Battle of the Sexes

Recently, my husband and I had a battle of the sexes and the sad, frustrating, maddening thing is that he won and it's twisting my tits just thinking about it. This victory of his might surprise some of you that know us, since I'm the one that is the more correct out of the two of us in most matters of debate. But the sad truth is that in our latest clash of Mars versus Venus, the male of the species obviously has the upper hand and I'm powerless to do anything about it.

It's no secret that as part of my promotions activities I collect a lot of pictures of bands and their members. Over time, this collection had grown quite large until our hard drive crashed the first time a while back. (My three constant readers will remember this unfortunate event.) However, through diligent effort and many kind submissions from sympathetic friends, I was able to replace a lot of what I had lost. I can't help it if a majority of the pictures are of three or four specific men. Some of them are just more prolific when it comes to seeking out photos for press items. And even though I have a sizeable catalog of hotties in tight pants and eyeliner, my husband is good natured about the whole thing and views my girly crush with amusement and tolerates my occasional hormone bursts while searching Google images. If he's been insecure about any of this, he certainly hasn't said anything to me about it.

So because we obviously have this wonderfully understanding relationship where I can keep looking at menu even though I'm on a very restricted diet, all should have been well when I went to the mailbox the other day and found that my husband had subscribed to a "men's issues" magazine called FHM. For those of you who don't know, FHM is a magazine that runs articles on everything from sports to fashion to electronic gizmos to sex advice to automotives to entertainment, peppered liberally with scantily-clad women. Pretty much all the advertisements in the magazine involve some young, hot, strategically clothed vixen selling anything from men's deodorant to motor oil. It's kinda like Cosmo for men, only that I've never seen that much male flesh in Cosmo. Maybe that's why I don't buy it.

But my husband assured me he liked the magazine for its reading materials, and reassured me it was no different than Maxim or Stuff or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Instead of killing him outright I decided to do what every loving wife would do in a similar situation: I threw a hissy fit of mass proportions. I whined; I yelled; I pouted; I gave him the cold shoulder. I couldn't believe that he would go out and get a magazine like "that kind" without telling me first. But somewhere in the next day or two I realized that I was being unreasonable, and that it was unfair for me to harbor all those pictures on my computer and not let him have a little fun himself. I did try to argue that the pictures I had on the computer were all of fully-clothed men. I will admit there are a few where they aren't wearing shirts, but seeing a man's nipples is a completely different issue than seeing a woman's nipples, so my thinking was that a shirtless man didn't count as "nudity," partial or otherwise. But again, with that calm logic that makes me want to push him off a cliff, he reminds me that I get the same physiological response to those pictures as he does to his magazines. Translation: we drool over hotties, regardless of quantity of clothing. So, I get to keep collecting my pictures and he gets to keep his magazines.

Now, for those of you that think this is the end of the story, it's not. This matter that just passed isn't the battle of the sexes that I alluded to at the beginning. All that dribble you just read is what we writers like to call backstory. Now that you have an understanding of what happened, I'll finally get to the point.

When the dust settled and I was back to my perky self again, I decided that maybe I would subscribe to some sinfully sexy magazine as well, just to see what the husband's reaction would be. I went online to see what kinds of goodies they had out there and did a general Internet search for magazine subscriptions. Well, this one great discount site had a lot of magazines, but nothing of the caliber that I was looking for. So I tried another site. And another site. And another site. Very quickly a disturbing pattern began to emerge. No matter where I looked, the section of "men's magazines" had all the requisite categories of things that interest men: cars, sports, gaming, electronics, music, fitness, cigars. And, they had a bunch of magazines that had copious amounts of tits and ass, even if the magazines weren't specifically about tits and ass, like Maxim, Stuff, FHM, etc. Then there were the magazines that really were about tits and ass, like Playboy, Hustler, Penthouse and the tons of other similar variations that are out there.

However, whenever I clicked the link to the "women's" magazines, what I got were magazines about cooking, home decorating, gardening, weight loss, gossip, celebrities, hairstyles, weddings, parenting, crafts, fashion and a ton of stupid magazines by Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. Other than Playgirl, I found NO magazines even remotely similar to FHM or Maxim. Cosmopolitan was the closest cousin of the soft-smut magazine I could find, but inside its pages were MORE SCANTILY-CLAD WOMEN.

What the fuck is wrong with the publishing industry? Don't get me wrong. I don't mind sexy women. There is a part of me that is actually happy that the female of our species is so highly prized that they are everywhere in the media, and that our bodies are so glorified as to need to be displayed with as little covering as possible. But what about the men? Aren't they just as desirable? Don't their bodies turn on just as many people? Are they no less important? Aren't there other women out there that would love to see more man flesh in their Cosmo than perky tits and flat abs of women that we could never be like?

I think that there should be a revolution in the printing industry. What we're talking about here is more than just hot bodies and hormones. I'm talking about equality among the sexes. I feel that women have been objectified in the media and in our society for too long. It is time we balanced the scales and ensured the equal objectification of the sexes. No longer should men be in the shadows, hiding their luscious bodies. No longer should Sports Illustrated only have a female swimsuit issue. No longer should steamy men be regulated to cheesy calendars that come out once a year and romance novel covers. It's time we as women step up to the plate and demand our share of the sexual stimulus pie. We need to let those wrinkly old men that are running these magazines know that we demand more buff men in our magazines and in our advertisements. If a woman with big tits can sell a car, imagine what a hot young man just out of the shower will do for the sale of ice cream.

If you think it won't work, I offer this example: The product you are selling is fabric softener. Advertisement A has a pink teddy bear bouncing in your stack of newly washed and folded towels. Advertisement B has a gorgeous young man in his underwear bouncing in your stack of newly washed and folded towels. You tell me which brand will fly off the shelves faster.

So if you are with me on this, I suggest you find the contact information for the advertising and magazine moguls of the world and let them know that this kind of sexual inequality will not be tolerated any longer. We're now in the 21st Century, and women have fought long and hard to show men that we are just as valuable as they are in the areas of equal pay, voting rights and all the other shit that the women's movement over the years gave us. But it's time to take this long-overlooked area of women's disenfranchisement and put it to rights.

Vive la revolution!!!

In order to more effectively petition the powers that be, Marie is in search of reference materials with which to use as evidence when making her argument. Submissions of the types of men that you desire to see more of should be sent to her at poisongirl@hobotrashcan.com, and know that all the materials sent to her will be put to very good use.

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