May 7, 2012 |
To my great surprise I was asked to pose nude recently. By a famous art photographer. It was even a trade deal; I would have gotten a work of substantial value out of it. Oddly, my reaction was: “Hmmmm.” I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes. Maybe I’m still thinking about it; but maybe I’m hoping that this particular body of work has been concluded. I have been working out for years, and I’m certainly more picturesque now that I was a decade ago, but whatever work I’ve put in was not with an eye toward nude modelling.
Long ago, when I was arguably a more interesting subject for a nude, I did pose for a friend who was doing a series of nudes. I was a bit relieved that the shot was from behind, but when he gave me a print I realised, “I have no butt!” I think from now on I will only appear in nude scenes underwater or on horseback. I think nudity is an issue for men.
Women seem to love posing nude. I assume it makes them feel beautiful and desired. Even women that one would think might hesitate to strip for the camera for various reasons – such as shyness, uptightness, prudishness or fatness – often prove to be astonishingly good sports when propositioned for art’s sake. Women, it seems, will go above and beyond the call of duty for art. They seem to have the muse in their DNA.
Men, on the other hand, are nervous about taking it all off for the public record, even though male is the warrior gender, supposed to be naturally bold and brave. And men often impress us with their gallantry and fearless bravado: in the heat of battle, in defence of principle, in make-it-or-break-it business deals, or in defence of the weaker sex. But when asked to simply strip down, they ask for a towel or a hospital gown. And when asked to show all for art, they tend to become shrinking violets.
Shrinking may be the key word here. When women take it all off, they know that details of their bodies will certainly be regarded with interest by men and women alike, out of prurient interest or even out of sheer curiosity. But it is a different proposition for men because of that notorious differentiator, the penis.
Women will be compared, certainly, but it’s not in a way where “size matters”. Some women have big breasts, naturally or unnaturally, and some have small breasts, but scale of breast is not inherently an aesthetic or social value. Breasts of all proportions have their admirers and partisans. Some men are keen for the ample bosom of Venus, while others, devotees of the svelte goddess Artemis, insist that more than a handful is wasted. Buttocks, too, are enjoyed in a wide range of magnitude. And while, surely, women’s primary sex organs are not all alike, that is not easily discernable in photographs, and also there is little virtue seen in an enormous vagina. But alas and alack, the diminutive penis is friendless, while the middling one is, well… middling. Heroism seems to require a heroic phallus.
Both men and women serve in the culture-hero business. Men are sex symbols as much as women. But of the women we think of as such, virtually all of them have posed nude for photographed or acted in nude scenes on film or even on stage. But when it comes to “the sexiest men alive”, many of them have not exposed the fullness of their corporal magnetism.
But men are changing. Who would have guessed that they’d be sporting beards of 19th-century fullness in the 21st century? Who would have thought that men’s fashion, not long ago virtually nonexistent, would become an industry spawning dozens of magazines and runway shows on the level of women’s? Who would have thought that major stars would drop trou and let it all hang out?
Women have been relatively free to appear nude without drawing the box office poison X rating since the late 1960s. Women’s pubic hair was revealed in Antonioni’s Blow-Up in 1966. In 1993, in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, Julianne Moore did a non-sex scene talking on the phone strolling without underpants and demonstrating that her red hair is indeed natural. And in the 2000s, female frontal nudity with pubic hair generally led only to R ratings. Men, meanwhile, began showing butt; cock, however, was another matter.
The big breakthrough for the penis came in 1969 with Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling nude (as the ancient Greeks did) in Ken Russell’s Women in Love, based on the 1920 D H Lawrence novel. According to legend, both actors were hesitant to perform the scene, but after considerable drinking, mutual inspection revealed that both actors were similarly endowed. Remarkably (well, it was the 1960s), the film containing this watershed scene was nominated for four Academy Awards, won one, and was only banned in Turkey.
It was a sea change in eroticism, and subsequently, actors realised en masse that getting naked is not only a part of life that shouldn’t be excluded from drama, but also that it wouldn’t destroy their careers, especially if they simply flashed butt, which soon became almost de rigueur for film actors. If Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Ashton Kutcher and Tom Cruise can show butt crack, anyone can – even such unlikely flashers as Ned Beatty, William H Macy, Patrick Stewart and Jason Alexander.
