Lewds, Nudes, Dudes

“But the omnipresent fact is that the female body and its likeness remain hypervisible, bearing the official seal of a social trademark - easily recognizable, easily repackaged for consumption. ”

During my sophomore year of college, I took a costume design class as an open rebellion against the business degree that I had been maternally mandated to pursue. I sucked at drawing, but my professor from a theater class I’d taken the semester prior encouraged me - he believed that I would really enjoy it (they also really needed the students for the class to run so I’m sure they were willing to accept my crappy art).

This very small class of six had a ratio of all girls to one boy. Our teacher, a woman, presided. Our task was simple: we were to read plays and each individual class member would design a costume set for the entire dramatis personae. As the months progressed, our teacher repeated one resounding frustrated remark, “It’s like none of you know how to draw men. You’ve got these elaborate designs for your female characters and then the male characters look more like afterthoughts.”

She encouraged us, the female members of the class, to look up male bodies for reference because something had to give. I remember being slightly embarrassed by this - I was seventeen and felt like I was crossing a boundary. However, that class ended up teaching me something about fashion… and a lot about sexual politics.

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I would like you to take a moment to visualize the nicest butt you’ve ever seen. Imagine the plumpness of the ass cheek, the rotundness of its curvatures. It could be a firm butt or a soft one, it just has to be a nice one. OK, now that we’re done with that indulgent exercise, tell me yourself what was the gender of the person with this lovely ass? More than likely, regardless of who you are or what you’re into, you were thinking about a female butt. Maybe it was Nicki’s, Beyonce’s, Kim’s, some random Instamodel you follow. The butt is female, the butt is always female.

Society, as a whole, is more inclined to look at women’s bodies because we have been actively encouraged and rewarded for doing so. Women’s bodies exist in this weird cultural public domain to serve as muse and canvas, our bodies are the clay from which male intellectuals and creatives mold and shape their careers. Of course, women also paint and theorize about women. We do this in efforts to reclaim our bodies, express our autonomy, show love and solidarity within the sisterhood, be transgressive. But the omnipresent fact is that the female body and its likeness remain hypervisible, bearing the official seal of a social trademark - easily recognizable, easily repackaged for consumption.

I read a study (Men Are Much Harder by Beth A. Eck) in which men and women were presented with two sets of images - one presenting female nudes and the other male. When presented with the female nudes, everyone knew what to say about them - both men and women would speak on how attractive the female bodies were; women would go on to talk about how they wished to look like the women in the images. Now, when presented with the male bodies? Oh boy. Men made sure to assert their heterosexuality (“No homo, bro.”) and would say things like, “This does nothing for me, I’m not interested in looking at this” while women would be slightly embarrassed by what they were looking at. Nobody knew how to engage with these images because men’s erotic bodies rarely appear in the open as the object of muse or fantasy, we have no lexicon with which to engage eroticized male nudity.

In our society, we conflate sex with the objectification of women. We speak of sex as a perfomance that plays out on female bodies for their male partner’s pleasure (I mean, have you seen mainstream porn?). Much of the language we use to communicate and express sexual desire is filtered through our patriarchal understanding of relationships and pre-set sexual “scripts.”

When I was in my late teens/early twenties, an aunt gave me a warning coated as advice: “Men are aroused by what they see.” I had heard some variation of this growing up but how she worded it so succinctly was nothing short of mastermind. As a young woman who had been repeatedly denied from exploring her sexuality for fear of reproach (and because, let’s face it, we as a society are not good about discussing sexuality at all) I let these be my governance for how I was to behave in relation to relationships. But it begged the question - what the heck were women aroused by? Because I sure as heck knew that I was aroused by what I saw and I had a private Tumblr exclusively dedicated to photos of dudes in all manner of undress to prove it. Yet, despite all this, I felt like I was doing something unnatural.

The gnawing sense of shame I felt for having that Tumblr lead me to delete it two years ago after a successful four year run (press F to pay respect). Why was I feeling shame about a blog that only I knew ever existed? Because I felt abnormal. Over the years I routinely explained to myself that I only had the blog so that I could gain better understanding of male anatomy but of course that wasn’t true - I kept it for my own visual pleasure, for my own titillation, for my own sexual satiety. That must have been what have been really scared the crap out of me:  I was a woman who was aroused by what I saw. After repeatedly hearing that female sexual desire is more duty than delight, an expense paid for the love from her male partner,  I felt like I was betraying womanhood and femininity.  

In Dr. Lucy Neville’s, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica, she makes a note on how we react to women who look - very poorly. She says, “To look critically at men goes against the feminine role and disrupts the established power relationship. Good girls don’t look. They particularly don’t look at men. Instead they get looked at.” Our society, so painfully unequipped to understand women’s sexualities  (especially when it entails looking at men with that same gaze with which men have been taught and conditioned to so freely look at women) decides to pretend that either we don’t exist or we’re in some way trying to be men. Our views on sexuality have been so thoroughly warped, so thoroughly androcentricized that we are willing to assume that one gender stands as sole paragon of sexual desire.

For me, the most powerful scene in the 2019 film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, comes when Héloïse asks Marianne if she draws men nude. Marianne replies, “I am not allowed to… I’m a woman… It’s mostly to prevent [me] from doing great art. Without any notion of male anatomy, the major subjects escape [me] [but] I do it in secret.”

This statement absolutely floored me. It reminded me of how I rarely find women artists who draw the male erotic as their primary subject and those that do tend to do so through the homoerotic lens. It’s as if women’s desire has been thoroughly quelled; we have a lack of social scripts to guide us.

In her video essay, Shame, Contrapoints points out that, “In the most patriarchal situation, straight women are ultimately attracted to men, and sexually aroused by male bodies. Or are they? … a lot of straight women are just kind of ‘meh’ about male bodies and men in general. What is that about?” But she’s right. I remember having a friend see my phone’s home screen (which is a really hot pin up I commissioned of an artist’s male original character [abbreviated to OC, for all you non-fandom plebs]) and she was really shocked to see it. The image isn’t explicit, it channels the power of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. When I asked her about her shock she said, “I just don’t look at men that way.” I believe what she meant was “sure I date guys but I’m not about to have a pin up of a dude as my screensaver.” I get it. Nobody really looks at men that way. While female bodies dominate our perceptions of erotic, male bodies are just… meh. We have had centuries of experience posing and styling the female body to make it aesthetically pleasing but when we do this with the male body it looks almost alien.

I used to be at that ‘meh’ point. But in coming into my sexual liberation, I have realized that I would rather openly challenge this than sit with it. I'm tired of hearing "be sexy for your man" as legit advice for women. Do guys hear from older guys that they need to "be sexy for their lady?" No they don’t.

I started that Tumblr back up again. I intend to keep it this time.

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Bracy Appeikumoh is a Sarah Lawrence College Creative Writing (Speculative Fiction) MFA candidate who writes to imagine a world wholly different from our own. She explores issues such as sexuality, gaze theory, the subversive effects of fandom culture, and internet culture. Also a nerd. You can find more from Bracy at Twitter or Instagram.