[LINK] Who's cuter?

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Positive Liberty, Timothy Sandefur wrote about the controversy over Tom Ford's Vanity Fair cover and goes on to wonder why the female nude seems to be more prevalent than the male nude: "Is the preference of female over male nudity due to some objective aesthetic superiority of women over men, or is this determined simply by a person’s sexual preference? Do women’s magazines not feature male nudity because women don’t find that as compelling as straight men find female nudity? Or is it, as I think, because naked women are prettier than naked men?"

This might well be my experience and my tastes talking, but "pretty" is to me somehow an irrelevant adjective when one's talking about men, or at least when one's talking about the majority of men in the majority of contexts. That said, the concept's relationship to the prevalence of the nude seems obscure to me. Do we only want pretty pictures?