THE world may be becoming ever more complicated and confusing, but one thing that happened in 2016 was not at all difficult to understand – and that was the pleasure many people got from watching a beautiful man in a steaming tin bath being washed, and kissed by his fully dressed wife. Poldark, for the second year running, clinched the top slot for most memorable television scene, according to a Radio Times poll. Third place went to The Night Manager, for a scene in which the notable character seems to have been Tom Hiddleston’s bare bottom.

One thing we can take from this is that, at least where British Sunday night viewing is concerned, 2016 was the year of the straight “female gaze”.

The last decade has seen plenty of other gestures towards this, from Daniel Craig’s Bond emerging from the water like a testosterone-buffed Venus to Sam Heughan in Outlander, but no series has been quite so committed as Poldark.

Partly this is because its writer is a woman, Debbie Horsfield, and it’s she who wrote key scenes such as in the first series where we were treated not only to a naked Aidan Turner as Poldark swimming in the sea, but also Demelza watching, lust-struck, from the cliff-top – as if we were Peeping Tomasinas looking through her eyes. Interestingly, all its directors have been male.

It’s easy to forget what a revolution this is. Watch most of the films or series someone in their forties saw as a girl, teenager or young woman, and for the most part it’s clear the camera has what some have called a “male gaze”. It is pointed where a heterosexual man might want to look. This is what we were brought up with, so it’s no wonder that, politically correct or not, hypocritical or not, a lot of us are revelling in the chance to gaze like straight women do, and then get hot under the collar.

No wonder, as has been said in recent times, Poldark has occasionally come close to breaking the internet.

Is this a good thing? Or a regressive shift, which is only going to send all of us, whether male or female, into a toxic spiral of self-loathing and dehumanisation? It’s hard to tell – and it seems there are two issues here. The first is whether all this gawping over buff male bodies is making it just as hard for men to live in their own rather more ordinary bodies as it has long been for women. Are men being forced into the same lifelong battles and self-loathings that we women have been caught in far too long?

Actors themselves are already starting to feel the pressure. Last year, James Norton, star of War And Peace, said of Poldark’s scything scenes: “That Poldark shot made me feel incredibly inadequate and emasculated. There’s always been a body beautiful thing with television, but the focus has been more on women over the last however many decades. So it’s probably right that the tables should turn, but I don’t know if it’s a healthy pressure. There is now a sort of expectation on men.”

The second is whether this represents a hypocritical and indefensible objectification of men which should be stopped. There have been plenty of articles on this, particularly with regards to Poldark, the most memorable being, “I’m objectifying Aidan Turner and I’m not sorry” in the Huffington Post.

Clearly, we don’t want to get caught up in some equal-opportunity approach to objectification. If objectification is bad it’s bad, whatever the gender of the object. But it seems that culturally we’re still a long way from objectifying men in the same way as we do women.

Rarely do we write off men’s other qualities, or discredit them as little more than their hot bodies. Not much of the porn tsunami that has engulfed the internet is designed for women looking at male bodies.

That’s not to say the objectification of men isn’t happening, however. Among the avalanche of tweets triggered by Poldark’s sexier scenes have been more than a few comments that have reduced Aidan Turner to little more than a naked torso. But most viewers are interested in the fuller character of Poldark, and there’s certainly little evidence of Turner being written off purely as eye candy.

So, should we switch off Poldark and tune into something less pec-ridden instead? I don’t think so. In a year which has presented so many troubling events, our love of it seems something we shouldn’t be too ashamed of.

Wherever we’re headed with feminism, and whatever damage the digital proliferation of images of bodies may be wreaking on our psyches, we still, whether we are male or female, need to be allowed to look at each other, admire, and not feel too ashamed about that.

It’s not the looking, or the pleasure, that’s the problem, it’s the attitudes that so often go alongside.