Male nudity deficit for Fifty Shades of Grey

The well attended – indeed, fully booked – Fifty Shades of Grey premiere event at Eden Cinemas last week proved that the craze over E.L. James’s erotic romance book trilogy remains in full swing. It has now of course also gained an extra inch of cultural traction thanks to the much-hyped film adaptation of the biggest literary trend since the Twilight saga (more on that later). 

But although both expectations and enthusiasm ran high during the Eden Cinemas-organised event – during which half-naked male models greeted the predominantly female punters, who also availed themselves of complimentary cocktails – upon exiting the screening, one disappointed customer echoed an unfortunately familiar refrain.

“This was a film supposedly aimed at women… but all we saw were other naked women…” 

This was hardly surprising, for two reasons. The first is more straightforward: Jamie Dornan, the actor taking on the role of the titular Mr Gray, revealed ahead of the film’s release that there would be no full-frontal nudity for him.

The second is a lot more insidious but sadly widespread: Hollywood has a chequered history when it comes to male nudity – a stigma that appears to be borne of a strange and barely-logical approach to sexuality on the screen. Broadly speaking, this translates into more female than male flesh on the screen, for reasons that appear to be shrouded in as many shades of grey as the currently box-office-bursting film’s titular anti-hero. 

Documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick tried to cut through this miasma with This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), which shows up the myriad contradictions of the American film ratings board – the MPAA – and in one section of the documentary, even puts forth the idea that it’s female pleasure in particular that continues to be taboo. Filmmakers depicting sexuality in anything but evasive soft-focus choreography almost always run the risk of getting stamped with an ‘NC-17’ rating, which is a step up from the more tolerable ‘R’, often spelling box office poison.  

“I’ve always been a fan of European filmmakers and the way that they deal with sexuality, which is real people and real bodies, and it’s just a part of human life, a part of human nature… And I find that in this country we’ve de-sexualised sex,” American actress Maria Bello said during an interview for Dick’s film. “We’ve taken it out of the realm of a day-to-day function, because we’re so afraid of it.”

Similarly, Newsweek film critic David Ansen confessed that, “the Europeans always found us strangely puritanical,” and mentioned how director Stanley Kubrick had to include strategic shadows covering nude parts in order to secure an R-rating for Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

“This all turned out to be much ado about nothing,” Ansen said. Filmmaker Allison Anders suggested that this may in fact be down to a generational shift, pointing out how the ’70s appeared to be a far more permissive time for sexuality in American cinema. Anders’s argument is evidenced by a pivotal scene in Coming Home (1978) in which “Jon Voight goes down on Jane Fonda… whose orgasm lasts for a long time, it’s kind of amazing.”

Ansen concludes that pleasure in general and female pleasure in particular appears to have been edged out of American cinema wholesale. 

Though E.L. James is a British novelist, the Fifty Shades behemoth is arguably more of an American phenomenon than anything else. Blissfully unaware of the stratospheric success that would follow, James initially penned Fifty Shades of Grey as a piece of ‘fan fiction’ piggybacking off Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga – a corn-fed teen vampire romance shot influenced directly by its author’s sexually evasive Mormon background.

Despite boasting a (refreshingly female) British director in Sam Taylor-Johnson, the Fifty Shades film adaptation is even more so. Its Anastasia is embodied by Dakota Johnson, daughter of Hollywood royalty Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson (of American-as-can-be TV show Miami Vice), and it’s produced and distributed by American companies. As such, its creative direction is dictated by the American milieu… and it shows in the end result.

Throughout the film – which unfortunately imports a lot of James’s notoriously clunky dialogue wholesale, and dilutes the BDSM imagery that gave the books their titillating hook – we were treated to plenty of shots of Johnson’s breasts and backside, with only a handful of Dornan’s sculpted behind.

This disproportionate attitude to male nudity in Hollywood films hasn’t escaped the notice of local media experts either. Dr Josephine Ann Cutajar, senior lecturer in the department of gender studies at the University of Malta said: “American movies don’t have any qualms about showing nude young women – but not men. This is not the case with French or Swedish movies, which reveals a cultural difference.”

Even recent releases put paid to Cutajar’s claim: think of the substantial amount of male private body parts on display in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic odyssey Nymphomaniac (2014), which employs some American actors but which is in essence a pan-European production. And one of the most celebrated films of 2013 was Blue is the Warmest Colour, a French production boasting a seven-minute lesbian sex scene which more than rivals Jane Fonda’s throes of pleasure in Coming Home. 

Just as highly sexualised female flesh dominates American-produced pop music – represented by the likes of Nicki Minaj, and a fact that Cutajar finds more worrying than the lack of male nudity in cinema – it appears as though the American pop-cultural hegemony still operates with a stolidly heterosexual male mind.   

Additional reporting by Martina Borg