There are similarities between the kind of certain features of representations of women that you can trace back through out culture, no matter how far back you go. Women have been portrayed in a certain way throughout history.
Naked women are represented in a certain way to make it comfortable for the viewer to look at them. Represented in a sexual or objectified way, and naturalises the process of sexual objectification.
If there is a tendency in society to stereotype men as the people who look, and the women who are looked at, it is usually because of the fact that men are the artists through history until about the 1970s as women were socially excluded from doing this. The images that are produced are somewhat reflective of the male view on the world.
The whole tradition of the nude is that an artist paints it for a patron or a buyer, and paint them what they want to look at. The buyers were men and the painters were men, so they painted naked ladies. But to avoid being called perverts or sexual deviants, they had to produce something that was socially acceptable. It had to be fictional, not real life.
A tradition of men producing images of female naked bodies to look at without ever being looked back at - you can view and objectify this woman and you will never ever be challenged.
'Vanity' by Hans Memling - women like to look at themselves, therefore it's okay to look at them.
Our society is creating a system of images that often called ideas of beauty, that are actually very specific male ideas of how women should look. These are fed into the consumer world, are unchallenged and act as constantly visible reminders of how women should act, look and appear.
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