Tag Archives: objectification

Full Frontal Nudity, Gender, and the Penis

[warning: contains images that may not be comfortable for workplace or other public computer constraints]

Debbie and Laurie say:

We missed Sezin Koehler’s Sociological Images post about full frontal nudity on HBO back in June. Koehler analyzes the frequent use of full frontal female nudity and the extremely rare use of full frontal male nudity on True Blood, Hung, and Game of Thrones. 

Koehler’s conclusion is:

Ultimately, nudity is rarely necessary to further a storyline.  Women’s nudity isn’t about plot, it’s about treating women as objects and men as human beings.  The problem is systemic. Women’s bodies exist in many of HBO’s varied worlds to serve men, circling us back to a culture of male entitlement that, in the case of [Elliott] Rodgers at least, led directly to violence.

We agree with Koehler’s article, and our more-or-less unique experience of photographing, writing about, and talking to and about naked men in extensive detail, when we were working on Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes makes us want to take the conversation in another direction.

Of course, not all bodies are male or female and not all penises belong to men. This post relates specifically to commercial television and movies, where trans and genderqueer bodies are extremely rare, and nearly always objectified on a different axis than we discuss here.

Here’s the thing. Women are objectified whether or not  we are depicted in the nude. Men are physically objectified more than they used to be twenty or thirty years ago (read Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male for a treatment of this issue), but the vast majority of television and movies, are made with the tacit assumption that men are the watchers and women are the watched. In academic language, these programs are made with the “male gaze.” Shows that never show a naked woman still constantly objectify women’s bodies.

This is why an image of a small portion of a woman’s unclothed body is a nude

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but only a full frontal picture of a man is a nude.
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Men’s full frontal nudity isn’t shown for lots of reasons. It’s still a real taboo (and women’s full frontal nudity is not, but showing labia is). Penises (especially relaxed penises) show the natural experience of being a male human. Once again, we quote Jonathan D. Katz from his piece in the Familiar Men keynote essay:

Female nudity can be ubiquitous, but to present the male body threatens to give the lie to the rich meanings we associate with it. All of which may explain why it’s so rare to see naked or near-naked men in art, advertising, popular media, or that host of other venues in which the female body is now coin of the realm. … I think novelist Dorothy Allison said it best when she remarked that she thought the penis was the original source of the literary concept of irony, that something so small and vulnerable could be accorded such impressive powers. To see a penis is to know that it couldn’t possibly be a phallus.

As for the show Hung, which is specifically about a man with a large penis, Koehler points out that “we only get one brief glimpse of it — and not even the whole.”

The very existence of a TV show which makes the invisible central, which builds its entire plot on that-which-cannot-be-revealed says a lot about how women’s bodies–however objectified–are real to the television/movie creative world and the audience, while the essentially male feature of men’s bodies is, in our current cultural context, purely metaphorical. The show is not — it can’t be — about Ray Drecker’s penis; it’s about how we imagine, and create, our own imagery of Ray Drecker’s penis. In contrast, a show about a woman’s body is about the character’s actual body.

All pictures of bodies, clothed and nude, are laden with the gender-specific, deeply embedded overtones that have been placed there by the tens or hundreds of thousands of images of bodies we’ve seen before. The embedded message about women’s bodies is “see all of me,” and the embedded message about men’s bodies is “I get to control what you get to look at.”

Advertising: The Message Is the Medium

Debbie says:

This week’s internet has brought me three really interesting takes on substitution in advertising. There’s the growing number of ads that substitute men for women:

Lisa Wade at Sociological Images makes the two important points about this:

First, because the ads are so tongue-in-cheek, they didn’t seem to be acknowledging and validating women’s sexual desire, so much as mocking it.

This is how I have always felt about Playgirl and its ilk–they seem to be done with no sense of what women find sexy, but just an assumption that women will find the same things sexy that men do. (Hmm, wonder why we don’t see advertising for women that features two men looking lasciviously at one another?)

Wade’s second point is:

Objectifying men alongside women certainly isn’t progress.  “I wouldn’t call it equality — I’d call it marketing, and maybe capitalism. Market forces under capitalism exploit whatever fertile ground is available. Justice and sexual equality aren’t driving increasing rates of male objectification — money is.”

This first trend is happening in actual highly-paid advertising; the other two substitutions are responses to advertising.

Jes Baker at The Militant Baker decided to see what happens if you substitute people of size for the bodies we most often see in advertising:

 

So he invented a fake perfume called “Lustworthy” and did some ads. He says:

It turns out that no body is inferior (and consequently no body is superior), and so all bodies have the opportunity to be paired with all bodies. This isn’t an opinion. This is a fact. I see it in my life. I see it in other people’s lives. I see it everywhere.

Everywhere except for advertising.

So Liora and I changed that.

Finally, artist Anna Hill had the most brilliant substitution idea in the history of high-tech advertising images; she reframed the ads so that they are selling what they are actually showing: Photoshop!


I want every person in the computerized world to see these, because Hill has truly pulled away the curtain to reveal what advertising really is.

The three sets of images taken together have an overwhelming message: advertising is just a set of styles and approaches. Its most powerful tools, techniques, and assumptions can–and must–be turned around, examined, made fun of, and reframed. That’s the only way we have any chance of understanding what we are being barraged by all the time.

Special thanks to firecat for the Militant Baker link.