Frontality is something else, however, as it requires a certain something, and I don’t just mean nerve. But nerve helps and Harvey Keitel, who is hardly eye candy, has done frontal in at least six films. Brad Pitt, who is eye candy for millions, has showed most everything numerous times, although he has apparently sworn off doffing because of his numerous children. Ewan McGregor has flaunted his front even more times than Keitel, probably eliciting considerably more excitement. Other leading men to have taken it all off include Colin Farrell, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Jude Law, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Colin Firth, Mark Ruffalo, Kevin Spacey, Kiefer Sutherland and Michael Pitt.
Paul Thomas Anderson took the penis to new heights (or lengths) with Boogie Nights, in which Mark Wahlberg plays Dirk Diggler, a character based on real-life porn star John Holmes, who was famed for his 13in Rodney. When he lets it all hang out of his fly at the film’s climax, Wahlberg looks in the mirror and says, “I am a star! I am a star!” Apparently, the starring penis was actually a latex prosthesis that Wahlberg later kept in the drawer of his office desk, although he did dedicate his 1992 memoir Marky Mark to his personal penis.
There’s an old saying, “It’s not the meat, it’s the motion”, and the most interesting penis appearances in mainstream film tend not to be love scenes. Christian Bale went full frontal with a chainsaw in his hands in American Psycho, while Viggo Mortensen defeated two thugs in hand-to-hand combat, in a sauna, without even a towel. And then there was Sacha Baron Cohen, who paid home on home homage to the breakthrough moment of cinematic male nudity in Women in Love, in a violent, no-holds-barred nude wrestling match in Borat between Kazakh TV star Borat and his obese producer Azamat who has angered Borat by “having a hand party with Pamela” (Anderson in a magazine). Afterwards, Borat says to Azamat, “my moustache still tastes of your testes”.
When the male organ has appeared, except in pornographic films, it has invariably appeared in an un-aroused state, but perhaps even the tumescence barrier will be broken in the near future. Vincent Gallo laid the groundwork, bringing the realism of porn to the art house with his film The Brown Bunny, in which he not only showed the real thing in its full tumescence, but had the actress Chloë Sevigny bring the picture to a climax unprecedented in non-pornhouse film. I think Gallo proved a point here. You have nothing to lose by nudity but your inhibitions, and you may even have a lot to gain. Thomas Jane, the 32-year-old actor has 49 titles in his resumé, but it took HBO’s Hung series, in which he is nude regularly, to make him a star, which he did by living up to the series’ title.
But even if the double standard is steadily eroding regarding actors’ careers, audiences still struggle with the reality of maleness. They fear the fun gun. They dread the dipstick. They pale before the package. They stammer before the hammer of Thor. And this is wrong. This organ was made to play the music of love! It’s time to put puritanism behind us.
The fact that male nudity in film is still unacceptable compared with female nudity is undeniably sexist. Some producers still say that penises are bad for box office, that men are uncomfortable looking at nude men. However, this is not universally true. I have met several men who enjoy looking at other men’s penises. Certainly there are men who are uncomfortable contemplating another’s Johnson. Some are undoubtedly men who fear that they might actually like to look at penises, with this fact declared by their very own. Then there are those who are uncomfortable looking at themselves nude, fearing that they don’t stack up well against the, uh, competition. Inevitably, I think, this too shall pass and realism will prevail. Penises are here to stay and a growing number of men are willing to stick up for them.
One activist for gender equality in nudity is Judd Apatow, a comic genius writer, producer and director. He produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which the fairly schlumpy Jason Segel (who also wrote) gets full-frontal exposure, which makes his pathetic sobbing even more affecting. It’s not just sex, you see, it’s the naked truth. And Apatow, annoyed by screening audiences’ reactions to John C Reilly’s penis in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox story, has vowed that he will put a penis in every movie he makes from now on: “America fears the penis and that’s something I’m going to help them get over.”
The penis needn’t be in your face. But it can’t be denied any longer. The penis has its place, in art as well as life.
by Glenn O’Brien
