Political blogger Phoebe Connelly of TAPPED has a nice rumination on reactions to the Dr. Manhattan character’s blue penis in the movie The Watchmen, and on the penis itself. (All emphasis hers.)
Mainstream American culture is still fundamentally uncomfortable with male nudity. Amanda points out this is why the recent Vanity Fair spread with Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd failed:
If you challenged the strict gender stratification where women are for shutting up and being hot and men are for staying clothed and looking, and say, put lean, naked men in a picture to be gazed at by a famous lesbian, you’d have made the point, but it wouldn’t be funny, because there’s no gotcha there. And then a lot of people would be uncomfortable, because you revealed the lie of gender essentialism. But this isn’t funny, either.
In fact, when I thought about it more, it brought to mind another recent clunker, He’s Just Not That In To You. When one of the male characters starts wearing fitted, unbuttoned shirts and tight jeans, it’s in an attempt to appeal to prospective gay clients to his business. He’s made fun of by his straight, male bartender friend.
We’re comfortable with objectified male bodies when they are a joke, but not when it’s merely a part of a character — the way female nudity, particularly in action films, so often is.
So yes to the blue penis. Let’s hope it makes people pause to consider why it’s discomfiting to have male nudity displayed, not for laughs, and not part of some art house epic, but just as a side-bit character trait that no one seems to remark on.
As you know, basic discomfort with non-mocking, non-laugh-factor male nudity is a product of rule #2 of the no-sex class paradigm: it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. And mockery of straight men who try to boost their visual sexual attractiveness (as opposed to their sex-as-reward worthiness) are mocked as a result of rule #1: it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.**
What’s particularly cool about Connelly’s point here is that the penis in question really is just a penis in the movie, there as a sort of necessary consequence of the character having been transformed into a semi-incomprehensible, almost literally etherial being. And therefore not really clothable.
Whether it arouses desire in women any more than the perma-nipples in the female hero’s rubber costume arouses it in men (this doesn’t appear to have been the direct intent***) is sort of beside the point. The expressions of discomfort are all about rule #2.
(Via Matthew Yglesias.)
[** I still can’t get over how thoroughly those two rules write actual straight women’s sexuality out of existence and into denial. I say the no-sex paradigm is so primarily a male-driven phenomenon precisely because it seems incomprehensible to women. Who, being, you know, straight tend not to find their own desire, nor the desirability of men, at all intolerable or, um, inconceivable. —fl]
[*** We are left with no explanation for why the Silk Spectre II character’s permanently prominent rubber nipples arouse neither mockery nor discomfort. Nor, for that matter raised eyebrows from reviewers otherwise too knee-squeezy about Teh Blue Peen. —fl]
