How to explain the fact that 300 has earned more than $200 million from an overwhelmingly male audience? Does iit mean that “20 million closet cases snuck off to see an illicit fantasy about bare-chested men in Hellenic Speedos,” as Slate‘s Matt Feeney inquires, “or that young men from the vast heartland of this very conservative, Christian, pro-military country flocked to see an unabashedly heroic tale of Occidental, republican military glory?
“To believe the latter, all you have to accept is that, in imagining the sort of heroic figures they themselves would like to be, straight men would project onto them not just excellence but physical beauty. Shouldn’t a guy be able to do such a thing without being called gay?”