I’ve been seeing boobs in film and TV ever since I was a child and my mum inadvisably bought me a copy of the 2004 romantic comedy (which is not strictly what I would call it) Girl Next Door on DVD, but one thing I and everyone else has seen substantially less of mainstream TV is some good old dick.
But you’d be forgiven for forgetting that if you’ve been watching series two of HBO’s smash hit The White Lotus, which has bestowed upon us not just one full-frontal naked man, but another (set to hit UK screens tonight). First - as in, literally in episode one - was British-born actor Theo James, whose penis played a starring role in a scene where he was changing into his swim trunks and made ‘White Lotus pee pee scene’ the top trending search in the US last week after he admitted while chatting to Jimmy Fallon that that’s what the cut had been nicknamed on set (in the same interview he confirmed that he had, in fact, been wearing a prosthetic peen, but that’s besides the point).
Now viewers are preparing to once more be confronted with a face full of phallus as newcomer Stefano Gianino’s character Niccolo gets his kit off in episode six. And it’s not just Niccolo and Theo’s Cameron who’ve received the naked treatment this series. We’ve actually seen nearly all the male characters in their birthday suits, in one notable scene even seeing Jack (Leo Woodall) post-coitally nekked while his love interest Portia appears fully clothed. It certainly makes for a break from convention, doesn’t it?
We’re so used to seeing women on TV and films get unnecessarily naked during romance scenes while her male partner just about manages to undo his fly that the novelty of the reverse appearing on screen is genuinely notable. Obviously, for as long as media has existed it has been engineered for predominantly male consumption, and the fact that we’re finally starting to see more equality when it comes to nakedness on screen has predictably lead loads of tabloids throwing around words like ‘shocking!’ and ‘racy!’. What’s shocking is that it’s taken this long for film and TV producers to work out that women also have a taste for a spot of soft porn in their casual nightly viewing.
We saw it earlier this year when, for the first time in it’s thirty-year-legacy,Sex and the City showed full frontal male nudity after decades of seeing boobs, bums and sensual shots of erogenous zones on screen.
At the risk of sounding like a pervy old woman, levelling the playing field when it comes to seeing nakedness on mainstream telly is something of a feminist issue. Not only does it accommodate the fact that women, too, like to indulge in a bit of harmless objectification and sex sells to any and all genders, but it will also help to demystify naked bodies in general and the risk of presenting sex as merely something which happens to a woman, when her body is laid out like a baroque carving and his is – quite literally – shrouded, not only in mystery but also clothes.