Men’s magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women’s magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.

Roeper’s line is a deliberately exaggerated, comic explanation for a real asymmetry in magazine imagery: women’s bodies are routinely displayed for a presumed heterosexual male gaze, and even women’s lifestyle media often reproduces the same visual economy. By calling the female body “a beautiful work of art” and the male body “hairy and lumpy,” he parodies cultural double standards that aestheticize and commodify women while treating male nudity as awkward, funny, or taboo. The humor depends on blunt generalization, but it also points to how “taste” is socially constructed—what is framed as art versus what is framed as indecent or ridiculous.