Male nudity: why it matters to men too

On a couple of occasions over the last few months, I’ve tweeted a link to this video:

I’ve done so, first and foremost, because it’s funny, ballsy, and hey, who doesn’t want to watch a group of attractive women making an impassioned plea for more dong?? However, it also resonates because the whole issue of full-frontal male nudity in TV shows and films has long struck me – alongside the Bechdel Test and the onscreen presence of women over the age of 50 – as one of the more obvious bellwethers of any shift in the prehistoric attitudes toward gender and sexuality that still shape what we can and can’t see in mainstream media.

In the case of male nudity, it’s an attitude that not only has a direct impact on female (and gay male) viewing pleasure; it also shapes the way men feel about their own bodies, and limits both their comfort with being naked around other men, and their ability to discuss male nudity (and its associated issues) in a mature way. I was lucky enough to play team sports with grown men from the age of 14, so although it took me a while to shake off puberty-induced shyness, I eventually grew comfortable with the whole routine of showering and changing alongside other men (getting naked in front of women was, for a long time, an entirely different matter). Other guys aren’t so fortunate: in a lot of cases, once they leave the towel-whipping, size-shaming, rough-house confines of the school changing-rooms, the only real exposure they get to full-frontal male nudity comes via porn, which hardly gives a representative picture of body proportions.

Because of the way it venerates the penis – and the large penis above all – porn is often blamed for male anxiety around cock size and, by extension, sexual prowess. None of that is really porn’s fault though. Sure, the fact that most viewers like their male stars to have a big dick is partly a consequence of way the industry has actively shaped their preferences, but I think there’s also an argument to be made that it’s primarily an instinctive, organic thing: simple aesthetics more than cynical, exploitative marketing. As far as visual entertainment is concerned, the real crime has been committed over the last few decades by Hollywood studios and the big TV networks, which allowed female nudity to become more widespread, more explicit, and, in a few enlightened cases, more honest, but continued to ensure that the area between a male actor’s belly button and his lower thigh remained a mystery to most viewers.

The result is that for years now the average Joe in the street has been able to leave school at 18, and go through the rest of his life without ever seeing another man’s penis in any real detail – and certainly not his erect penis. For some people, that probably comes as blessed relief; for others, there’s a decent chance it’s actually beneficial as far as body image is concerned; but for a lot of guys – particularly those who watch porn – all it does is distort perceptions of what constitutes ‘normal’ and how they themselves stack up against that. Ignorance breeds myth-making, and that in turn feeds into and reinforces a general, widespread discomfort with the idea of simply being naked around other men.

A few more cocks on the telly won’t sweep all of that away, of course. Too much of the way we feel about our bodies comes from the way we’re educated, our sexual experiences, the influence of religion, the enduring misconceptions and prejudices around homosexuality, and a bunch of other shit that will take years and years to confront properly. However, in the context of all of that big stuff, a few inches of ‘Grade A man-meat’ on our screens every now and then would be a pretty easy place to start. As well as taking the first baby steps toward addressing a serious (and seriously sexist) imbalance, it would find favour with plenty of viewers (both female and male), make sex scenes feel more authentic, and serve as a valuable reference-point for a lot of men who are shy and insecure about their bodies. In time, it might even help to normalize the idea of male nudity, and to remove the lingering stigma from the idea of straight dudes looking at other dudes’ genitals.

So yes, HBO, you should absolutely listen to your female viewers and show a whole lot more premium penis – not least because, in the process, you’ll be doing your male viewers a big favour as well, regardless of whether they realise it at the time.