So as anyone who's seen me in the past two days knows... I've started a project. The Andro-Aperture Project.


It's a project about the female gaze and erotic male nudes, partially thanks to a lot of people who have doing awesome work on the subject. But one of the things I kept noticing is that the few people who were tackling this issue were, either through choice or circumstance, showing mostly a stereotypical "hot man"- white, cisgendered, able-bodied, muscular, lean, often waxed, often with little to no facial hair. 


Yawn. I mean, yay diversity (and yay for these things happening at all because it's really not the easiest thing ever and when you start these things you get told your blog is annoying and that you're ignoring science or something, but anyway) but that's not really diverse and it doesn't address what I like. Plus Suraya over at Filament tells me they need more images displaying that diversity, because they have to accept 70% of what they get sent to fill the magazine. So I'm doing my own project. I'm playing in my own sandbox, damn it, and I'm not going to be satisfied until I break this thing wide open. From my new blog on the subject (yep, you're gonna have to follow another blog):

"I’m on a mini-crusade for the appreciation of male beauty in all its forms. There aren’t enough images shot for female appreciation and if I have to make and curate it myself well, what else is new. And it’s not enough to have these images taken- no, I want to see as many sexualized male bodies as female bodies in the kinky/sex positive community, as an indication that we agree that diversity is beautiful, that we are, in fact, sex positive and at the forefront of challenging “the norm”. I want club nights designing fliers to consider having a variety of male bodies on their images. I want galleries to show men tied up or tying, being spanked, standing tall in their leather boots- and I want these images to not be ones created for the gay male community and then pushed at women. I want to see faces in agony and pleasure. I want to see erect cock. I want to challenge the knee jerk reaction that “female bodies are just more attractive”. 

“Andro-Aperture” is a photography project whose mission is to address the lack of diversity in sexualized masculine iconography (and thanks Maggie Mayhem for the name!). By embracing a variety of men, male, and trans-masculine bodies and presentations as sexy and desirable, we validate different presentations of manliness. We believe increasing the quantity and availability of imagery of the sexualized male body, particularly beyond a gay context, increases social acceptance of these otherwise transgressive expressions. 

The ways in which we seek to do this include: 

• reflecting diversity in sexy men the way diversity is being embraced for sexy women 

• showing sexually submissive men as erotic, whether partnered or as a single subject

• encouraging amateur photographers to experiment with erotic images of diverse male bodies

• encouraging professional photographers to challenge their assumptions by demonstrating that erotic photos of men made for the female gaze have a market

• presenting these images in BDSM/sexual spaces and galleries as a way of challenging the notion that women are to be gazed at, men are to gaze"

Maybe buy a badge from this Etsy seller?

Interested? Well, go check out the Andro-Aperture Project and get involved! I'm going to start writing up some tips and tricks for photographers working with male nudes to help people get into the female gaze/female interest swing of things, hold a meetup here in the Bay Area to get photographers and models together, and get started on creating a visual challenge to the idea that male erotic nudes only appeal to gay men.

Yeah fucking right.