How TV is telling the full-frontal, naked truth

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There’s a lot of full-frontal male nudity on TV right now, and I’m all for it. I’ll tell you why in a bit. But I’m not going to lie to you, it’s startling.

There are scores of naked penises in the new HBO series Euphoria, arriving June 16 – in fact, one hour features about 80. In the first four episodes alone, we see the semi-erect penis of an adult (Eric Dane) who abuses minors. We see at least 14 penises in a high-school locker room, some in slo-mo closeups. The main character, Rue (Zendaya, excellent), a world-weary high schooler, narrates a dick pic lesson accompanied by dozens of cellphone photos. We see a webcam session in which an adult male masturbates while begging a teenage girl to humiliate him.

We saw naked penises in Game of Thrones, of course. In The Leftovers, a naked male submariner sets off a nuclear bomb. In Harlots, female prostitutes witness a veritable parade of male members, as do porn actors in The Deuce. In Chernobyl, dozens of miners cope with nuclear heat by working naked. Full-frontal male nudity also arises (sorry) on Westworld, The Affair, High Maintenance, Catch-22 and Altered Carbon.

Every time it does, I feel a little “oof,” an instinct to look away. Why? The answer is interesting. Many people will tell you that it’s about time – that naked penises should be on TV, if only for the sake of parity, a counter to the “more boobies” aesthetic of too many shows. (There’s certainly a disparity in film: A study by the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California found that in the top 100 films of 2016, 26 per cent of women were shown partly or fully naked, compared with only 9.2 per cent of men.)

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Damon Lindelof, who created The Leftovers, has announced he wants to “normalize male nudity on television.” Emilia Clarke, who as Daenerys did nude scenes early in GoT, advocates for that, too. “I did it, why can’t the boys do it?” she asked Stephen Colbert in 2016, a month after joking with James Corden about creating a hashtag, #FreeTheP.

Euphoria features male nudity for the verisimilitude – today’s teenagers see a lot of nude photos and pornography – and not incidentally, for the buzz it generates. “There are going to be parents who are totally freaked out,” series creator Sam Levinson (Assassination Nation), son of Barry Levinson, told the Hollywood Reporter. (Drake, another entertainer who knows how to stir things up, is an executive producer.)

While I applaud both parity and truth-telling on TV, I’m happy to see these naked penises for two other reasons. First, if the guys are doing it, it’s going to be handled respectfully on set. HBO now employs an intimacy co-ordinator for nude scenes – on Euphoria, it’s Amanda Blumenthal – to make sure that everyone feels safe. The scores of women who’ve done nude scenes for decades deserved this, too, but better late than never. “As soon as men are affected by something,” Alison Owen, the executive producer of Harlots, has said, “you suddenly see a lot more attention paid to the legislation around it.” Second, nude scenes will be handled more thoughtfully in storylines as well. “To me, parity in the nudity means that my male colleagues are willing to be as vulnerable,” Kristin Lehman, an actress on Altered Carbon, told me, “and the material will reflect that.”

We should feel startled by nudity, the shock of seeing in public something usually private. If male nudity can remind us of that, maybe we’ll use female nudity a little more judiciously.

Many of the series doing male nudity, including Westworld, High Maintenance and Altered Carbon, have female showrunners. They and their male allies ensure that nude scenes do what they were always alleged to do: Develop character and increase intimacy, rather than simply commodify hot female bodies. So when Westworld’s android Maeve (Thandie Newton) forces her former master Lee (Simon Quarterman) to strip naked, we feel his shame at what he’s done to her. When Catch-22’s Yossarian (Christopher Abbot) walks naked through the base, we know it’s his reaction to the horrors of war. When The Affair’s Helen (Maura Tierney) blanches as her naked lover parades by, we understand how strange it is for her to be with a man other than her husband.

High Maintenance does vulnerability particularly well. The entire series is a patchwork of intimate moments, and that often involves nudity, whether it’s a joint-smoking older hippie in his bathtub, a nudist watching TV on his sofa or the main character himself, the Guy (Ben Sinclair), fresh from the shower. Sinclair and his co-showrunner Katja Blichfeld know that we’re not only naked when we’re sexy; we’re also naked when we’re lonely, or sad, or sleeping. I gasp at the full-frontal male nudity on Euphoria because it’s raw, and often dangerous – much violence is perpetrated when men are naked. I glance away from the nudity on High Maintenance, on the other hand, because it feels so private. But because it’s about human frailty, I always look back.

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