Stripper Mike less than magical

With Channing Tatum yanking off his tank top and Alex Pettyfer stripping off his leather chaps… With Channing Tatum yanking off his tank top and Alex Pettyfer stripping off his leather chaps — oh, wait, “Magic Mike” had a plot?

Surprisingly, it did. Maybe the storyline wasn’t beautifully poetic, but an unofficial poll of moviegoers showed that no one walked in expecting the kind of depth seen in “Schindler’s List.” If you went to the male-stripper-themed movie to see cinematic art, get out. Get out right now and go stew in your pretension.

The only art in this movie — custom furniture aside — is the chiseled, Adonis-like bodies of the leads, and that’s A-OK.

On an intellectual note, this premise comes at a fascinating time when mainstream media — think “Fifty Shades of Grey” and porn star James Deen — is beginning to exploit women’s sexuality with the same blatant pandering that they do men’s.

Did Steven Soderbergh, the director of “Magic Mike,” intentionally try to make this the feminine complement to the male gaze? Maybe.

Mike (Channing Tatum) is 30-something-years-old, has terrible credit and works multiple jobs. He moonlights as a car detailer, a construction worker and the owner of a custom furniture store, but his primary income comes from taking off his clothes.

One day he notices wayward 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer), whom he introduces to the exhilarating and lucrative world of stripping. Mike soon falls for Adam’s responsibly employed older sister Brooke (Cody Horn). While Mike tries to charm her with his abs and laid-back attitude, Adam learns to pick up chicks and score drugs.

As Mike watches Adam descend into debauchery, he sees a fork in the road. He can grow up, as his hook-up Joanna (Olivia Munn) did, or he can keep working it on stage and end up like sleazy club owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), wearing age — if not body — inappropriate skin-tight leather pants.

After a rough night, Brooke confronts Mike about his man-child lifestyle and then they all go about in pursuit of a cliche ending.

Most things in the movie come secondary to the gimmicky entertainment. Tatum’s dancing outshines his acting — to be fair, he’s a phenomenal dancer — and there are more stripping scenes than a character-driven movie would need. There’s also little emphasis on the actual emotional toll such a lifestyle might have on a person.

That’s because this movie is to strip clubs what romance novels are to porn — in other words, something sexually explicit packaged and directed toward women. There’s some wooing of the audience, some romancing, some shallow characters to root for and gads of gorgeous, mostly naked men. Like a dog-eared copy of any run-of-the-mill Harlequin novel, sex comes before plot.

And if the female gaze is simply the camera panning up and down a man’s body instead of a woman’s, then this is, in many ways, the female gaze. But in a time when S&M is moving to the mainstream and heterosexuality is less and less regarded as the “norm,” thinking in terms of men’s and women’s gazes seems a bit outdated.

After all, there were plenty of men sitting in the audience, lusting after the leads.

It’s better to acknowledge that openly casting men as the sexual objects of a film departs from the more refined and subtle sexuality of a traditional male romantic-comedy lead. And the women, rather than being doe-eyed romantic heroines, are perfectly capable of obviously pursuing sexual gratification.

Make no mistake, this isn’t some kind of intelligently novel look at sexuality. For better or worse, it’s the usual movie sexuality. Essentially, it departs from the traditional model of sexuality sold to women.

When the women control sex in this universe, it’s not because of withholding or shrouded advances. For example, Joanna  obviously uses Mike for sex. She goes so far as to tell him to lie there and look pretty when he tries to strike up a conversation about her life.

In a way, it upends a longstanding tradition of sexually passive women in movies. As a converse, consider Kristen Wiig’s helpless character in “Bridesmaids,” hopelessly devoted to a jerk she hooks up with.

“Magic Mike” might not be art. It might not even be that great of a movie, but it does serve as a marker of what kinds of sexuality we can portray in the mainstream.

And it’s pretty sexy, too.