Male Nudity on TV

[NakedShadow]

Here is an artilce that discusses the status of male nudity, speifcally the penis, on TV
from
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2016/feb/02/flashing-the-flesh-a-history-of-tv-nudity-penis-mr-darcy



Flashing the flesh – a history of TV nudity
Mark Lawson
Tue 2 Feb 2016 10.11 EST


Two decades ago, the screenwriter Andrew Davies gave Colin Firth a skinny-dipping scene in a BBC TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. It has become YouTube's most popular man-in-water footage that doesn't involve Tom Daley. Now Davies, in his current BBC1 version of War and Peace, has gone for what is technically known as a longer shot. On Sunday night, a Russian soldier, walking out of a lake, revealed a flash of penis 26 minutes after 9pm – the time known, with unusual appropriateness in this case, as the "watershed" for family viewing.

This shift of a couple of inches between the Austen and Tolstoy adaptations marks another notch on television's bedpost of flesh-flashing.

The first full-frontal nudity on TV is generally believed to have been in Holland in 1967, when the experimental show Hoepla showed a female model reading a broadsheet newspaper that she moved aside to reveal her complete nakedness. Continental European television has generally been more unbuttoned than the UK and US schedules, which are heavily regulated and, especially in Britain, carefully watched by the rightwing press. A significant percentage of the full-frontal nudity screened on UK TV appeared on Eurotrash (Channel 4, 1993-2007), which sampled stark examples from abroad.

The fact that the cleaner-screen campaigner Mary Whitehouse expended far more of her energies in the 60s and 70s on swearing, violence and supposed leftwing bias suggests the relative absence of nudity as, if she was seeing it, she wouldn't have liked it.



But from the 70s, post-9pm dramas on BBC1 and ITV specialised in the quick-flash tactic, in which a woman might show her breasts while rolling on top of a lover or swinging out of bed, or offer a rear nude view while walking into the shower. The police series The Sweeney (ITV, 1975-78) was a specialist in this trick, so that, as John Thaw or Dennis Waterman answered the door, an undressed girlfriend might wander past on the way to bedroom or bathroom.

In 1979, the BBC1 documentary Let's Go Naked! interviewed members of a naturist camp in Britain, using artful camera angles. But Margaret Thatcher became prime minister that year, and her administrations imposed a general moral retrenchment on television. By 1986, considerable controversy could be caused even by the so-called "bobbing bottom" scene in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, when Patrick Malahide's backside was visible. Whitehouse's campaign against that particular bum ended with her having to pay libel damages to Potter's elderly mother, for falsely suggesting that he was dramatising his mum's lovelife.

More recently, female anatomy has become a regular sight on both British and American TV, especially following the rise of the US cable networks such as HBO. All but one of the main actresses in Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004) bared their breasts at some point; the exception was Sarah Jessica Parker, who is reputed to have had a modesty clause in her contract. Lena Dunham in Girls (HBO, since 2012) is frequently seen nude, and the character of Cersei in Game of Thrones (HBO, since 2011) has been paraded naked through a street with the camera watching from both sides.

Almost all these examples involve women and, as commenters have rightly pointed out, Sunday's brief flash of male full-frontal nudity in War and Peace (following a flash of men's bottoms in an earlier episode) doesn't begin to even out the number of women who have so far stripped in the series. Lacking official appendage statistics, I would estimate that nipples are way ahead of willies, even allowing for the double presence of the former items on the female body.

While the gulf between the appearance of female and male genitals on TV has reflected both sexism and a preponderance of straight male bosses, the continuing inequality also reflects a practical regulatory issue. Under obscenity laws, an erect penis can't be shown on mainstream TV, while an erect nipple can. Trouser-bulging and sheet-tenting erections have been seen on Big Brother – and sex-ed documentaries have shown outlines of erections with infrared cameras – but male arousal is too hard for drama to show.



As a result, any full-frontal sex scene involving a man inadvertently becomes an advert for Viagra. Perhaps one advantage of Andrew Davies's fondness for shots of men emerging naked from very cold water is that those are circumstances in which it would take a truly remarkable male actor to display enough arousal to bother Ofcom.

Similarly, the sudden popularity of fellatio in TV drama towards the end of the last century – with notable scenes in This Life (BBC2, 1996) and Queer As Folk (Channel 4, 1999) – was that the act seemed visually daring, and infuriated puritans, but with the penis conveniently unseen.

The fact that cunnilingus has also become a thing in TV drama – from the lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet (BBC2, 2000), also adapted by Davies, to the adultery series The Affair (Showtime, since 2014) – is further proof that TV's sex rules are dictated by which bits can be seen in detail. So, while screen morality campaigners may not like to see an actor clamped between a woman's thighs, no post-watershed taboo is broken.

But for a penis to be seen, even flaccid and cold, still pricks the attention of viewers. Some guardians of classic literature, though, may be alarmed by signs that Andrew Davies is upping the ante. After graduating from a bathing man with an unseen penis in Pride and Prejudice to naked swimmers actually giving viewers the willies in War and Peace, it may not be long before, after fielding phone calls about some future Davies adaptation of Northanger Abbey, the chair of the Jane Austen Society asks imperiously: "What is dogging?"