this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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r/MenDrawingWomen didn't have a circlejerk feel overall. Quite a bit of disagreement and people saying "actually, I'm okay with this one >.>" while also being helpful. Some artists would submit their stuff for advice on "how to not end up here". People improving their work and others creating good examples of "men actually drawing women well" was celebrated. ๐คท๐ฟโโ๏ธ
You probably agree with their reasoning and general premise.
Now go back and suggest that there isn't a "good" or "bad" way to draw women, and that being horny doesn't make you a bad artist or a bad person, and see how that plays out. I bet you'll get banned, or at the very least downvoted into oblivion. Every dumping sub has some amount of debate about who they're dumping on, but that doesn't stop them from being a dumping sub.
Also, I've seen stuff get posted there just for beginner anatomy mistakes. Constantly looking for content to post and dump on (even if it's a poor fit) is the nature of that kind of sub, because rageboxes reward that behavior.
Edit: Also, most importantly, those kinds of subreddits leak. The most toxic people in the subreddit (even if the majority are absolutely wonderful people) are the ones who are nasty outside of the sub.
I mean... "bad anatomy" posts were common. So were "where's her spine?" comments. In this context, the issue was unrealistic realism for women but not for men. I'll give an example that comes to mind. At one point (maybe last year), One Piece got dunked on for how the vast majority of its women were drawn. And the fans' defense? (the post was brought up in r/OnePiece, so people were discussing it) "The men are unrealistic too. Most guys don't look like that!"
Before anyone starts, ask yourself what the difference between physique and body-ody is. Before y'all miss the point, were the male and female characters designed the way the were for everyone's enjoyment or for a single demographic's?
As for the both sides of it, when it comes to viewers who're children, there most definitely is a "bad" way to draw people in general. Friendly reminder that people getting the wrong idea about their genitals from pornographic media is common... for both sexes.
inb4 definition of "children" ๐
I'm not gonna bother countering this.
As for the rest of your comment, you've got points.
A single demographic, clearly.
My wife listens to books on tape basically all the time, and some of those books are pretty horny and treat the character designs of their men in words the same way that One Piece treats the character designs of women in pictures. As such, it seems to me that those particular books are also targeted at a single demographic; and while I don't think this has actually been studied by anyone that I'm aware of, it seems at least anecdotally that there's more current written fiction geared exclusively towards straight women than there is geared exclusively towards straight men.
My point here isn't "waddabout books, those are bad too"; it's to point out that the existence of media that's geared toward the enjoyment of some demographic or another is perfectly okay. One Piece doesn't need to be aimed equally toward every demographic. Anyone who wants to like it is allowed to like it. If someone doesn't like it because of the character designs, that's fine too; the authors of the series aren't obligated to alter their character designs to appeal to everyone. They can make it however they want.
This goes doubly for the random art that people post on reddit that r/mendrawingwomen frequently links to. Artists aren't obligated to appeal to everyone equally. First and foremost, they're trying to make something that appeals to them. And if people are positioned in a way that some people find attractive and other people find awkward-looking, if that's the intent of the art, then that's fine.
Now, you bring up kids, and I want to say that I think the idea of educating people about the difference between fantasy and reality is important, and that's how we need to be dealing with misconceptions coming from things like porn. r/mendrawingwomen is not the kind of subreddit that's ideal for doing the kind of non-judgmental education that needs to be done, though.