If HBO Doesn’t Start Showing More Male Frontal Nudity, These Women Will Boycott (Video)
Everyone knows that HBO shows way more boobs than penises. That’s because TV is an industry largely run by straight white men who might feel vulnerable and gay when arguing for more male frontal nudity. Regardless, some women have had enough and in a recently released College Humor video, they’re threatening to stop watching if HBO doesn’t start delivering “dongs.”
The women in the video (below) raise good points, starting with the countless number of shows featuring nude women in brothels compared with the rare instances of nude men. One female audience member tells HBO, “You had a show called Hung about a guy with a big dick. And we never got to see it??!?”
So, they suggest a compromise for HBO: “For every minute we have to sit through this dumb double standard, you owe us an inch of Grade A man meat.” Sounds fair.
Here’s College Humor’s video on why HBO should show more male frontal nudity:
A Vulture writer pointed out that Game of Thrones has actually had its fair share of male-frontal nudity, though it comes nowhere near the amount of breasts they’ve shown. And herein lies the problem.
A lack of male frontal nudity boils down to one thing: straight male cable execs
HBO rarely shows penis in a sexualized context: All we get are flaccid dongs of men (or robots) just standing around rather than erect penises or ones in a sex scenes. Also, HBO commonly shows naked women in scenes of rape and torture, which is very male-gazey and misognyist. The men in their shows aren’t subjected to the same sorts of violence even though such things happen to men in the real world.
Discussing the lack of penises on TV, Kristin Iversen wrote in Brooklyn magazine wrote, “Claiming that women don’t visually objectify the male body in the same way that men do for the female is ridiculous on many levels, but also ignores the fact that it isn’t only women who might want to be looking at a naked man, in the same way that it isn’t only men who want to look at naked women.”
Since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) only regulates TV broadcast over the airwaves, it’s left up to cable execs to determine how much penis to show. Unsurprisingly, they vary on what they consider appropriate or interesting for paid subscribers.
