Better A Guy Who’s Super Than Superman

A friend of mine called after a holiday dinner.

She said the guests had been pondering a conundrum. No, not the bailout of South Korea. They had been animated by animation. The earthshaking question they considered was: Why are men attracted to female cartoon characters, while women are not attracted to male cartoon characters?

It began when one woman at the table said her 17-year-old stepson found Anastasia “hot.”

The grown-up men at the table all agreed, throwing out names of other cartoon babes, such as Pocahontas and Jessica Rabbit.

The women scoffed that it was impossible to think of a single hot male cartoon figure.

“The superheroes, like Superman and Spiderman, are all wearing leotards, so you’ve got a Marv Albert thing going on there that’s very unattractive,” said my friend, Tammy, recapping the conversation. “And the manly ones are thugs with no necks, like Fred Flintstone. And you couldn’t go for George Jetson. It would seem so adulterous.

“The cartoon women, on the other hand, have these seductive voices and huge almond-shaped eyes. The animators create the ideal woman. But if a guy fantasizes about Jessica Rabbit, does he think about a cartoon body or a real one?”

I didn’t puzzle over this at first. There was the bailout of South Korea to worry about. But then a male friend at the gym told me he liked my hair longer and straighter.

“You look like Jessica Rabbit,” he said, approvingly.

I wheeled on him. He conceded he loved cartoon babes, starting with a teen crush on Ms. Pac-man.

“She had really big lips and great makeup, in yellow and blue and red,” he recalled in alarming detail. “It’s not just the way they look. Their personality has to be good. I wasn’t attracted to Belle in ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ She acted like every guy in the village wanted her.”

Why was he drawn to drawings? “Real women don’t have curves like that,” he explained. “And with real women, you can like the way they look at first, but then, when they talk and move, it’s all over. There’s no charm. Animated girls never make ugly faces the way people do in real life. You never catch a cartoon figure at a bad moment.”

I began to see the sick logic of it. Guys always asked: Veronica or Betty? But you never heard girls musing: Archie or Reggie?

While women are imbued with the concept of Prince Charming, they are not drawn to him in animated form. The golden boys who come to the rescue in ‘toonland are sexless, despite square jaws and rippling pecs. Prince Charming is as lame a consort for Cinderella as Ken is for Barbie.

There have been cartoon babes since Betty Boop, but the only animated rogue is a wascally wabbit, and his charm is pansexual.

Disney heroines are often ridiculously nubile, and the male-dominated animation industry has put a lot of subliminal effort into titillating the male audience. Even the goldfish in “Pinocchio” was seductive, with long lashes and luscious lips. The makers of “Pocahontas” said they used Christy Turlington as a model for the lithe Indian princess, described by The Times as “an animated Playboy Playmate.”

Teenage boys in America not only love their own curvy cyberbabes, like Lara Croft of the video game Tomb Raider, they also snap up the sexy Japanese animated thrillers called anime, about “the adventures of giant mechanized interdimensional sword-swinging ninja babes,” as the Web calls it.

Checking out Web sites featuring a strapless Belle and a topless Jessica Rabbit with garter belt, I began to see this gender gap as inevitable. For most guys, the more cartoonish the better. Perfect features, perfect bodies, no demands.

While women find a wide array of men attractive for a wide array of reasons, men tend to be more predictable and visual in their responses. From Jean Harlow to Marilyn Monroe to Jayne Mansfield to Jenny McCarthy to Pamela Anderson Lee, what men find sexy has hardly changed, despite a feminist revolution, except to grow more plastic and cartoonish.

From Betty Page pinups to Vargas girls to Playboy centerfolds, men are more easily aroused by iconography, while women hunger for that third dimension.

Three dimensions isn’t too much to ask, is it? xxxx