The Double Standard on Male Nudity and Sexuality

The image that was labeled "deeply offensive"

For almost its entire existence, this blog has posted "male beauty" photos which celebrate the male form and what at least I view as beautiful males.  Critics said that I should omit these posts, but a poll I once set up on the blog showed that 70% of readers said "keep the pictures!"  (Women readers were most vocal on retaining the male beauty posts.)  Why is it fine to glorify - or objectify depending on one's outlook - women, but not men?  The reality is that if one looks at almost any fashion magazine, woman are depicted in all manner of undress and perhaps objectification. The same treatment of males, however, is something that is rare outside of gay publications and blogs.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the puritanical double standard and the bizarre aspect of American society and male indoctrination that makes male beauty and sexuality something scary.  Here are article excerpts:

The photo in question was my chosen pic for an article I wrote about, among other things, the selling of sex. The site removed the piece and banned me for a week, then sent me a not-safe-for-hurt-feelings email saying the photo was “deeply offensive” and “soft-core porn,” and that I ought to be ashamed of myself for placing it on a respectable, liberal site. They threatened me with permanent blockage if I ever tried such a stunt again, “even in jest.”

And I just thought the photo illustrated my satiric point.

Before I try and figure out the answer, let me post the entire photo, not just the cropped version used for this piece. This is your official warning, so you might want to lock the kids in the closet, close the curtains, hide the bibles, keep the smelling salts handy, and chain yourself to something secure so you don’t throw yourself out the window or jump into oncoming traffic.

But why is it “deeply offensive” and “soft-core porn”? The Urban Dictionary’s Top Definition for the latter is “pornographic material that shows everything excluding insertion or penetration.” Other examples say penetration with a partner and masturbation is okay provided you don’t show ejaculation or an erection or cunnilingus. Playboy is often depicted as soft-core porn.

Forgetting for a moment that the photo has been displayed on mainstream gay sites worldwide, and that almost every “serious” cable show now shows male nudity, Grand isn’t naked in the photo—you don’t even see the Facebook-forbidden butt-crack or pubic hair. He’s not masturbating, there’s no partner, unless you count the showerhead, and he’s not erect. He’s wearing the male version of the type of undergarment female Victoria Secret models show off on posters and commercials and TV ads on a daily basis.

[M]y educated guess is that the photo was removed, and I was body-posting shamed, because you can see an imprint of Grand’s penis. (I hate to sound vulgar, but I felt it necessary to use the technical term.) It’s also homoerotic.

We’ve come along way in regards to male nudity and homoerotism (while straight women are likely to get excited by this photo, the artistic feel of the shot, the clothing, the openly gay model, are geared toward homosexual men). But for reasons that I still don’t understand, we’re major prudes when it comes to male genitalia.

This makes sense in the GOP world, where all risqué photos are taboo and all semi-naked men are an abomination (unless the former are nude modeling pics of the First Lady in lesbian-bondage poses and the latter are the male prostitutes they found on Grindr). We know they’re hypocrites.

Penis-phobia in the progressive world is far more surprising. You’d be hard-pressed to spend a day on social media or looking at ads without finding allusions to male anatomy. It’s everywhere, even in our political discussions. It’s in our puns, our jokes, our masculine “measure of worth”—you can’t even write a sentence about the subject without unintentionally finding a pun. Yet show any suggestion of it in the open and it’s a crude, graphic display.

Not only is this a perverse double-standard, and one that adversely affects the gay community, it reinforces the notion that the male body is shameful. When we’re only allowed to allude to it, and not celebrate it the way we do the female form, it’s tantamount to saying our admiration should be kept in the closet. I’ve met few straight men who will admit they appreciate the nude male body, and many who won’t even admit that a man’s face is attractive. That’s an unhealthy way to live and a choice most women ignore.

Our macho sensibility tells men it’s wrong to admire each other’s physicality, which leads to insecurity, fear, and a general lack of self-awareness.

