Let’s look at a couple of moments in recent influential film and television. The first moment is that bit in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007) when Ben (Seth Rogen) and his feckless housemates are engaged in “research” for the business they’re trying to get off the ground – an online database collecting the exact timings of occurrences of nudity in films. They later find out such a service already exists: Mr Skin, a real website and, as expected, “NSFW”.
The second moment comes in the first season of HBO’s fantasy drama series Game of Thrones. Littlefinger, “the pimp” (Aidan Gillen), delivers a monologue in which he explains his childhood and, by extension, his character. Throughout the lengthy scene, there are two naked women in the background, vocally having sex. On and on Littlefinger’s monologue goes, and on and on go the women. The TV writer Myles McNutt coined the term “sexposition” to describe such a device and I’ve found myself using it with gratitude (“Thank God this term now exists!”) and resignation (“Oh God, I can’t believe this term exists”).
These two moments say a few things about the state of sex on our screens. Breasts are a symbol, a signpost and a shorthand for all that is “sexy”. Breasts, sometimes useful for feeding children, are also secondary sex characteristics (the same as facial hair and Adam’s apples – and yet entirely different). Naked breasts are the universal bloodtype of the screen: show them and everyone gets it.
Most societies operate a “no naked breasts” rule in most public spaces, while granting men permission to go shirtless if they want: a man’s chest is not equal to a woman’s. It follows that the corresponding “sexy” part on a man would therefore be his penis, yes? Yes. So why are there so few penises on television?
I am not the first person to query this. Mhairi McFarlane’s hilarious essay on a blog called The Flick is my favourite piece on the subject, and recently the American comedy website CollegeHumor released a video, featuring four female comedians and entitled “HBO Should Show Dongs”, which asked the same question.
“Hi, HBO. It’s us – your female viewers,” they begin. “From the brothels of Game of Thrones, to the brothels of Boardwalk Empire, all the way to the . . . brothels of Deadwood. . .” says one woman, “. . . you’ve shown us a whole lot of boobies,” says another. “It’s time to even the score. We’re not saying ‘no more boobs’, we just think that you should show . . . dongs.”
Why don’t we get to see that many penises on screen, outside porn? I’d wager that, for all the usual arguments – penises are not “aesthetically pleasing”; they’re comical, unsexy; viewers don’t want to see them – the reason there’s such a dearth is that women’s sexuality, and how they express it, is still clothed in centuries-old fear and misunderstanding.
That and the fact that TV is still largely the domain of straight men making content for other straight men. It’s why in the HBO series Hung – specifically about a man with a large penis – we never even get to see it. And as for the “Women don’t want to look at that!” argument, I offer you two words: Magic Mike. The excitement caused by this 2012 movie about male strippers cannot be overstated. We spent more than $160m at the box office trying to see unclothed penises in Magic Mike – and even then, there weren’t any.
As the poet Bridget Minamore had it on Twitter, “Shout out patriarchy for forcing male objectification movies for straight women to be smart and well shot to get anywhere!” Sometimes we just want penises – no bells and whistles, and no plot. As Daniel Bergner tells us in his book What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire: “More than anything, though, as an isolated, rigid phallus filled vaginal blood vessels and sent the red line of the plethysmograph high, niceties vanished, conventions cracked; female desire was, at base, nothing if not animal.”
The ladies of CollegeHumor nailed it with their proposal: “For every topless background extra, every actress that bares her bouncies but doesn’t even get a line, every minute we have to sit through this dumb double standard – you owe us an inch of Grade-A manmeat.” Seems fair.
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