Essay | The Penis Exposed
‘Penile Papers’ by Dominic Wyatt. Published 2021 /MNK Press
The penis has come a long way since it was concealed behind the knee of a naked Yves Saint Laurent in the advertising campaign for his scent Pour Homme, in 1971.
The designer wears nothing but his signature spectacles. He has silky, shoulder length hair and is remarkably androgynous, but perhaps more significantly - vulnerable. His lean frame is closer to that of progressive rock fans or British porn actors of the era - figures formed by copious cigarettes, tinned food, strong tea and instant mash. In hindsight the portrait by the photographer Jeanloup Sieff is distinct because it’s free of the machismo implicit in the male centrefolds that started a trend the following year.
The American edition of Cosmopolitan was the forerunner with that infamous Burt Reynolds pin-up. Shortly before the release of Deliverance the actor was photographed by Francesco Scavullo, who’d previously captured Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro - the pert chest gracing the cover of The Smiths debut album - naked. Reynolds has his arm between his legs, revealing only a hedge of pubic hair which merges with his hirsute body, which merges with the bearskin rug he’s spread across. With a limp cigarillo suspended from his lips he has the look of someone watching, waiting for someone to join him and be taken rather than the classic, clichéd female porn pose of being ready, willing and waiting to be taken. ‘At the time, men liked to look at women naked,’ said the editor of US Cosmopolitan Helen Gurley Brown, years later. ‘Well, nobody talked about it, but women like to look at men naked. I did.’ This contradicted the Gay Talese belief that beyond its appeal to male homosexuals the penis had no purpose as a commodity in American culture: ‘Few women could be aroused by the sight of an erect penis unless they were warmly disposed to the man who was attached to it.’ Inspired by the Reynolds pin-up and the sales for that 1972 issue, Playgirl launched the following year. The female gaze was cast in a different light to its male equivalent, as successive waves of feminists have been quick to argue that male objectification doesn’t often lead to violence or a loss of power.
In the 1990s I interviewed Germaine Greer about Cosmopolitan as it was coming up for an anniversary. She explained how back in 1972 her husband from a rash marriage that lasted three weeks was its first British male centrefold. It was apt that Greer’s estranged construction worker husband should become a pin-up. Three years earlier, before the publication of The Female Eunuch as time was called on the 1960s, she was co-founder of Europe’s first ‘sex paper’ Suck. Published in Amsterdam to avoid UK obscenity laws it was an antidote to top shelf pornography such as Screw (according to its editor, it didn’t ‘ink out a public hair or chalk out an organ’). Greer’s role was to demystify the body, at least when it came to women’s relationship with it. One issue featured an image of the author with ankles at ear level and every orifice in view, as she smiles at the camera: ‘Face, pubes and anus framed by vast buttocks, nothing decorative about it. Nothing sexy about it either. Confrontation was the name of the game.’ The penis itself put in an appearance to illustrate columns entitled ‘Cock Sucking’, beneath deco fonts and graphics that belonged at Biba or on Magpie.
Then in 1972 Greer’s former spouse naked in Cosmopolitan with a knee raised to cover his penis and, oddly, his navel airbrushed completely. Nudity had moved from the counter culture fringes to glossy female magazines, but what was central to the sexualisation and objectification of the male was absent. Despite talk of milestones in sexual liberation in that era sightings of the penis were rare. It was there in the far reaches of the aforementioned top shelf porn, but it would be a long time before it began having a regular cameo on page, stage and screen - now, for instance. And long before it did there was Nick Kamen in boxer shorts.
You have to picture the world of advertising, the wider world even, when the model stepped into that launderette to the sound of Marvin Gaye and stripped down to his underwear on Boxing Day, 1985. Suddenly there was a male figure in commercials that seemed in keeping with the young of the age, even though the setting for the Levis ad was a previous epoch of Americana and denim as worn by figures like James Dean. We’d gone through Marlboro Man, the Milk Tray man, those scantily clad males that had a touch of furry Burt Reynolds about them, advertising aftershave that smelled as bad as the name emblazoned on the bottle sounded. Now this.
