Men’s images of women’s bodies

In this chapter I will focus on accounts by male heterosexual partners where they comment on their girlfriends’ or wives’ physical attractiveness, and I will relate those accounts to standards of beauty and slenderness. This analysis is allowed by the fact that, in four ¹ of the ten autobiographies in the data set, the third-person interview was with the male partner of a female participant. Within the categorical framework exposed in Chapter 3, I will relate general accounts of feminine beauty to the speakers’ positionings as heterosexual men, as lovers and as caregivers for their wives or partners. I will discuss this analysis with respect to recent developments in research on heterosexual desire and images of female beauty.