Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Roeper

Roeper sets up a neat little symmetry - men’s magazines, women’s magazines, same naked ladies - then snaps it shut with a punch line that pretends to be “common sense.” The joke works because it borrows the voice of cultural inevitability: of course magazines do this, and of course there’s a simple, natural reason. That faux-obviousness is the mechanism. It’s how a preference gets laundered into a rule.

The subtext is less about anatomy than about who gets positioned as the default viewer. Even when he mentions women’s magazines, the implied gaze still skews hetero-male: women, too, are framed as consuming women’s bodies, because women’s bodies are the sanctioned aesthetic commodity. The line about the male body being “hairy and lumpy” isn’t just a cheap laugh; it’s a comic inversion that exposes a real asymmetry in media: women are encouraged (and rewarded) for being looked at, while men are generally allowed to be bodies without being objects.

Context matters: Roeper comes out of a late-20th-century, mainstream entertainment-critic world where a certain breezy sexism was both currency and camouflage. Read generously, it’s a jab at magazine economics and the relentless recycling of the female nude as visual shorthand for “desire.” Read less generously, it’s the same recycling, delivered with a wink. Either way, the line’s cultural bite comes from how easily it slides from satire into justification - and how familiar that slide still feels.