Thank God For This Year’s Meaningless Dicks

I’ve got a problem with TV’s penises. It’s something that I’ve discussed before for Decider, and ever since I’ve first noticed it, it’s something I can never completely shake. It basically comes down to this: While our favorite comedies and dramas are packed with countless instances of gratuitous female nudity that largely only exist to establish a mood, male nudity is often placed on a narrative pedestal. If you see a dick on television, that dick is likely meant to represent something dark, moody, and powerful, likely a brooding reflection on impotence or the toils of masculinity. A naked woman is just another establishing shot for another strip club. It’s just another subtle way entertainment raises its male characters and uses its women.

That’s why I was such a big fan of TV nudity this past year. 2017 was filled with silly, pointless dicks that didn’t ask to be over-analyzed. They were just their sometimes floppy, sometimes not selves. It was silly and glorious way to begin fixing a trend that’s been haunting Hollywood for decades now.

2017’s radical dickstorm really started swinging in May with the premiere of American Gods. Neil Gaiman’s beloved fantasy series always had a special relationship with sex and nudity, so everyone was prepared to embrace some truly crazy sex scenes. However, I don’t think anyone was expecting STARZ to request its adaptation to contain equal opportunity nudity, and even fewer people were prepared for just how many penises American Gods would show. According to Jezebel, the series showed off more full frontal male scenes in its first few episodes than were seen in 2016 as a whole. As a result, STARZ presented viewers with a series that didn’t transform male nudity into the special holy grail full frontal shots typically are. In American Gods, penises were just a steamy extension of sexuality, no more symbolically important or vulnerable than any female character who has deliberately shed her clothes during an intimate moment. STARZ’s embrace of the peen also led to one of the most beautiful and erotic gay sex scenes ever created.

This year’s comedies were filled with smart penis takes as well. This season it wasn’t an alarming phone call or email that distracted Insecure’s Issa (Issa Rae) so much that she crashed her car. It was a dick pic. That moment exists almost solely to flip the gendered narrative. Countless male characters have become so distracted by the opposite sex that they make a mistake. Why can’t the same embarrassing thing happen to Issa? That’s not even mentioning Insecure‘s headline-grabbing blowjob plot this season, which showed just about everything but a penis and yet has nothing to do with sex organ.

Joe Swanberg’s Easy took the same anything-goes approach to nudity, especially in the show’s third episode, “Side Hustle.” The episode, which almost watches like erotica, follows Sally (Karley Sciortino), a feminist writer who works as a sex worker on the side. “Side Hustle” is another exercise in equal opportunity nudity as it shows but Sally and her client completely naked, but the humor of the story doesn’t come from anything having to to do with male vs. female nudity but how quickly this couple is able to switch from normal conversations to graphic sexcapades. Penises weren’t the end of the joke for either of these shows but just elements for more complicated conversations about sexuality.

That’s the trap male nudity tends to fall into when it comes to comedies. Near naked or fully naked women are almost always used as objects of desire while penis shots are supposed to punchlines merely because they exist. It’s as if the idea of showing a penis on television or film is so absurd it can stand as its own joke. Hulu’s Future Man came close to falling into this trap before quickly subverting it. “Prelude to an Apocalypse” finds Josh (Josh Hutcherson) facing off against another version of himself from a different timeline. Almost immediately it becomes apparent that our Josh is packing a lot more than multiverse Josh, but rather just turning this interaction into a literal penis measuring contest, Future Man quickly plows on to deliver a big plot twist. Yes, Hutcherson and his penises are the butts of the joke, but they’re throwaway jokes in a scene that’s a lot more important.

However, Netflix’s American Vandal holds the gold medal in creating meaningless dicks. Though the entire faux docu-series centers around the question #WhoDrewTheDicks, the show’s roughly 1,000 penises don’t really mean much of anything on their own. Rather, they’re a stand in for a crime that was unfairly thrust upon the shoulders of one innocent man.

Even when penises were allowed to mean something in 2017, some of those symbolic packages were treated with the same emotional distance that’s often used when it comes to female nudity. For a brief moment in Big Little Lies, Perry’s (Alexander Skarsgård) penis can be seen, in a moment that highlights the unique horrors this rapist has inflicted on Celeste (Nicole Kidman). Likewise, the two penises in The Deuce’s first episode — one of which belongs to an old man and the other to a domestic abuser — are positioned to represent violence and an unfair power imbalance. These penises mean something, but they reflect on the lives of the women around them rather than these men’s own humanity. They were essentially mood-establishing props, something that female nudity has been for a long time.

This observation isn’t about being gross or needlessly vulgar. Thanks to the rules-free worlds of streaming and cable, creators can now show just about anything they want at any time. When most shows take that freedom as a greenlight to add in as many naked or near naked ladies as possible, it’s frustrating. But when women are constantly treated as nearly meaningless sex objects while TV proves that nudity can be tasteful, intelligent, and important but only when it comes to men, that’s infuriating. It’s another, sexier branch of the same Hollywood inequality that seems to have a limitless list of complicated anti-hero roles for (predominantly white) men but can only spare one-dimensional worried wife or sexy girlfriend roles for women. At this point, it’s starting to feel a bit eye-rollingly outdated.

It’s not a question about whether or not we should have so many nude scenes. It’s a question about intent and equality. This year in television proved that dicks can be thrown around just as haphazardly as female nudity always is, and shows can be better for it. Let’s learn a lesson from 2017 and STARZ. If we’re going to embrace nudity in this free-for-all TV landscape, let’s at least make it equal opportunity.

Stream America Gods on STARZ