Women, whether sitting on panels of beauty contests or destroying each others’ fashion sense around the water cooler, have always been able to appreciate feminine beauty. This, of course, gives them a distinct competitive advantage when it comes to bending us to their wills.
It’s high time we turned the tables and that grown men started discussing each other’s looks in other than derogatory fashion.
So here, in the interests of gender equality, are five men who would make even the most militant heterosexual question his beliefs.
1. Hugh Jackman in X-Men (2000)
There is something about watching a childhood icon like Wolverine come alive, especially in this hunky frame that starts something stirring you didn’t even know was there. His pose when he has the blades on one guy’s neck and turns around to cut through the shotgun is unforgettable. So is the black leather. Pity about the yellow spandex. Hugh shows more skin in this year’s Wolverine, but this, before we knew he was a song and dance man, is his most charged moment.
2. Harrison Ford in Star Wars (1977)
Sure, Luke Skywalker is the guy all adolescents identify with. He is the guy we would like to be but Han Solo is the man we would want to have. In a movie rife with sexual confusion and genital metaphor, it’s still Han’s handsome smile that steals the show. It’s not Leia who gets our lightsabers rattling, its…well, you get the point. The Greeks understood that all teenage boys secretly desire to be, uhm, Greeked by interesting older men, and the big brother figure of Han fits the bill perfectly.
3. Jake Gyllenhaal in Jarhead (2006)
Jake spends most of this movie prancing around the desert in varying states of undress, most memorably wearing nothing but a Santa Claus hat on his crotch. Ho, ho and, indeed, ho. In a military society inhabited only by males, it is guys like Jake who have to provide the festive spirit, and this he does admirably. At the end-of-the-war party, his commanding officer welcomes him with the words “a little overdressed, aren’t you, soldier?” In other words, “get yer kit off, Jake.”
4. Elvis Presley in King Creole (1958)
The proverbial “if I had to fuck a guy” guy. Elvis was gorgeous in Jailhouse Rock, but it is in the opening scene of this movie, singing Crawfish out on the balcony and combing that hair, that is his defining moment. Long before Bowie, the Pelvis was the first superstar to toy around with sexual identity. “Everyone who sees Elvis and does not want to be Elvis there must be something wrong with,” quoth Bruce Springsteen. We all know what he really meant.
5. Macaulay Culkin in…well, let’s just drop it here, shall we?
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