Bananas, eggplants, peaches, melons…supple and juicy meet erotica in the current generation, with emoji-sexting and food porn. However, this is not new news. Using food in conjunction with sexuality has penetrated history, especially in form of art, where it could be as unabashedly conspicuous or as humbly subtle as a horny artist wanted. Not all of these attempts at sexualization with food, though, have aroused laudable reception like our #yolkporn. Could this be linked to our subconscious bias?

Linda Nochlin’s Buy My Bananas presents an unclothed, hairy man with pleading eyes offering a tray of bananas. In her note, Nochlin reveals where she even got this idea of using fruit and nudity in an erotic manner, and we can compare the original, more conventional Buy My Apples with the parodic, off-putting Buy My Bananas.

With such similar contexts, it is logically perplexing as to why these two works evoke such different reactions from the audience.

Of course, like Morimura’s parody of Olympia, the stark similarities in composition and visuals are there to exaggerate the differences; it’s like one of those children’s puzzles in which they ask, Can you spot the differences? In the case of these works of art, the differences lie primarily in the audience reactions than in the actual pieces.

Although the reasons for its extreme absurdities are obviously to make a point, Buy My Bananas has its bias in that the way we see females as attractive is not the same as the way we see males as attractive. Females can be depicted as attractive in more ways than males can, according to common social preferences–but that’s not to say if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Take, for example, the posture and context of the Buy My (respective fruit) pieces: to be holding a platter of anything for anyone is quite a subservient task, and it is written subconsciously in society that only women generally look sexier in a subservient manner; the idea of the man being the subordinate and subservient is more of an up-and-coming idea that hasn’t achieved notable momentum in the minds of the majority.

Take, too, the physical orderliness of the two fruit-bearers. The woman is shaved throughout her body, and her hair is gathered neatly into a bun above her head. The man, on the other hand, has his body hair comparatively intact, and even the hair on his head and face is allowed to just be. Granted, because this is a parody piece Nochlin purposefully portrays this man as shaggy to make her point. This difference in orderliness plays on the different societal expectations from males and females in which the latter should be better kept and cleaner than the former in order to be attractive.

Mayhaps as a result of these feelings of discomfort and the greater difficulty in aestheticizing males, nude female artwork is more publicly prevalent than nude male artwork in this recent age. It could be all a matter of mere comfort—simply that a greater number of people are comfortable with looking at nude females in erotica than at nude males for the same sexual purpose.

Along those lines, I’ve noticed that more females can admire both male and female bodies than males can; the majority of males whom I know are uncomfortable with seeing each other’s genitalia and consequently with openly admiring the male body. I find the same with pornography: Of the people who would watch sexual acts, there is a greater amount of people advocating lesbian sex than homosexual male sex. This is most likely because both a majority of men and women are comfortable with watching two women, but fewer men are openly comfortable with watching two men, decreasing the audience. In still art, too, this concept exists.

Now, society is trying to get women to be more wary of how they expose their bodies, but equalists push to allow the same freedom of expression for all genders. Ironically, lack of clothing in females is more acceptable in media than in reality, and lack of clothing in males is more acceptable in reality than in media.

The male body can also be beautified in media if we can overcome the fear of being called “homo”; the female body can also be desexualized if we stop restricting their body exposure. Society may think that by covering up, we are saving ourselves from evils, but as we know from Titian’s Venus, hiding only further incites curiosity.

Check out more works from the Buy My Bananas exhibit.