Much has been made of the male frontal nudity in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” and with good reason: Penis shots, even quick flashes such as those with actor Jason Segel, are rare in film.
With women, though, directors are far more libertine. And languorous.
Look at the uneven treatment of men and women in another new comedy, “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.”
When the lead characters arrive at a friend’s house for a “bottomless party,” they are greeted by a woman wearing no panties. The camera gives a close shot of her pubic hair, trimmed into a landing strip. Then, in a slowly shot scene, we see at least 20 women in full view.
The difference is not just how much nudity we see and for how long. There’s an underlying disparity: The naked female body is a source of sexual arousal and objectification. The penis is played for laughs.
The women’s bodies at the “bottomless party” are too sexualized, too perfect, to be funny. The audience when I saw “Harold & Kumar” was silent during the party scene. The only moment of laughter came when the party’s host showed his penis, a slip of a thing buried in a mountain of pubic hair.
The effect is similar in “Sarah Marshall.” When we get a glimpse of Segel’s penis, it comes attached to a fleshy body that is a far cry from the buff women of “Harold & Kumar.” And the audience reacts differently too: When Segel’s character, still naked, hugged his clothed girlfriend, who just broke up with him, a few women said, “Awww.”
So what do these movies say about young men and their view of women, or of sex? And why does seeing a flaccid penis on screen make us laugh?
“There is nervousness about male nudity, and what you do when you are nervous is you laugh,” said Linda Williams, a professor of film studies at the University of California Berkeley. “It is almost a permanent adolescent reaction that is built into American movies, and we haven’t gotten beyond the adolescent reaction to the more adult reaction.”
The movies mentioned here, such as the recent films “Knocked Up,” “Superbad” and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” are made from the perspective of adolescents nervous about growing up, or grown-up men acting like adolescents. An adolescent view of women’s bodies pervades these films: Think of the “period blood” gag in “Superbad” or the childbirth at the end of “Knocked Up,” both scenes in which male characters react in disgust.
On a deeper level, the movies reflect a hesitance on the part of men to grow up and accept responsibility in a world that puts more pressure on them than ever. Many men have experienced increased anxiety about the success of the women’s movement, particularly as women encroach into previously male-dominated areas of the workplace.
Two films in particular address this issue. In “Knocked Up” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” both directed by Judd Apatow, slacker men struggle through fraught relationships with beautiful women who are more successful in their careers.
Which, maybe, explains all the penises.
“This may be like men in the movies screaming back, well, here is one thing we have that you don’t have and you can’t have,” said Peter Lehman of Arizona State University, author of “Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body.”
“There has been an increased emphasis and centrality on the penis in our culture,” Lehman said. “The stakes have gotten higher and higher around the male body, the idea of bigger is better, the idea of an impressive penis, penis size being very central in defining male sexuality and desirability.”
Apatow says his goal is a lot simpler.
“America fears the penis, and that’s something I’m going to help them get over,” he said last year in an interview with Hollywood.com. “I’m going to get a penis in every movie I do from now on.”
When Apatow speaks of “them,” he’s talking about men. He is trying to help men get rid of their anxiety at seeing their own member onscreen. There is no feminist goal at work here, no effort to impose some kind of gender equity in movies, in which there is an equal amount of female and male disrobing. Hence the sequence of drawings of penises in funny poses in “Superbad.” And the hotel room scene in “Walk Hard,” in which several men walk about with their flaccid penises flopping around.
Feminism, in fact, seems to be working against the males in these films.
Another advance of feminism is that women have become more open about their sexuality, and the female characters in these movies are sexually demanding. In “Superbad,” one boy refuses to have sex with a girl he has long had a crush on; it is she begging him to take her virginity. In “Knocked Up,” Katherine Heigl’s character demands that Seth Rogen’s character hurry up already with the condom.
Near the end of “Sarah Marshall,” Segel’s character fails to get an erection while in bed with his ex-girlfriend.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks.
“Maybe because you broke my heart into a million pieces, my [penis] doesn’t want to be around you,” he replies.
This is not a moment of a man being subject to the whims and passions of his body. It’s a moment of a penis with a moral conscience that won’t get erect for a woman who treated him so badly.
It’s as if Apatow is trying to restore dignity to soft penises, and the men they belong to.
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Laura Hodes is a Chicago-area freelance writer. She has written on this topic on her blog at www.personalpolitic.blogspot.com.
