Reading Muscle

This picture was put on a website advertising Body Building Supplements.

This picture shows a man eagerly watching his female workout partner measure how big his ripped arms are, while one a beach on a sunny day.

The first thing I read in this image is the way it portrays the man wanting to show off his big arms. It demonstrates how in our culture, men "want to have a lot of muscle." It shows an icon and a reference to0 other men that they too should have nice arms in order for beautiful women to admire how large they are. The image argues that men like be built, they like to have defined abs and they like to make sure their arms are up to par with what women want; They want to be labeled as, this cultures, 'hot'.
The image also argues that women, may not be into big arms- the women is not smiling- but would take the time to actually measure a how big a mans muscles are. It may be just to give the man a bit of pleasure, but the point this image makes is that women care in someway about how muscular a man is. It brings to light how men should make sure they have enough muscle to show off to women, and that women should care about muscle because the 'muscle makes the man'.

This image also presents the normalcy to heterosexuality. This image speaks not to all men, but the men that are into chicks. Even if the man in the image was gay, the distance between the bodies and his smile while the woman measures reads as Heterosexual.

This image depicts in gendered male body wanting big arms, and taking pleasure in the female body measuring just how big they are. the gender of men is shown as masculine, muscular, and heterosexual. The fact that we cannot even see the mans face makes me believe that this image argues that a "hot body" is most important in being a happy man. His face doesn't matter. What he actually looks like does not matter. the thing that matters is that he has a hot body, and he gets the hot blond to measure his arms.

My reaction as a stubborn homo is an annoyed boredom. Whereas to a Heterosexual man, the reading might cause a reaction of enlightenment- discovering that he too should be measuring how big his muscles are. This culture has seen this exact image over and over and over and over again. This image demonstrates gender roles as being the same as hundreds of years ago, with a masculine man and a submissive woman. Images like this are the reason we still are gendered into looking certain ways and wanting certain things. images like this feed the hetero normative hegemony that has been passively accepted as natural for the past centuries.