2 hours Ago By Sarah Carson
When it comes to full frontal male nudity on TV, there is always a point. A penis is never incidental. It is never part of the background, never secondary to the action, never allowed to escape our notice.
If there’s a penis on TV, it demands our attention. Our first reaction is usually shock – and not just because the sight of one is so rare, but because that penis has a function. It’s there to tell us something important about this scene, this character, this relationship.
Genitals are rarely the only thing being revealed. I’ve been thinking a lot about penises – prosthetic – since Monday night’s episode of The White Lotus, in which Jason Isaacs’ half-asleep Jason Ratliff crawled up to a stool at the breakfast bar in a hotel-branded robe, spread his legs, and flopped out his appendage, to the mortification of his younger two children and the unnerving approval of his eldest. if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }As with most penis scenes, it immediately went viral – but it was much more important than a quick flash.
Without words, that brief transgression and his family’s reaction to it told us about their closeness and boundaries, and about the unravelling of this man – a financier on the verge of ruin, self-exiling from the FBI in Thai paradise, mainlining his wife’s lorazepam. His penis told us he is losing the plot. The White Lotus has wielded this device often.
In the very first episode of the first season, Steve Zahn’s Mark asked his wife to inspect his worryingly enlarged testicles. It was not a mere moment of marital duty – it laid the foundations for his character’s inferiority complex, health anxiety, desperation for validation and his fears about how his more dominant wife emasculated him. In the first episode of the second season, Theo James’s finance bro Cameron flashed his penis to his college friend’s wife.
That split-second glimpse (of a prosthetic James described as “ginormous” and possibly stolen “off a donkey in the field”) told us everything we needed to know about him and his respect for this woman, all women, his own wife, and his friend. Where Isaacs’ character’s accidental penis flash signalled his crisis, James’s deliberate one was a sign of his arrogance and virility. The White Lotus is a satire, so creator Mike White’s decision to include these penises is part of how he lampoons each man.
But unlike, say, the “naked tennis” scene in last year’s Rivals, which has been nominated for Bafta’s “Memorable Moment” award, there is nothing about these carefully considered penises that invites you to laugh. if(window.adverts) { window.
adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_mobile_l1"}); }if(window.adverts) { window.
adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }Matthew Rhys was Emmy-nominated for his guest role on Girls (Photo: HBO)Penises are one of television’s few remaining taboos – and in a world where we are so easily desensitised to what we see on screen, they still retain their violence. Often, their purpose is to force the audience to recoil in horror.
A disturbing penis scene that has never left me was in 2017’s “American Bitch”, one of the best and most troubling episodes of Lena Dunham’s Girls. A masterful two-hander between Dunham and guest-star Matthew Rhys, it saw protagonist Hannah Horvath invited to the home of a successful writer accused of sexual misconduct, after she blogged in support of his victims.Their long conversation about their work, about men and women, about privilege, about cancel culture, forced Hannah and us to think about the grey areas in all of them.
As they bonded, and he charmed her, we began to trust him. Then he exposed his penis, and she touched it. It felt like a heart-stopping violation for us as well as her, as she leapt back, alarmed by her own complicity and his chilling, predatory smile, triumphant in his manipulation.
(Given the opportunity to choose his own prosthetic, Rhys declined and deferred to the props department, concerned about what his choice of size might say about him). Horror, too, was my reaction to a penis scene in last year’s third series of HBO’s hyper-explicit, high-tension investment banking drama Industry, in which heiress Yasmin (Marisa Abela) walked in on her father having sex with a pregnant staffer on his yacht – in her bed. Unlike in The White Lotus, the dynamic between father and child here wasn’t merely dysfunctional, it was abusive – the implication that he wanted her to see it a sign of the troubling power dynamic and decades of nightmarish Freudian trauma.
The BBC did not want anyone to see it: for the British broadcast, the scene was cut, because the penis was erect.Paul Mescal in Normal People (Photo: Element Pictures/Enda Bowe)Showing a penis is not always about demonstrating a man’s power or dominance – sometimes it is the opposite. Paul Mescal’s nudity in 2020’s Normal People came after a tender sex scene, and before his character Connell awkwardly suggested to Marianne that she might send him a naked photo.
With other treatment this might have seemed like the plea of a horny adolescent. Instead, he was unsure, gentle, respectful – so his penis became part of his vulnerability, rather than a tool of coercion. Like all those other scenes, it could have been shot without the penis – could have been left an allusion.
But like them, the decision to show it feels like a bold command for us to consider what the programme wants us to think about masculinity. A woman’s naked body could never tell us all this. Their ubiquity has made us indifferent – they’re just always there, stripping off, or dead – we expect them, and we will never reverse or redress the imbalance.
But that is a tragedy, because it is staggering how much a naked body can say when we do not objectify it. Even on TV, men’s bodies really are more powerful than women’s. ‘The White Lotus’ is streaming on NOW.