The 1980s Levis 501 man as exemplified by Kamen was a different specimen altogether; one that shifted jeans and redefined a vintage brand as sales rose by 800 per cent. Kamen was a street-cast model, and a poster boy for the maverick Buffalo collective of models, photographers, musicians and stylists credited with defining youth culture of the time, as featured in The Face. He was an unusual bit of casting for such an iconic wholesome American brand, having mixed Burmese, Dutch and English heritage. As Buffalo photographer Jamie Morgan has said of his brother, the late-Barry Kamen, as a model, a subject, he had the ‘vulnerability and strength of a guy’ and ‘the same status as a woman’.
Here was a taster for the waxed, ripped, groomed and exfoliated figure that was to dominate advertising and similar arts in the future. The shift came by way of the 1980s and the freedoms that consumerism brought when it exposed an experience to the many - although not all, granted - previously available to the few. The ad was where music, style, revivalism, and a shift in sexual mores came together during a spin cycle. Just as men began to dress and look different in the main - the camp margins had clocked up new romanticism, gender-bending, and leather boys - they were beginning to look after themselves. This was not lost on anthropologist Ted Polhemus writing on ‘peacock power’, suggesting this was one of those points in history when the preening male was moving in on territory preserved for the female of the species. His articles appeared in Cosmopolitan and Over 21 along with essays encouraging the heterosexual male to break free from shackles that were cultural rather than sartorial, under headings such as ‘Liberating The Clockwork Man’.
Clearly, male grooming and male sexuality had evolved since a man last walked into a launderette and stripped off. He was a young, quintessential English caricature belonging to a class from another age, filmed in a makeshift launderette in the 1960s, as young women in Mary Quant clothes accessorised with chignons, looked on aghast. They stared and giggled as the male with the bowler hat stripped down to white boxer shorts, a saggy vest and sock suspenders. The phallic theme in the scene was limited to the Hamlet cigar he slipped between his lips as Jacques Loussier played Bach. (Perhaps, as Freud is alleged to have said, a cigar is sometimes simply a cigar. )
Fast forward to the present day and Playgirl has been relaunched - with the exposed male less apparent between its sheets - while the penis has become a bone of contention in the trans debate and remains an issue for those that believe it dominates and defines male behaviour and attitudes towards women. Equally, it has become more exposed and is more on show; omnipresent in fashion, on screen. No longer censored or concealed in the way it was for so long when, in broadcasting, if the member was seen at all it could not be for purposes of sexual arousal and, reputedly, should ape the outline of the Scottish coastline; the mythical ‘Mull of Kintyre’ rule. Everything changed last year, when the tumescent membrum virile - well, eight of them to be exact - made its television debut.
In pursuit of relevance Channel 4 courted controversy and made television history by depicting an erect penis on the small screen for the first time, in the documentary ‘Me & My Penis’. It seemed a quaint move in a culture where Pornhub and dick pics are readily available. There have been ‘dick’ documentaries in the past, in which women or men provided the voiceover, offering a view on male genitalia as various examples of limp penises appeared on screen. With the influence of the internet and social media on the mainstream, it may be the dick pick has made a generation or two more acclimatised to the phallus. In the controversial teen drama ‘Euphoria’ Zendaya’s character Rue addresses a classroom on the subject of the dick pick - a kind of masterclass. The producers went to great lengths in rallying the right men to get the right images for this sequence. If this acclimatisation has contributed to the phallus losing its mystery and mystique it comes at a time when men are simultaneously accused of toxic masculinity while having their maleness constantly pricked. Even though the clockwork man has largely been liberated - he embraces his gay male friends, exfoliates, talks about his feelings, his inadequacies and shortcomings while standing naked with his penis exposed to the camera in television documentaries. The phallus remains central to gay culture, while those on the left that canonise and lionise the black male often objectify him too, pandering to the mythical black penis archetype. A theme that’s consumed the interest of many - from Laurens Van Der Post and Robert Mapplethorpe to fans of Jason Derulo.
