You may not be well acquainted with Tommy Lee’s career accomplishment, or the musical legacy of his band Mötley Crüe, but chances are you’re aware of his massive penis.
It was the defining feature that relaunched his profile in the mid-90s when the Crüe’s fame was on the decline, after he married Pamela Anderson and the couple’s now infamous sex tape was stolen and sold over the internet in what is widely considered to be the first example of online porn. If you weren’t there the first time around, Hulu’s 2022 dramatisation of the scandal, which featured a bizarre scene in which Sebastian Stan’s Tommy has a drug fuelled conversation with his member prior to his first sexual encounter with Lily James’ Pam, spawned a thousand memes and headlines. If you didn’t catch that, Tommy recently shared a full-frontal dick pic to Instagram and Twitter, which took five hours to be taken down by the former for violating their nudity policies — and is still up in all it’s glory on the latter.
Owing to its impressive dimensions, Tommy has never been shy about his junk, but the recent Instagram upload drew a (justified) load of criticism when it inevitably went viral because of its glaring hypocrisy. Online feminist platform CheerUpLuv shared stories from women who’d had posts reported and removed for crimes such as breastfeeding, or even having the outline of a nipple showing through a T-shirt – why was it that a graphic image of a penis took five entire hours to be taken down by censors, particularly given the amount of engagement it was generating? Is it that the male anatomy is deemed less offensive by the powers that be, or simply that that anatomy belonged to a powerful and influential man?
The incident occurred nearly two weeks ago now, and Tommy has finally broken his silence. He’s not exactly known for his eloquence or decorum – he and bandmate Nikki Sixx once set a hotel bed on fire while on tour, and swallowed lightbulbs for fun - and so a considered statement was never likely. Instead, he gave a typically Mötley address to fans while on stage in San Antonio, Texas.
‘A couple of weeks ago, we had a two-week break off the tour, and I went on a motherf**king bender, bro,’ he explained from behind the drum kit.
‘I got f**king sideways as f**k and got naked and posted pictures of my dick.’
Ah, the age old ‘I was drunk’ defence. Except, it’s not so much a defence in this case as a statement of fact. Not that Tommy needs to apologise for the photo; it’s his body, and if he wants to share it on the internet, we’re all for it.
He went on to say to the screaming crowd, ‘Usually, I mean I’m a titty man, so I like to see titties, but tonight is equal-opportunity night. Tonight, I wanna see everyone’s dick.
‘C’mon, boys, pull your shit out. Pull your f**king junk out. Let’s go.’
At the age of 59, with four marriages under his belt – one of which to the aforementioned Pamela Anderson, famed for her ample bosom – and a lifetime of touring, you’d think Tommy would have seen enough titties. His attempt at ‘equal-opportunity night’ was evidently intended as satire, but you can hardly blame him for playing the character he’d been playing on stage for the past four decades.
But still, the double standard persists. Consider the derision, occasionally masked as ‘concern’, for Britney Spears, who after 15 years under the strict conservatorship of her overbearing – and by all accounts, abusive – dad has developed a penchant for posting nude photos to Instagram with strategically placed flowers. Male nudity is by and large considered a funny joke, not to be taken seriously even by the censorship-happy social media overlords, to be laughed off à la Tommy, and rarely sexualised outside of the act itself - not even when a bloody great big schlong invades our social media without warning. Conversely, a woman’s nudity is almost always a political statement, whether it comes from forgoing a bra under your summer vest top or posting an artfully staged nude to your socials. It can never go uncommented on or laughed off as bantz – and, as CheerUpLuv illustrated, is inevitably censored with an iron fist. When England Forward Chloe Kelly celebrated her winning goal in the Euros by running across the pitch in her sports bra, she may not have been sexualised or objectified by the media, but the fact that she wasn't was remarkable. How novel for a woman’s semi-nakedness to be so inconsequential in the context of her achievement, we said. How strange to consider her in her underwear, without thinking, ‘tits!’
No, we’re not offended by Tommy Lee’s dick – we’re offended by the fact that he was permitted for five hours to share it with the world on a platform renowned for its strict nudity policies, when those policies are evidently only applicable to female bodies.