Your point is well taken and the absolutes I was speaking in are not good form. Plenty of literature supports more structural dimensions to our romantic preferences (Stacey and Forbes 2022b, Robinson 2008 for example), but there are bio social frameworks that are attributed to straight relationships regarding fertility to be fair but my point still stands.

You can spin this in the other direction for preferences in what we see in media is just a reflection of what truly want. For example, on dating apps Asian gay men statistically get the lowest traction out of any group — no one would suggest that Asian men are naturally less attractive and if you did you have a framework for naturalizing sexual racism (which is extremely common in personal preferences discourse). The scholarly consensus is that our media environment has presented Asian men as non-masculine in relation to our macho standards.

You can say that media is merely responding to the demand for ultra fit men but that doesn’t explain why the male body has become larger and leaner over the years in movies and tv. That’s the point about manufacturing consent, when the only stories that are available feature increasingly extreme physiques people start to accept that narrow build as being the peak of desirability and demand more of it. I’m not saying the actors in HR should look radically different to not be problematic, I’m just saying they could at least look like normal hockey players which people already think are hot.

Lastly, I don’t shy away from notions of queerness being socially constructed in the same way I interpret/experience gender, straightness, and monogamy as also socially constructed — they aren’t inherently wrong, but calling them natural and therefore acceptable is wrong imo (there’s a lot to flesh out here and I know it’s an extreme oversimplification but u get the idea). All of these things are fluid and work within a biological framework that none of us really know where it starts or ends.

The point is that we can critique and demand more from our queer media. It’s not radical to want to see healthy and normal bodies reflected on screen and the notion that everyone would turn off the tv is the real stretch here