.² Sometimes it’s flat hostility.

This is one of the reasons it’s so interesting when something beautiful breaks through that mold. There were a lot of elements in Bridgerton’s success, but let’s not pretend that the beautiful face of Regé-Jean Page wasn’t a huge factor. 

I mean. My God.

John M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians and Wicked, Part 1 and 2 broke the conventional mold in multiple ways, featuring handsome leading men whodidn’t look like they’d spent the past week dehydrating themselves for one shirtless scene in movies filled with color. Talk about eye candy.

I mean.

A lot of these exceptions have been commercial successes, sometimes breakouts. (Crazy Rich Asians, Wicked Part 1, and most recently Heated Rivalry did better than any analysis suggested. Heated Rivalry’s leads are probably the most “conventionally attractive,” but it’s an explicitly queer story with a textually biracial lead, so.) Unlike something like the Superhero Industrial Complex, though, there usually aren’t dozens of duplicates sprouting up in its wake. We’ve had dozens of Taken ripoffs, and Crazy Rich Asians didn’t even get a sequel.

Not all cultures are quite so pissed over different people liking different things. Japan’s manga industry rather infamously markets different aesthetics for different audiences: the everyday-ish male protagonists and pretty ladies of shonen, the everyone’s-beautiful look of shoujo, the beefy men of bara.³ The KPop industry and the casting directors in CDramas generally focus on making everyone as pretty as possible.⁴

You tell me if that’s why these media have made inroads, especially with young women, in the past few decades.⁵

Now, this isn’t meant to be any kind of survey of world pop culture, this is just me grabbing a few random examples at hand so we can see that the world doesn’t have to be this way. One of the reasons we do Intersectional Femivision every year is because so much of what we see and hear is dominated by the Guy. The Guy isn’t real—he’s a katamari of horrible men created by marketers and executives—but he very much can hurt you. He’s still complaining about Rey in Star Wars and the Barbie movie. The Guy is who the marketers want to please when they strip the queerness out of a family movie. The Guy is who the bots target when they want to smear a woman’s reputation. The Guy is treated as entitled to the rage he feels when a woman likes something he doesn’t approve of, and all the rest of us are just supposed to take it. Gosh, it’s tiring.

Rudolph Valentino was so upset by a Chicago editorial that called him a “Pink Puff” he brought it up after the emergency surgery for the perforated peptic ulcer that took his life. In 1977, he was portrayed in film by Rudolf Nureyev, another beautiful man whose masculinity was constantly questioned⁶. Nureyev himself would die young (at 54, at least, in 1993) due to complications of AIDS. Like so many other queer men, he was penalized for not getting the approval of The Guy.

So maybe, on this last day of Women’s History Month, we should look at something pretty and forget about The Guy. Ignore the terrible podcasts and YouTube videos that cater to him.⁷ Instead, find your own eye candy. Find something that makes you smile. Do it without the algorithm, if you can. I’ll give you a suggestion.

Have fun!

1. Of course, even the white male taste du jour isn’t always what we see on a screen. When I was a teenager, Sassy magazine (RIP) did a really fascinating survey about what young men and women considered ideal. In the era of “heroin chic,” the men surveyed picked a much curvier body type than the women. ↩︎
2. I don’t think you need me to tell you that this is all kind of sexist, definitely racist, and homo- and trans-phobic, because you are Magpies of refined tastes.  ↩︎
3. Narrowly marketing to specific perceived markets doesn’t come without pitfalls of its own, of course, but let’s stick with the topic at hand. ↩︎
4. They also come with their own issues, but it’s the last day of the month, let’s keep it simple. ↩︎
5. I’m just kidding. I know. ↩︎
6. Gene Wilder, one of those ‘unlikely sex symbols,’ also played Valentino…in a spoof. ↩︎
7. Remember, don’t tell YouTube to ‘ignore’ those shitty videos, it literally only encourages it. ↩︎