Five episodes into season three of The White Lotus and we are at least four penises down. Whether in the form of a skinny dip, a slip of the hotel robe or a braggadocious wander around the room, the male nudity has not gone unnoticed with viewers calling it everything from ‘weird’ to ‘shocking’ and ‘horrifying’.
‘Not a single person on my TL [timeline] talking about any aspect of The White Lotus besides the male nudity,’ reads one X post. ‘Call it a penissance,’ reads another by IndieWire. ‘Way too much male nudity on this season of The White Lotus,’ offers a third.
What’s that sound? It’s hypocrisy calling and it’s for anyone who has a problem with (debatably) gratuitous nudity when the shoe is on the other foot. Or the genital is on the… never mind.
In episode four, Jason Isaacs, who plays disgraced businessman Timothy Ratliff in the HBO show, accidentally flashed his nether regions in front of his family after taking too much lorazepam. Isaacs revealed that he opted for a prosthetic for the scene and has noticed ‘a lot of people are debating it’ and that chatter about his penis is ‘all over the internet’.
‘What is your obsession?’ the actor asked during an appearance on CBS Mornings. ‘Mike White [the show’s creator] is a brilliant writer. It’s the best series on television for a long time. And what is the obsession with penises? It’s an odd thing.’
He proposed that there’s a double standard at play, saying ‘when women are naked, no one would dream of talking to her about her genitalia or her nipples or any of those things’. Isaacs makes an interesting point, but he reaches the wrong conclusion.
The reason people don’t ask women about their bodies when they’ve appeared naked is not out of a greater respect for female genitalia – it’s the opposite. The female body is so often served to us on screen whether the scene requires it or not that no one bats an eyelid anymore.
In episode two, Rick (Walter Goggins) and Chelsea have sex, and he kisses her naked breasts. Not one eyebrow has been raised in response. In episode five, Laurie (Carrie Coon) takes her top off in the pool with Valentin and his friends, but it’s ‘Valentin’s bare ass’ that’s trending on X. This is not because of a divine appreciation of the female form, but because we see that sort of thing all the time.
A full-frontal flash from a 61-year-old man, however? Not so much. There are countless X posts that read ‘that Jason Isaacs scene’, ‘Jason Isaacs full frontal made me spill my soup’ and ‘when Jason Isaacs leaned back in his chair’ accompanied by a video of a person in shock.
This is not to say that men cannot be objectified or that the naked men on this specific show have not been objectified on social media – they have (see above). The point is that we have seen so many female bodies in so many different scenarios that we have become almost entirely desensitised to them. Evidently, the same cannot be said for men.
This is also not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with on-screen nudity. As Isaacs said himself, White is a brilliant writer and he has earned his audience’s trust enough to know that nothing in his show happens by chance. As Michael Hogan argues in The Guardian – where he writes, rather poetically, ‘Lucius Malfoy [another of Isaacs’ roles] has showed us his wand’ – the male nudity in The White Lotus is ‘a metaphor for their vulnerability’.
‘It strips them of their generational privilege and aura of blithe superiority, reminding us that they are as flawed as the rest of us, if not more so.’ This rings true. There is something so awkward and tragic about seeing naked Saxon trot off to the bathroom for a wank while his younger brother sleeps in the next room – his daytime bravado stripped in an instant. And Timothy sitting loose legged at his hotel suite breakfast bar, after stealing his wife’s medication to cope with the fact his life is falling apart, is another reminder that he is helpless and about to be entirely exposed.
It's also true that people are usually naked when they have sex and sometimes take their tops off when they're drunk and in a swimming pool. Sometimes there’s a deeper meaning, sometimes it just makes sense.
What’s still true, though, is that thoughtful analysis of nude scenes is rarely deployed when we’re talking about women – further evidence of how normalised it is in popular culture. In an ideal world, we’d be comfortable looking at the human body in its various forms, and male and female nudity would be included, debated and appreciated on equal terms, while knowing that the actors had fully consented beforehand.
Instead, we live in a world where the Bechdel Test exists to measure whether a film has two named female characters who have at least one conversation about something other than a man – and it’s estimated that 40% of films don’t pass. The male gaze has dictated female representation on screen since screens were invented, it’s about time a few penises upset the apple cart.
The White Lotus is available to stream on Sky Atlantic and NOW
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across pop culture, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things TV for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow shows with equal respect).