If you can count more than 20 penis-based puns in the paragraphs that follow, I'm donating my fee for this piece to charity. Admittedly, that's not going to make much of a dent in any cause but, as they say, size doesn't matter. Why exactly they say that, however, is something of a mystery, particularly considering the impressive number of column inches Jon Hamm's crotch has been racking up recently.

Ever since the "Mad Men" star was snapped with an enormous bulge in his pants, large swathes of the internet have traded lolling at cats in favour of rampant speculation about the size of Hamm's package. And where media interest goes, advertising dollars follow. Two underwear companies are now fighting it out to brand Hamm's bits. Both Jockey and Fruit of the Loom have announced their willingness to give the underwear-shy actor the support he has shunned for so long.

So what does the Mad Man himself think of all of this? In short, not much. As he told Rolling Stone:

"They're called 'privates' for a reason. "I'm wearing pants, for fuck's sake. Lay off."

And he has a point. Leveling this amount of scrutiny toward a woman's body immediately provokes outraged accusations of sexual objectification. Are things any different just because Jon Hamm's a man?

To a large degree, yes. There is nothing new about the sexual objectification of men in popular culture but, to date at least, it has operated very differently from the way in which women are objectified. In The Boy, Germaine Greer wrote of the objectification through centuries of young males, from Cupid to David (supposed to be disproportionately small) to Kurt Cobain. It's a visual paean to the beauty of boys full of pervy-cum-erudite captions such as:

"Correggio is the only artist ever to have depicted the anus and scrotum of an airborne angel."

Greer intended the book's celebration of younger men to be deliberately controversial and demolish one of the "last great western taboos". Ten years later, however, older women swooning over boys doesn't seem like such a big taboo: there are plenty of mums who lust after Justin Bieber just as much as their tweenage daughters. As Greer conceded even then, "Women have now claimed the right to look and to derive pleasure from looking" – be that looking at younger boys or middle-aged Mad Men.

The last few decades have seen an increasing emphasis on an idealized male body in the popular media and advertising. Indeed, women in a recent AdAdge survey said they wanted to see more sexy men in Super Bowl ads. When asked why, many said because this type of imagery is everywhere today, so "they've come to expect it." And Cindy Gallop, something of an original "Mad Woman" of advertising and founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, told me:

"As a straight woman who appreciates a nice penis, I see nothing wrong with celebrating Jon Hamm's. We all have genitalia, we all have sex, and I'd like to see less prudishness and more acknowledgement and celebration of that in media and advertising."

While the female gaze may be growing more prevalent, it rarely has the menace associated with its male counterpart; it is, as Gallop puts it, more "celebration" than objectification. And the reason for that is simply that male bodies are not commercial objects in the same way as female bodies. They are not blithely compared to "cool cars" by Esquire editors; nor are they the raw material of the multibillion-dollar sex-trade market. A large penis is not an "Industrial Vagina".

All of this is not to say that sexual objectification of the male body can't be harmful. Indeed, there is evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of men in advertising is driving an increase in eating disorders and poor body image among men. However, for the most part, men are still more relaxed about their bodies than women.

Indeed, a Guardian interactive project launched last month found that men are more than twice as likely as women to underestimate their weight. In these cases, getting men to feel bad about themselves might, perversely, do some good. Speaking about the enormous billboard showcasing David Beckham's crotch that used to be in Midtown Manhattan, one male advertising exec said:

"David Beckham's perfectly photoshopped abs didn't leave me in any doubt that this is the 'ideal' shape of a man, but I can't say it made me feel any more like a rotund, micro-endowed freak than usual. That said, I think I did go to the gym the day I saw it …"

Of course, with the next season of Mad Men airing in just a week, all this talk about Hamm's private parts could just be a carefully orchestrated publicity drive. John Hamm's TV persona, Don Draper, once said that "What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons." It might just be that that the buzz about his bulge was also invented by guys like him, to sell AMC dramas.