More male nudes

More male nudes

Time to talk about male nudes again… And we need to acknowledge that we live in an asymmetrical culture, where – on the whole – young and beautiful women can trade on their erotic capital, but young men cannot. That’s enough to start a very divisive argument between those who believe that sexual capital shouldn’t exist and everyone else: and between those who see the whole thing as really rather nasty, and the result of the patriarchy.

That’s not the sum total of viewpoints, though. There are sex positive feminists, and there’s also the tabloid tendency to complain loudly about anything that will increase circulation. One daily rag had the distinction of leading a campaign in Ireland to allow teenage girls to have vaccinations to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, while the British edition campaigned against the availability of vaccine here. If there’s a pot, stir it!

I’m old enough to remember when the audit section in a council had to beg calendars from the architects’ department (our budget didn’t stretch to calendars): building firms supplied more Mayfair calendars than you could shake a plumb line at, and they went on the walls. This would now be unthinkable… Unless, perhaps, the slightly more subtle Calendar Girls approach found favour. Parity, with the Farmer’s Boy calendar on the opposite wall might solve a problem or two, but would upset the uptight.

I think we need to acknowledge that all human bodies are beautiful to someone, and confine the argument to what constitutes bad taste. Male nudity is necessarily rather more obvious than the female equivalent: I shall leave it to the brave to look up the Mull of Kintyre rule that still operates in many places.

I’ll introduce one of my favourite Australians here – Germaine Greer. She has a try-it-out approach, and that extended to posing nude (and I believe fairly tastelessly) for photographs in the Seventies, and editing a book of male nudes a few years ago. Whatever else the debate is, it’s definitely not cut and dried!