I'm deeply troubled

[RiyahArp]

It's harder to make a man a bit steamy than you think. The problem I think is a lot of male attractiveness is reliant on power, not just showing skin. You have to emphasize the power of the male frame and muscles when you do so, which makes it very hard when you want the guy to show off a lot of flesh. This is why a lot of gear in something like WoW tends to really exaggerate male shoulders via pads, and you also get "costumes" as a form of attractiveness, since certain things have innate power of their own; cowboy, soldier, etc.

It's actually really hard to do, because on the one hand you end up with exaggeration and caricature, and on the other ridiculousness. I mean, it even goes down to how you render the muscles; if it is too chiseled, it can look bad, like the anime Free's male characters and all the little lines around their abs and middle. Another anime that did a very bad job was Pilot Candidate/Candidate for Goddess, which shows you why the devs didn't give the exact same shorts to men as women from fashion report.

[Ayer2015]

snip

I don't particularly agree with this. The projection of power may be considered from a societal standpoint in some cultures as attractive, however those aspects are separate from normalized standards of male physical attractiveness. I find the positions of many on the forms wanting to apply feminized forms of dress to somehow be sexy on males, which for the majority will not translate. That being said I highly doubt our mmo devs will ever focus on the sexualization of the male form based on both the demographics of the game and those of the dev team. If they were to do so however, you would likely see far more muscularity of the male models and more shirtless/revealed torsos in the male armor models.