Is it me, or are we drowning in dicks?
There was a time you could go years without seeing a male member – tumescent or otherwise – on the big or small screen. But for the last decade or so they seem to be coming at us from all directions.
There is Michael Fassbender’s monster trouser snake in Shame, like he’s auditioning for the sandworm in Dune, or Barry Keoghan’s floppy dance in Saltburn. In the Righteous Gemstones, they poke a character in the eye; in The Boys, a miniature superhero creeps inside of one, with disastrous consequences. It’s like some enormous Willy Wonka’s Cock Factory has suddenly started churning them out.
The first male penis in a feature film appeared in 1911. It was hell, literally. The film was L’Inferno, adapted from the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy and directed by Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe De Liguoro and Adolfo Padovan and the penises belonged to the damned. As with Philip Larkin’s “fuck”, you can get away with anything if you call it culture.
The Europeans have always been more relaxed about nudity generally and male nudity as part of that. Penises have long graced the screen of European art films such as Jean Vigo’s 1933 comedy Zéro de conduite, Gaspar Noé’s more recent sex-fest Love or Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, volumes I & II. Ingmar Bergman pops one on the screen at the start of Persona to make sure we’re all awake.
And, of course, queer cinema has had a no-shit-Sherlock interest in male genitalia for years. As with many areas of male sexuality, you have to hand it to the gays.
Andy Warhol’s Flesh was an early test case for the censors and Pier Paolo Pasolini can’t get enough of male parts. And trust the Japanese to make it weird with Empire of the Senses. Uuch.
But for years, willies in mainstream English-language cinema and television have been verboten. The British Board of Film Classification had a strict no-no on the penis even when female flesh was increasingly visible, if not de rigueur.
Of course, the heads of the board, John Trevelyan, succeeded by James Ferman, were heterosexual men, drenched in a culture in which the female body was seen as the fitting province of art, every woman a nude in the making, and the male body a somewhat embarrassing and suspect sideshow, the voyeur who would prefer to be disembodied.
As John Berger pointed out in Ways of Seeing, when men are seen naked they are in the process of doing, in women they are being watched and are often aware of being watched. Their nakedness is nudity: they are not simply without clothes, they are presenting their body to a viewer. If you’ve ever seen a nude or semi-nude model in some inappropriate location and thought “that looks uncomfortable/cold”, then you’re on the right track.
The first changes came about in the 1960s when men started to wrestle nude in front of open fireplaces (Ken Russell’s Women in Love), or in roadside cafes (Malcolm McDowell in If…). Generally, we had glimpses of flaccid penises, swinging hither and yon as Robert Forster chases Karen Black around a room in Medium Cool or the soapy communal shower scene in Drive, He Said, like a gender-flipped Porky’s.
The reasons the phallus remained hidden might not have everything to do with censorship. Male stars had more power than female stars, and the less well-endowed and even the averagely well-endowed fought shy of getting their tackle out on screen.
Certain stars were rumoured to have legendary girth – Errol Flynn and Rock Hudson were both supposed to be generously endowed – but a question: who started that rumour? Beryl Flynn? Smock Fludson?
Manhood was/is synonymous with penises after all. Mike Nichols described once how before Jack Nicholson stripped off for his big nude scene in Carnal Knowledge, he told everyone to step back as he was about to unleash “Frank”. Frank turned out to be a flop: that is to say normal, but the joke reveals his and our (men’s) nervousness.
Male stars keeping their clothes on as they relentlessly strip their female co-stars of theirs enacts a power dynamic that is repeated in society, leading to some ridiculously asymmetrical sex scenes in which men apparently are able to penetrate vaginas through their trousers. That notorious butter scene in Last Tango in Paris is rendered a bit silly by the fact that Marlon Brando seems to keep his trousers on throughout.
It was in 1991 that saw the BBFC allow a penis to stand proud in the video release of The Lover’s Guide, arguing that it was for educational purposes. Lord Reith would’ve had a lump in his throat.
But by the early 2000s the dam had broken, and the pent-up dam of penises flooded down on the Alpine villages of our modesty. Now nudity was no longer the consideration for films certified as 18, but rather sexual activity, and even then only in exceptional circumstances in which – for instance – sex is unsimulated. The latter was still available but would be certified R18 and would only be available from adult cinemas and sex shops.
This led us to where we are more or less today, when the penis is free to do his thing. Some male stars have embraced this. Richard Gere and Bruce Willis anticipated it in the ’80s and ’90s, giving us a glimpse of their credentials. Ewan McGregor was likewise obliging.
In television, American cable channel HBO was a prime mover in freeing willy. The prison drama Oz featured full-frontal male nudity as would Euphoria later.
Not all performers, however, are as relaxed or as naturally talented as Michael Fassbender. Or else the roles they play might demand a little more than an average-sized package.
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Mark Wahlberg played a character partly based on the schlongmeister John Holmes. The money shot was a final reveal of the beast itself.
Marky Mark, being normally endowed, had the prosthetic appendage attached with surgical glue to his groin area. As Tom Cruise says in PTA’s follow-up, Magnolia: “Worship the cock!”
Sometimes we don’t know if it’s prosthetic or the actor might try to keep up the illusion that we’re watching an unsimulated sex act. Vincent Gallo’s notorious The Brown Bunny was one such film that fell victim to its own publicity.
Chloë Sevigny appears to fellate Gallo at the end of the film, when most of the critics had concluded that, given Gallo’s indulgence, he was already fellating himself. But Gallo had actually stolen Claire Denis’s penis (a fake, from the set of Trouble Every Day). The shock value was all Gallo could cling on to. That and a stolen dong.
Nowadays, special makeup artists are churning out dicks to keep up with demand.
Jason Collins’s sausage factory at effects makers Autonomous F/X said that, due to what we must call the penaissance, 15% of their work is taken up with pork swords. A show like Minx might have as many as 50 penises made for a single season.
Why fake it? Mainly control. Penises – as any man reading this article knows – tend to have a mind of their own. They don’t go up (or down) on demand and they can change size and appearance over the course of a few hours. On-screen peeing isn’t guaranteed, especially over multiple takes.
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Is it a good thing we’re living in a wangster paradise? Yes! We need more male nudity.
The clothed male is, first of all, unrealistic. I disrobe on occasion, and that is part of my daily life. That should be reflected on screen.
Plus it’s the ladies’ turn to get to see what they’re getting come their wedding night! Plus, men should see men.
I’m eternally grateful to queer cinema for giving me a non-straight view of male sexuality. Just as women look at women in ways that are not necessarily sexual, it certainly won’t do heterosexual men any harm to see themselves up there on screen with nothing to protect their modesty.
The penis has been surrounded by a mystique of the phallus that is only sustainable when you don’t actually have a look at one. Sorry lads, but those sports cars and space rockets we describe as phallic are far more elegant than the escargot curled in your underpants like an apologetic @ symbol.
With a more realistic self-image and tempered expectations thanks to the movies, maybe men can start thinking about their penises, rather than with them.
