The women in our lives may not look like the women in our fantasies - and that's ultimately a good thing.

****Editor: askmen.com's Ian Lang**** I was poking around the internet this past week, as I'm wont to do, when I noticed some celebs making more than their typical fuss about the ever-contentious issue of body image. Amid heated discussion over her weight gain, Lady Gaga posted near-nude photos with the caption, “I’ve struggled with bulimia my whole life." “News” broke that Jessica Simpson has approached two doctors for lap-band surgery, proving that Weight Watchers can make poorer investment decisions than Lehman Brothers. And, just today, I saw that Christina Aguilera declared herself pop music’s once and future fat girl, this most likely being due to Adele being a successful fat girl and Xtina having a shaky grasp on the concepts of cause and effect. My point being, I was thinking a lot about the female body, but not in the way I usually do when I’m home alone and bored. Body image is a complicated thing, but discussions on it, by and large, exclude men. We certainly feel pressures of our own, whether they be real or imagined. Just look at that shirtless action star of the moment. Now look at yourself. Now look at him. Now look at yourself. Rinse, lather and repeat until the tears start flowing. Regardless, the effect of the media’s portrayal and apparent control over the ideal female form affects us in very real ways, even if we are excluded from the conversation. We’re supposed to decry the entertainment industry’s penchant for models with unrealistic proportions, but we can't deny that Marisa Miller is truly some grade-A boner material. The conundrum for us men is how to negotiate between reality and the media's fantasies. While I doubt many of us can recall exactly when, where or how we first laid eyes upon the nude female form, I'm sure we can all remember the feelings it... um… inspired. For some readers, the old tropes of stumbling upon dad’s stash or a quasi-well-intentioned older brother likely ring true. For guys my age and younger, the internet probably played a large role. I’m sure many a man under 30 has fond memories of hastily attempting to download some tasteful nude over a 36.6k connection, while anxiously listening out for their parents' footsteps. I distinctly remember my own attempts at saving a particular shot of Ginger Spice (shut up, it was the '90s), who, as the slowly loading picture arduously revealed, is not really a ginger at all. Regardless, chances are, whatever you were able to get your hands on was hardly an accurate representation of reality: over-airbrushed centerfold spreads, genetic-freak models with comic-book proportions or even past-their-prime porn stars precariously posed and contorted to avoid unflattering angles. Either way, whatever we saw as younger men had a direct influence on the mental schemas we formed of the female body: bubble butts and buxom breasts most likely being de rigueur. Fast-forward an indeterminate number of years, depending on how “cool” you were, and sooner or later you achieved what I'm sure many of us had imagined to be our sole reason for existence: seeing and perhaps even touching a real, live naked girl. Some of you were probably making awkward attempts at getting fresh well before you could drive, which, besides creeping me the hell out as an adult, makes me totally understand why fathers are so protective of their young daughters. For the bulk of us, though, those first glimpses of bona fide nakedness happened later in high school, or maybe earlier in college for us wallflowers (shy people, not the band, although maybe them too -- who knows?). And the results were… disappointing? I shouldn’t say that, because, let’s be honest, you were stoked. But, still, some things were apparent: not every girl has gigantic, perfect breasts, and the breasts they do have don’t usually stay perfectly heaped up like a couple of airbags. It turns out that, just like us, girls have moles, zits and blemishes. Making out in the back of a car or other teenage-approved locations often led to interesting positions that created lumps and rolls in even the fittest of bodies. And, boy, were we ever wrong about that “vagina” thing. We were all like, "OH GOD, WHAT IS THAT? There’s hair and lots of skin and what exactly am I supposed to be doing with it?" Needless to say, the need to separate our youthful fantasies from the realities of real, live, breathing women often presented itself in an abrupt and at times traumatizing manner. I think the reason I find the disparity between the real and imagined so particularly interesting is that the media has consistently conjured up images capable of making a normal young woman just seem “meh.” I mean, Marisa Miller is a real, live person, who, by all accounts, looks exactly the way you think she does. But she just happens to have genes that are, quite literally, one in a million. As we men grow older and start to suss out the real vs. the imagined, we figure out what’s a reasonable expectation and what's a genetic anomaly or Photoshop wizardry. As the novelty of naked flesh wanes, we’re not blinded by every set of jugs or flash of bare leg that crosses our path. As we gain more experience, we learn that it's a lot more about the person attached to those not-as-big-as-I-thought-they-were boobs than it is about the boobs themselves. As we reach adulthood, we start to look at Victoria’s Secret models the way we do concept cars -- secretly, and in another city, so our wives don’t know… I'm kidding. We see them as visions, as escapism, as a queer, somewhat twisted depiction of an ideal. We may like the thought of getting behind the wheel and taking them for a quick spin, but we sure as hell wouldn’t want to own them. I fear a bit for the fate of today's young men. Given the ease of access and incredible proliferation of internet pornography, its tough to get away from this artificial reality. It's not just the acts being depicted, but the images themselves. The stuff that’s out there today is a far cry from the low-res, slow-loading images of Geri Halliwell I used to ogle. My fear is that such depictions could potentially take hold of, and irreparably distort, one's perceptions of what a real woman looks like. If that happens, men are going to be involved in the body image debate in a way we never imagined. I fear for that. But then I remember how it only really takes one awkward and embarrassingly short-lived romp in the back of her dad’s SUV to bring the average teenage boy crashing back down to reality.