Sure, they’re in the minority, but there are non-pornographic movies that show genitalia, male and female. However the ratio of male to female nudity seems nowhere near equal. Recently, movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story have prominently used penises to punctuate certain scenes, but one doesn’t have to think very hard to come up with many more examples of male genitals in films. One does have to work very hard to come up with any examples of actual vulvae in movies.
So, we wondered if this bias was an actual phenomenon or merely imagined. To investigate this we performed an abnormally high amount of research for this blog. We found 156 movies
that feature graphic nudity (we are using “graphic nudity” here to mean actual genitals, not just pubic hair as the MPAA seems to define it), however slight, from either sex. As you can see in the chart, the overwhelming majority of graphic nudity is male. of the 156 movies, 154 show penises while only 21 show vulvae. To demonstrate the disparity even more, we
counted the actual numbers of different,individual genitals. Had we counted the number of actual shots, the numbers would have been even more one-sided as most of the movies featuring penises have multiple shots of the same member, while the few with vulvae have only single, very brief, glimpses. Doing it this way made counting much easier and, somehow, seemed more fair. Despite giving this slight advantage to the fairer sex, the figurative scales bottomed out under the numerical weight of dicks.
Now that we have established that there are indeed many, many more penises than labia in movies, we come to wonder why is this so biased. I can think of two possible explanations. The first is a matter of size. It is simply much easier to show nude women without exposing genitals. There are even options for discretely covering them up. Hiding genitals on naked men involves very purposeful camera and body angles or extremely obvious prop placement. The second is a matter that we touched on in an earlier post; flaccid penises can be regarded in a non-sexual way. It is more difficult to separate female genitals from sexuality. One ex-girlfriend once told me, a bit hypocritically and self-serving, that we can’t compare male and female nudity because it doesn’t “count” unless they have erections. While this may be a bit extreme, nudity is nudity, there may be something behind it. Maybe unerect penises shouldn’t be compared to vulvae. Maybe, on an explicitness level, they are more on par with breasts (granted, a little bit above them). When an erection is shown in a movie it is definitely a deliberate thing. It’s not the same issue mentioned before that it’s simply difficult to show naked men without a little visible penis. It’s very much intentional. The
same way showing a vulva would be deliberate. As a last effort to make sense of the issue, we compared erections to labia. This brings the ratio down a lot, but we are still seeing four times the number of erections.
So, if we can make any conclusions from all this, yeah, there are a lot more penises than pussies in movies. Why? I don’t know. It must be a combination of several factors; anatomically more prominent; in the case of flaccid ones, less sexualized; etc. But what it comes down to is that filmmakers are less shy about putting them in their movies and I can’t help but think that it has something to do with a thought-process something like, “With penises, men will be put off by them, women will recoil a bit, but no one is getting turned on by them. Now, put a pussy up close in the camera and that’s like pornography.” I’m not saying any of that is logically true (There are several instances of ejaculation in this movie sample), just that it might have something to do with it.
This whole exercise wasn’t scientific, but it really didn’t have to be to show that explicit male nudity is more common than female, and I’m sure the trend will continue. So, to put an end to this post and in keeping with this site’s traditions, here are some pictures from some of the movies studied.
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I think you should add the movie Prospero’s Books to your research and see how in throws off your results by adding several hundred different genitals of both kinds
We actually did look at Prospero’s Books since writing the post. Now maybe it was due to the quality of the copy, but we had a hard time definitively saying we saw female genitals. That was a hard thing with this counting. We could give a certain scene a second watch and if we still weren’t sure, the answer must be, “No we didn’t seem them.” If it’s that hard to tell they must not have been visible. Just knowing they are there isn’t enough.
Maybe there were a couple of times when they were in that movie, like I said it was an old, worn out copy on VHS, but even if that were true this movie would just push the tally more heavily to penises. There were a lot.
I guess I saw it in the theater a long time ago, but I remember at the very least the scene where the water nymph does a somersault underwater and her labia slowly pan the screen. And I suppose just generally on the bigger screen things are more noticeable.
Saw a vagina in a movie just yesterday. It was a gay movie, very famous movie called brüno. made by sacha cohen baron (guy from Borat). But it’s true, not a lot of pussy in movies. But i haven’t seen a movie whit a penis showing for months either(not even yesterday but I didn’t see Brüno completely). And I don’t remember if i’ve ever seen a movie with an erect penis in it. A lot of men find boobs more sexy then pussy and there’s a lot of boobs in movies waaaaaaay more then cock. Sexy dressed women, naked boobs and a ladies butt are much more in movies then erotic male close ups.