Over the weekend I caught this tweet from someone at the Seattle International Film Festival:

Naturally, I replied:

She favorite my response and we shared a knowing moment recognizing the perpetuation of sexism in the entertainment industry.

Then I started thinking that maybe it isn’t sexism in the traditional keeping women down sense.  Maybe it’s sexism in the sense that men tend to want the objects of their lust to take their clothes off regardless of the gender of those objects because that’s the way men are.  And maybe this reality is masked by the fact that most men lust after women.

One of the great myths of male/female relationships is that gay men are somehow “better” than straight men when it comes to relationships.  All right, we may be better at relationships with women, but relationships are loads easier when you take sex or the possibility of sex out of them.  If you want to see how high-minded gay men are, take a look at any gay magazine – Out, Gay Times, Instinct – and you’ll find that they’re filled with just as much soft-core porn as Maxim.  And don’t even get me started on actual porn.

I hate to break the news, but gay men are first and foremost men.  We like to look at pretty things that make us tingle in our special places.

When I was a kid, Robert Redford and Paul Newman made some very good movies and played some very interesting characters and I went into every one hoping upon hope that they would be shirtless at least once.  And the reason I used to make excuses to stay up and watch The Wild, Wild West had a lot more to do with Robert Conrad’s tight, tight pants and his penchant for stripping to the waist than any of his adventures.  And there’s the tingle.

It seems that the straight women I know are always asking why men have to be the way they are and the straight men are asking the same question in reverse.  Well the fact is men are men and women are women.  They may be able to adjust their behavior to some degree, but what they like and what they want is hard-wired in.

So maybe most film producers are chauvinist pigs OR maybe they’re guys who know what they like, ergo what other straight guys like and will pay for, ergo they know how to make money – with car chases and explosions and fist fights and naked women.

By and large, straight guys don’t like to go to chick flicks.  I doubt that they’d be any happier to go to chick flicks if studios stopped making Transformer or Fast and Furious movies.  Chick flicks are so-called because they don’t provide anything straight guys are looking for in entertainment.  Chick flicks are for women and gay men – which is how Lifetime survives.  We can create a society in which men and women respect each other – and we should.  We can’t engineer them to be different on the inside – and we shouldn’t.  That would be creepy.

But back to my original point:  Men tend to turn anyone they think is hot into an object.  Gay or straight, it’s just something we do.  I know I do.  For instance, Matt Bomer, star of White Collar, may be a brilliant actor, but I will probably never know.  He flashes those baby blues of his, doffs the shirt and it’s Robert Conrad all over again.  I’m not sure I could even tell you what his voice sounds like.

I’m just sayin’ it might not be all about the ladies this time.