It makes me wonder what an imagine of a woman holding high sexual energy would look like. It is possible for an image alone to posses "adequate" sexual energy? How does one instil an image with enough person-hood to to allow those who find the image arousing full agency and lack of shame?

I found this trend pretty striking when looking at Anna Torv. She played the lead character on Fringe and was, I think, one of the most balanced female leads in modern television. She was competent without being one of the boys, caring without being a drip. She was rarely even damseled, to the point of even rescuing her baux a number of times. On top of this, she was shown as a doer and an intelligent problem solver. Loved the portrayal.

Contrast that with a simple google image search on her name. It's seems like its nothing but cheesecake images, straight out of the array above. Even while the show was on, I was always shocked that she was portrayed in such a sexual way outside of the show. She never even wore a DRESS or low cut top in the show, but many of the publicity shots had her in much more "glamorous" and revealing garb.

Those actresses seem bland for the same reason Obama and Romney seemed bland: in order to appeal to the largest possible audience, they try not to say much of anything.

Plenty of male sex objects have the same vibe: compare Channing Tatum in his films, versus Channing Tatum when they're trying to make him sexy.

Bettie Page is the answer! http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/male-fans-made-bettie-page-a-star-but-female-fans-made-her-an-icon/282794/

These images epitomize the stupidity rampant in what passes for commercial sexual attraction in our society. Whoever poses like this is an ass (and I mean that in the sense of "fool".) The Christ's sake, what is Jennifer doing with her mouth and tongue that anybody of any age should have an iota of respect for?

When the target is a woman the message is: Look like me and he will want you.

When the target is a man the message is: Buy whatever this ad is about and you can have sex with me.

Can we PLEASE grow up?

That seems like something of an insulting misrepresentation of Monroe and her screen image- in something like Gentleman Prefer Blondes, while far from a feminist icon (as she's playing something a comical extreme of a gold digger) she's intensely powerful- she wraps men around her finger, strides forth wearing a bold sequined dress, and does more or less precisely as she pleases throughout the movie. She's often forced to play dumb- which, from what I understand, had little to do with her real life persona- but rarely the docile, weak, barely sexual blob that's described here. That sounds something more like a Joan Fontaine figure, someone who is represented as a child who can be domineered effortlessly and who doesn't seem to have a consciousness of adult sexuality.

I found Slater's comments to be interesting and thought-provoking, especially given the sociohistorical setting in which he was writing (the second wave feminist movement was just picking up steam and gender was beginning to be addressed more seriously by social scientists). However, his arguments are subjective and probably not based on any meaningful evidence (though I haven't read his book, so I could be wrong). In this excerpt, Slater makes sweeping, essentialist judgments about the nature of sexuality, while condemning some women for being "docile, accommodating, brainless, defenseless, totally uncentered, incapable of taking up for herself or knowing what she wants or needs." Though he is specifically referring to the fetishized Marilyn Monroe archetype, some women prefer to be sexually submissive, as do some men. To me, his comments come across as subtly misogynistic, as well as not-so-subtly homophobic.

I don't agree with this reading of Marilyn Monroe's persona. I think her characters actually negotiate with the possibility of her sexual agency in complex, often playful or parodic ways. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would be a prime example.

"Twenty years in the future, those girls would still be young, would still be smiling or smoldering or simply looking stupid, with their legs wide open. Some of them [now] were eating lollipops or bananas. They would still be eating those." -Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut

I don't really understand why those images are considered bland, but that aside, it doesn't seem fair to do a search specifically for the kind of images that would prove the point. It would be more fair to search each of the top celebrities on Google Images, save the first 20 pictures from each, and ask a third party (who is blind to your hypothesis) to rate each of them for their 'blandness'.

I don't think this assessment of Monroe or of commercial female sexuality is right at all, although what I'm going to propose as an alternative isn't any more healthy. We aren't dealing with an image of a woman who lacks sexual agency and doesn't know "what she wants or needs"--on the contrary, she's hyper-sexual, knows exactly what she wants, and is highly skilled (but also inexperienced, of course). The thing is, what she wants is to give her man exactly what he wants. And not just in the sense of performing a service because she wants to keep him happy, but rather in the sense that giving him what he wants is the thing that turns her on the most. The reason this ideal looks "bland" is because it needs to be an empty vessel into which each individual man can pour his own fantasies.

This all flows naturally from the dysfunctional gender dynamics of our culture. At the general level, women's primary function is to serve men, and the ideal woman derives her primary satisfaction in life from doing it well. Sex is a specific case of that general rule: sex is something that women do for men. And, of course, that means that the ideal woman derives her primary sexual satisfaction from pleasing her man.

One of the effects of this dynamic is that sex becomes transactional: Men deserve or don't deserve sex under various circumstances. Women provide or withhold sex under various circumstances. As a result, the ideal female sex partner is one for whom sex is the top priority--sex loses its power as a bartering chip, and since her sexuality revolves around pleasing her man, the man in question gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it.

Needless to say, this system is bad for everybody. But as usual, it's worse for women,

Nowadays, we cannot forget the other forms of female body consumption that aren't real people. Comics, video games, anime, etc.

There is the idea of a perfect "waifu" (a slang term of combined English and Japanese origin, meaning "wife" with the connotation that the person has such an attachment to a fictional character that they claim a sort of joking (or not joking) ownership of them)

Example: Don't you dare like Harley Quinn from Batman! Harley Quinn is my waifu and I love her more than fan could!

It's also where a lot of over anime and video game fanservice comes from. Creators deliberately insert female characters with large breasts, scanty clothing and armor and absolutely no personality to exist as sexual avatars or cardboard cut-outs. These female characters are not designed to be people, they are designed to be masturbation devices.

An average example of this could be: http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/post/74093414901/liliana-submitted-the-brandish-video-game

Generic fantasy female characters where even the attack poses are designed to display sexuality rather than power. This is where the spine-breaking happens in female characters. The need to show boob or ass is overwhelmingly prioritized above plot, above character, above logic or physics. Sex and selling the idea of easy female sexuality is more important than a story or character making sense.

Another very obvious example of this is the wartune advertisements: http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/search/wartune

Wanna know the kicker? Wartune doesn't even have sexy women in the game. These are just bait-and-switch advertisements. So those bland "save me my knight in shining armor!" damsels don't even exist as characters. They are solely to lure in male players with promises of easy, bland sexuality.

well that explains why there's not a lot of brown women included in the male gaze. those jezebels would eat him alive i reckon!! sheesh...

The original quote on Monroe was about her film-personality. I don't think it is fair to compare still images from the internet - entirely stripped of context (a context which others have already pointed out is based on appealing to the mass market for advertising), with modern characters' film-personalities. Some of which are much more whole than Monroe (who was vapid even for HER time - look at some of the other sharp sexy females in even older movies).