Does YA Objectify Guys?

One of my favorite ways to pass the time at home (and work, yikes) is reading blurbs about upcoming YA books. Like movie trailers, the little plot paragraphs on Amazon give me exquisite tingles of anticipation. But lately my happy tingles have been stopped cold by a line I seem to read everywhere these days: "And then she meets unbelievably gorgeous Boy X." Really? Again?

It wouldn't be so bad if the boys were just super hot, but too often they're perfect too. Yesterday I was reading a new book (otherwise excellent) where the main boy was the hottest guy in school, was a perfect gentleman despite the MC being a giant bitch, and devoted his life completely to the girl after knowing her for five minutes. That sounds more like a wish-fulfillment robot than any 17 year-old guy I've ever met. Crap, the 25 year-old guys I know are nothing like that.

Okay okay I know. YA readers and writers love to fantasize about the slightly dangerous but oh-so-perfect boy who will risk his life for us even though he's knee-meltingly gorgeous and, well, no one's ever actually asked us on a date before. But I think we writers need to back away from this. It's starting to border on objectification - just as bad as women are objectified in pron and really awful action movies.

Does/did anyone out there actually have a "hottest guy in school" anyway?
Are they holding elections now or something?

Of course there are loads of great books where the guy has his own awesome thing going on. Kartik from the Gemma Doyle Trilogy and Hannah Moskowitz's great boy-friendly books come to mind. But I see the reverse too often to feel entirely comfortable about it, even in my own writing. It's easy to make our lead characters flawed, because often they are a reflection, however refracted, of ourselves. Making the person "we" fall in love with imperfect is harder, because in some ways the author is as blind to his faults as the smitten MC.

The antidote, I think, is to put more thought into our male characters (or make our boyfriends read our books. The boy shredded the male characters in my first book). The best guy characters have goals and interests (and maybe even agendas!) that have nothing to do with the main girl. They have flaws like real teenage boys. They play too many video games and speak mostly in Colbert Report and Archer quotes and generally space out (my 19 yo brother is proof of this).

It's okay to make a perfect character once and a while. But there should be a good reason for it, like he's not very handsome so he makes up for it in charm, or he's grown up desperate to please his OCD mother who's the general of an interstellar space armada. Everyone has flaws. Even our mysterious demi-god-werewolf-ghost boyfriends who just transferred to our high school school from Borneo who OMG is so dreamy.

How do you avoid cardboard characters of the opposite sex?