pornish

Here is the topic I was writing about a week or so ago when a rant about something else took over:

Why do so many male nudes seem pornish?

There exists a strong tradition in Western art of female nudes, but not so much of male nudes. Yes, there are male nudes in Western art, but if one thinks of a nude, I suppose it’s typical to imagine a female nude. That’s just sort of the standard.

There is, of course, a strong tradition of pornography and pornographic imagery. So, when making nude male images, maybe it’s just easy to sort of slip into that kind of imagery, the sorts of poses, etc, that one might find in pornography.

Or maybe it’s that a lot of male nude images have been incorporated into porn. Okay, I don’t feel so strongly about that point, or the possibility that it’s the real reason.

But here’s something I do feel much more strongly about:

Nudity tends to equal sex for a lot of people. It just does, even some people who like to see themselves as liberal-minded and enlightened folk. It’s just in there. (I’ve written before about this stuff: the way our culture sexualizes nudity and encourages guilt.) And in our culture, the masculine sexual identity seems so very focused on the penis. Sometimes one’s genitalia may be called one’s “sex”. Much like the cultural “ideal” of oversized breasts and tiny waists for women, there exists this sort of “ideal” of the large penis for men, along with various other masculine “ideals”. The easiest place to see an unapologetically uncovered penis is in porn and erotica, and of course in those settings, it’s generally an erect penis.

So I think there’s a certain kind of, maybe unspoken, pressure for a man to appear at his “largest”, i.e., his most fully erect, in nudes. Or at least a pressure to present his “sex” as indication of his sex.

This is, of course, in the “full-frontal”, non-obscured, not “implied” but fully revealed nude. (If you’re not familiar with “implied nudes”, the whole idea of the “implied nude” or, as I’ve seen it lately, simply “implied” is a sort of PG-13 version: no genitalia shown, and no female nipples; but showing enough to imply that the model is actually nude.)

This sort of not-really-nude nude seems to me like the non-nude sex scene in TV and movies. I don’t’ really get it. I’ve seen some hot, sweaty, intense sex being had by people who are just wearing too much clothing. Sure, I guess for some people that’s a thing. But if those people on the screen are anywhere near as hot as they look, why are they still wearing all those clothes? Every time I see that sort of thing, it takes me out of the moment, away from the story or scene or whatever, and makes me wonder why they’re so nearly-fully-clothed. Of course, then I’m out of the movie or show entirely, because I know the reason has something to do with ratings or censorship or maybe an actor’s discomfort with nudity. And that gets me going off on a little mini-rant in my head.

-   -   -   -   -

Well, I’ve sort of gotten off topic again. I did just watch a movie yesterday that had several of that sort of athletically intense sex scenes with fully clothed participants. The same movie had no problem at all showing people being shot: blood, guts, brains even, flying out of newly-made holes in people.

Rant. Rant, rant, rant.