no one asks men to prove their confidence by posting Speedo pics on Instagram. (Well, straight men, that is. Gay men face similarly heightened body pressures as women do online and off, with much of the origin of both traceable to the sexualized male gaze of who is doing the looking, evaluating, and consuming—regardless of the gender of the person being consumed. Scholar Mitchell Wood expanded Laura Mulvey’s 1975 idea of the “male gaze” to include the “gay male gaze.” He writes, “Increasing the complexity of this objectification, gay men are both the subject and the executors of
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