Fair point. Hot is more specific. But consider that the tone of
   voice for "cute" can split it into two different words: Think of
   a "short cute" starting with a high pitch and gong to a lower
   but still high pitch. It's kind of non-committal, equivalent to
   a male "yeah" said a lower tone with the same high low but same
   range. Hmm.. I was gong to try to list all the ways to intone
   the word "cute" but that could take a page or two tongue
   emoticon Think of the way a woman will say the word "cute" when
   she means "hot". Compare to how a man says "hot" - the way the
   word sounds. They use the same way of saying it and it means the
   same thing in that context. Now if a man is talking about a
   stove being hot he doesn't use the word the same way, just a
   woman doesn't use "cute bag" in the same way. Ok, it's not
   equivalent, but the point is, the same word can have many
   different meanings, depending on how it's said and in what way.
   I think it's just a kind of happenstance that while a guy trying
   hard being "cute" and a guy who is attractive is "cute" both are
   "cute" but they're different cutes... whereas the word "hot"
   does not carry the dual meaning in that way. Yet in the two
   different "cutes" referring to a man, it's objectifying him in
   some fashion. But with "hot" from a man the objectification has
   a smaller set of meanings. == and, truth be told, if a man finds
   out that a woman thinks it's "cute" that he's trying too hard,
   he feels emasculated, which is the equivalent from a man's point
   of view of a woman feeling objectified for being "hot". == I'm
   re-reading the OP... OK ... i WAS starting to go in the wrong
   direction in my explanations earlier... but I think for now I'm
   going to stick with "cute" as
   similar-although-not-quite-the-same-as word for "hot" in the
   contexts that you're referring to. Both are very versitile
   words. Men call other men "hot stuff" too in a way that's not
   sexual but has the equivlant use for women, for example. "On
   fire", "smoking" etc. == Emasculation is objectification though
   from the man's point of view. He doesn't feel "whole". His "I'm
   a man" image gets reduced to feeling as if he's a preschool boy
   or at best, an awkward pre-teen. He's lost his puberty, lost his
   virility. Not quite lost his penis but shrunken. Consider the
   origin of belittle itself: "late 18th century: a coinage of
   Thomas Jefferson originally meaning *diminish in size, make
   small*; the current sense dates from the very end of the 18th
   century." So yeah. It's objectification, if not explicit. == Ok,
   you've gone a _lot_ further here than I was thinking. You're
   incorporating the legal system, rape, introduced expressions I'd
   never use in a millions years. My point is, on a everyday social
   level, not in the extremes that you're speaking of (which _can_
   be separated out for the purposes of discussion), women do
   objectify men on a regular basis socially. They do it to boys,
   they do it to men. Just as men do it to girls and men do it to
   women. But from that point, the spectrums can vary wildly when
   you begin to introduce power differences in areas where there is
   a definitive inequality: the court systems and such. == Oh, men
   in my generation called women "hot" too. I knew what it meant
   then as I do now. My brain is just wired differently. "She's
   hot" is a synonym to "she's attractive" - I know that. So in
   that sense it's used visually. One could say, "What about her is
   hot?" and then you get to find out how the man objectifies the
   woman in that case. I just don't usually participate in those
   conversations. Picking apart someone's physical attributes was
   never interesting to me. ==