With conventional, teenage-y ideas of what a sexy man is.Īnd i think that like with most twilight-related stuff, society is confused because it appeals a lot to young girls in ways that cultural products rarely do, and it makes it harder to decode if you are not a teenage girl (which i am not by the way, although I loved the books). I can understand the analysis by looking at only the pictures (and, society's history of what-is-sexy), but i think they mainly try to appeal to female teenagers. I think the perspective of "they put a football to show he's straight" is a bit limited. To people who've seen more maybe my observations lose credibility, I donno.
#Totally straight gay porn movie
Rolling Stone may've been playing off of that as well.Įither way, having just enough context to understand this movie as told by anecdotes from some of my particularly shameless friends, that's what I see in these pictures.
Twilight, in particular, has a weird sort of precedent going for it where the two actors from the first movie were (or are?) dating after the movie finished, so it seems like that 4th wall has extended past the stage and onto the real lives of some of the actors. I think when they had the dude pose in all these silly manly ways they were summoning up a very juvenile expression of the physical male stereotypes (cuz let's face it, even adults who like this stuff admit that it's their inner child that's into it).
I don't know that Rolling Stone thought about this explicitly, but the point is that these are undertones, so they don't need to be conscious thought. They manifest the set of male stereotypes that represent patriarchy. Vampires are the dominant types, ages old, with a piercing-gaze. This seems to be a manifestation of the set of male stereotypes that represent male physicality. The werewolf is the loner, the physical one, the woodsman, etc. I haven't seen any of the Twilight movies but this dude's a werewolf in the movie and werewolves/vampires have become representative of two different masculine archetypes. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture a textbook about gender and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. He likes dudes best, unless it’s for sex, then he likes girls! He likes girls! Even though he’s all sexy and wet and objectified, he’s not a fag okay! We swear! Look! THERE’S A FOOTBAAAAAALLLLLLL! Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. Wait! I mean he likes dudes! No, not that way! In a bros before hos way. I mean, wait a second, he’s a girl’s guy. So Lautner, by virtue of being objectified, threatens to also be seen as gay:Īpparently they’d rather break one of the golden rules of photography (don’t have anything coming out of the subject’s head), than allow Lautner’s sexual objectification call his sexuality into question.
And who gets fucked? Women and womanly men (you might know them as “fags”). And, as I’ve written before, a “sexual object is to be presented as passive, consumable, inert (remember, only one person gets “fucked”).” And who does the fucking? Men. You see, in this photograph, Lautner is a sex object. Of course, everyone’s been talking about It’s either “oh he’s so hot!” or “he’s just seventeen! child pornography!” But what I think is hilarious is the fact that they had to have him posing with a football.
Elizabeth T., my awesome former student, asked us to write about Taylor Lautner’s Rolling Stone cover.