It’s also time to stop the patriarchal, outdated nonsense about male genitalia and start treating the male body in the manner it deserves: as a thing of beauty, as something to admire, to be inspired by, to get excited about, to love, and to look at.

A parting thought: Could the double standard be due to (i) GOP and Christofascist males being afraid of the desire such images invoke in them, and (ii) such photos reminding the majority of straight males that they look like Hell physically? 

Abercrombie’s Buff Twink Models Kiss One Another

Get ready for spittle flecked hysteria, another American Family Association boycott, and screeching from the One Million Bitches Moms crowd.  While it is all too common to see straight couples in an embrace or kissing in magazines and fashion spreads, rarely does one see a male on male kiss.  It seems that Abercrombie & Fitch may be about to change that and one can already contemplate the reaction of the Christofascists who already have no love for the clothier.  Back in 2008 Virginia Beach police made themselves national laughing stocks when they seized promotional photos (one of the offending "obscene" photos is below) at an Abercrombie & Fitch store and charged the manager with obscenity charges after a "godly Christian" shopper complained.  The case was dropped, but it illustrates what may be forthcoming from the godly set if Abercrombie goes forward with the new ads.  Queerty looks at the campaign shot by Bruce Weber.  Here are highlights:

Between the gay dance anthems playing in the store and vintage-porn-looking hunks modeling barely-there clothes in ads, Abercrombie’s marketing strategy has always been super-gay.

But though their ads ooze homoerotic pyrotechnics, they’ve never actually gone and shown us the full monty, the real act of affection between two hot dudes. Until now!



Homorazzi alerts us to a series of Bruce Weber-directed which feature standard buff-twink Abercrombie boys training for wrestling. The most explicit one, titled, um, Other Sports Require One Ball, features two toned studs sparring in the shower and then, voila, kissing one another.

Here are the others, which are just as homoerotic without any actual boy-on-boy action:

• Basketball Is What Boys Do…
• Everything Else In Life Seems Easy
• Live, Eat and Sleep Wrestling

Do you think Abercrombie will actually run these ads in the store, or did Weber take it too far for them to?

Just How Gay Is The GOP?

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle writes humorous, yet often accurate columns that poke fun at the pompous, self-righteous and self-important. The following column (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/09/07/notes090707.DTL) is no exception and I encourgae you to read the entire piece for its entertainment value:

Here is the sticky, irresistible question, hovering like some sort of perky rainbow-colored cloud over anyone who reads the news or pays attention to the scandals or the nifty bathroom hand signals or the various semen stains covering the pages of the Official GOP Handbook like some sort of wretched, skanky Kandinsky painting:

Really, just how many closeted, self-hating, violently repressed "I-am-not-gay" totally gay hypocrites are there in the Republican Party? Or for that matter, in your average born-again Christian megachurch? Or in the U.S. military? Or in (your morally righteous group's name here)? Ten percent of them? Fifty? A hundred and four?

Because baby, it just keeps popping up, scandal after scandal, homophobic lawmaker after anti-gay preacher after gay marriage attacker after hooker-loving "family values" adulterer, Bob Allen to Ted Haggard to Jim West to Glenn Murphy Jr. to David "Diaperman" Vitter, so many examples of a militant loudmouthed Christian Republican suddenly caught with his pants down around his boyfriend's ankles that, after so many headlines, the notion that these cases might be rare or exceptional simply vanishes and you are left only with the undeniable fact that, oh my God, the American right is simply teeming with so much murky, pressure-cooked homoeroticism it might as well be a Young Republicans kegger at Mark Foley's pink Miami Beach condo.

You need no "Da Vinci Code" to tell you of the religious right's eternal repression of the feminine divine, its deep fear of sex, its eternal fascination with the supple flesh of young males. Hell, show me a vociferous anti-sex fundamentalist of any religious or political bent -- be he Muslim, Christian, Jew, Mormon, Republican or other -- and I'll show you a slideshow of his secret nighttime fantasies so kinky and dark it would make Jenna Jameson shudder. And not in a good way.