Cassilis

Caitlin Moran in yesterday's Times on Gok Wan, presenter of C4's 'How to Look Good Naked':

"For now we have the vote, and equal rights legislation, it might well be that Gok Wan, star of How to Look Good Naked, is the most significant person in the lives of 21st-century women. For those who have never seen Gok's show the premise is simple - [h]e wishes to get the nation's women to stop loathing themselves, put a comb through their hair and wear exciting, red shoes. Within ten minutes of the show starting, I can feel my body neuroses sweating out of me, like toxins in a sauna. Christ, I think - in a possibly unsisterly, but ultimately beneficial, way. I'm not half as bad as some of these freaks. I need to ease up on myself a bit"

On reading this my wife (and I) were in whole-hearted agreement with Caitlin. A quick thought occurs though – Gok wan is simply explaining how most ordinary straight men really feel about women’s bodies.

The sort of female body image on display in the likes of FHM & Nuts should never be taken as the barometer of sexual aesthetics for men - at least not men who've cleared the hormone threshold of 17. The 'hard plastic breasts, perfect arses', as Caitlin describes them, simply aren't what most men like, certainly not exclusively. Those images are for male consumption and not in the obvious sense - they allow the viewer, more often than not in the company of other men, to affect a suitably bloke-ish attitude and indulge lazy misogynistic bragging – it’s about peer approval.

I can’t recall the source but I remember reading about a survey of sexual interests based not on questionnaires but traffic to pornographic websites – since in most cases these were the sites men visited alone, with nothing but a packet of tissues for company you’d struggle to find a more genuine indicator of what men really liked when it came to base sexual gratification. And what sort of sites do you think came out top in these surveys? By a large margin it was ‘readers wives / girl next door / voyeuristic’ type sites – sites which contain many more size 16, cellulite-laden 40-something women as they do size 8 17 year-olds. Now, before anyone objects I’m certainly not trying to impart any noble motives to the men that visit these sites. When it comes to the objectification of women and the links between pornography and sexual violence there are very sounds reasons to be appalled by the existence of these sites. I’m just pointing out that when you take peer pressure and cultural norms out of the equation, let men self-select in terms of the body image that arouses them then they aren’t that interested in the sort of shape most women feel under tremendous pressure to attain.

If it takes a gay 'camp Anglo-Chinese stylist' to explain that in such a way that women believe us so be it.