Thoughts on Glamour Photography

I have a few friends on Facebook who are photographers and make-up artists. So virtually every day, some of their glamour work comes through on my feed.

The other day, when coming across the umpteenth glamour pic of a young female model, the following thought popped into my mind: "Man, what's with all the chicks? I wanna see some ripped shirtless dudes too!" - That thought made me smile, both for how "queer" it would sound if I actually said that in a comment, as well as for how completely innocent it actually is. This is basically a demonstration of why I think of myself as "demisexual". Despite being at war with that label internally, I don't have a better word to describe this phenomenon at the moment.

In short: I simply have no sense of seeing anything sexually appealing in anyone upfront. Glamour photography of women versus similar "beefcake" shots of men have exactly the same effect on me. I can appreciate the beauty, health, and fitness of people as people, and nobody manages to get me going in any kind of sexually titillating way. In both cases, the though is something like: "Wow! Props to your genes, diet, and exercise regimen!" - and this is essentially all that I get out of "people watching" of any kind, regardless of the genders of the people I see. It's totally sex-neutral. So why did I get the thought of wanting to see dudes as well? Variety. Simple variety. The gender one-sidedness of the glamour genre simply bores me for being one-sided.

All that said, I am hetero-romantic. Meaning that I never feel any sense of romantic attraction to males. So on some weird level (which I can't even really explain), glamour shots of cute girls can sometimes mean something to me which images of men never can. It's totally non-sexual though, and in fact, it's usually something that I can only see in images which are not particularly "sexy", but mostly elegant or "cute". It's like there is some kind of subconscious trigger in them of memories of innocent puppy love, rather than anything sexual - since sexual attraction is something I simply don't feel for strangers anyway.

It's interesting to imagine sometimes what other people must be seeing in these things. For the longest time I thought of it as some sort of hype. It was like I could see something in it, but couldn't quite put my finger on what all the fuss and excitement is about. Why certain highly "sexy" poses get so many more likes, attention and "OMG UR SO HOT!!!!1!111!!one" comments than more neutral poses do, etc etc etc.

At the end of the day, it's not a big deal I suppose. But it does make me smile when people erase and invalidate demisexuality, because I highly doubt that most heterosexual men really see no sexually meaningful difference between glamour and "beefcake" pics. That both are in fact mostly "just beautiful people" to their mind.