Joe Phillips vs. The Hawkeye Initiative

This guy Joe Phillips draws 'beefcake heroes' and I've seen a lot of women claiming that this somehow balances the scales with respect to the sexualization of women in comics.






But the thing is, that's far from the truth. First of all, we'd need hundreds of such comics printing such images for decades before we got anywhere close to parity as far as the sheer number of images goes. But second of all, and much more and importantly, these men are shown as strong and powerful. These images aren't displaying biologically impossible caricatures of oversexualized bodies.

Some compare these images to the ones produced by The Hawkeye Initiative, but The Hawkeye Initiative shows the contrast between how male and female characters are portrayed. The images produced by Joe Phillips are just a male power fantasy + a speedo catalogue. There's nothing here which informs of us of the different ways men and women are portrayed in comics.

The so-called sexualization of men is simply not comparable to the sexualization of women. Society respects men, and so their idealized form depicts strength and power. Society hates women, so the idealized woman is weak, vulnerable, and as far as comics go, biologically impossible as well.