More recently, the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ gained attention because of the nudity that featured, notably the nakedness of its male lead, in the post-coital scenes where love lay limp. A state in which it’s hard to imagine the member living up to that which Gay Talese - once again - summarised in his book ‘Thy Neighbour’s Wife’ (1981): ‘Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is a man's most honest organ.’
Now the male has become more hyper sexualised he’s going through a moment similar to the ‘peacock power’ season that began in the 1980s. Last year, an article in the magazine Business of Fashion stated that as woman were wearing more men were now wearing less. This is notably evident in the output of designers such as Rick Owens and Ludovic St Sernin. Maybe Owens did a disservice to the penis when he put it on the Paris catwalk in 2015. There it was, limp and hooded, glimpsed through peepholes in draped and twisted jersey on runway models, with barely the impact of an accessory. It was a departure to how Calvin Klein portrayed it in those ads that revolutionised men’s underwear. When the designer launched his range of jeans in the 1980s he declared that the tighter they were the more they sold. This was true of the men’s underwear his name became synonymous with. ‘I know all of the images and all of the models so well - as well as the moments.’ This was designer Marc Jacobs later recalling the impact of those early campaigns. The models included Mark Wahlberg, Freddie Ljungberg, Jamie Dornan, and with each campaign the traditional male pose struck by male models loosened up into parted legs and facial expressions that were the half-way mark between kittenish and climactic. These men were both ready and waiting to take someone, and ready and willing to be taken.
One of the moments Jacobs mentioned launched Calvin Klein’s underwear range in 1982; Bruce Weber's image of Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus in a pair of briefs against a spotless white-washed wall, beneath a cloudless Santorini sky. Emblazoned across a billboard in Times Square it halted traffic and attracted crowds. Hoardings at bus stops were smashed by those eager to own the image, and it was listed by American Photographer magazine as one of the ten pictures that changed America, alongside iconic photographs of the Battle of Gettysburg and the My Lai Massacre. In 1989, a man and woman actually did get naked in an ad for the launch of the Calvin Klein scent Obsession.
In London, in 2017, while I was writing about Klein for POP magazine the Weber photograph of these two nudes was auctioned by Phillip’s in London, and remains the most expensive auctioned work the photographer has ever sold. ( 'Ric and Natalie, Villa Tejas, Montecito, California’). Not far from the auction rooms on the ground floor of Selfridges, I found myself surrounded by images of black actors from the film Moonlight in various poses wearing Calvin Klein briefs. I guess it was one of those moments Marc Jacobs referred to. One in which it became apparent how far we’d come with sex, sexuality, race and gender since Suck; since Reynolds in Cosmopolitan; since Kamen in Levis; since a semi-naked man in a bowler hat lit a cigar in a launderette.
It would take Tom Ford to take the penis out - who else?- and put it in an ad. This was during his time as creative director at Yves Saint Laurent, and the launch of the M7 fragrance, featuring the former martial arts champion Samuel de Cubber. The naked model was inspired by the image of Yves Saint Laurent and that first fragrance decades earlier. ‘I wanted to show a man who represents a natural and relaxed image of male beauty,’ Ford said. Vogue Hommes followed suit several years later with model Jarrod Scott peeling off his clothes throughout a fashion spread, before becoming fully naked. Penis, model’s own. Well-lit, well-hung and warm, polished and photographed, these poses were not as a relaxed and natural as those Rick Owens sent down the catwalk, where the penis was workaday and close to that found on the average male in a hospital ward, a changing room, or stood at a urinal at a motorway service station in harsh lighting on a cold day. Maybe this is closer to the ‘honest organ’ that Gay Talese mentioned. It’s a long way from the organ that’s held responsible for toxic masculinity and global warfare. When journalists asked Lyndon Johnson why America was in Vietnam he’s reported to have unzipped his trousers, pulled out his penis and said: ‘This is why!’. But that’s just one man’s cock and balls story. Others have another one to tell: just as a cigar is sometimes simply a cigar, a prick is sometimes just a prick.