Yan Benink reflects on adolescent masturbation, disconnection, and an off-label use for iMDb. 

Pause & Circumstance 

On-screen nudity is a recurrent topic in Scream (1996), Rose McGowan’s character bragging to Neve Campbell that she’s renting All the Right Moves (1983) starring a young Tom Cruise. “If you pause it just right,” she remarks, “you can see his penis.”

Before there was the internet there was the pause button. 

Left to fend for themselves without the aid of categorically erotic media, resourceful teenagers have been making their own porn since the dawn of time, be it with a pencil, an imagination, or a pause button. A still image, possibly blurry and pixelated, is captured from a moving picture. Story, context, and frames preceding and following are evaded in order for what remains on screen to become suddenly erotic.

I grew up in what was possibly the last American household without internet. As curious as I was enterprising, I’d make ends meet by ordering a slew of scratched and battered DVDs from the public library. Without a gay equivalent to Mr. Skin, the curated straight man’s guide to female-bodied on-screen nudity, I would sit in my school’s computer lab painstakingly shuffling through the parents’ guide feature on IMDb. The warnings (reviews) were at times incredibly detailed, penned by cyber self-pleasure connoisseurs generously sharing the wealth; meticulously detailed and often providing a time-stamp. In two days’ time, I would receive a call from an automated robot alerting me that my stack of smut was ready for retrieval. Librarians, unlike Blockbuster employees, were under no obligation to ask for ID or so much as question why this precocious 12-year-old had a stack of Ewan McGregor’s off-Hollywood appearances in his balmy, perverted little hands. Two hours after school with the house to myself meant embarking on an odyssey of awakening, my mind ajar and learning like a depraved camera shutter. Delightedly, my erotic idols went from the waxed and uncomplicated models on department store boxer brief packaging to every celebrity crush (and nameless body double) to have ever appeared nude on celluloid.

Before long this conscious disregard of disturbing circumstances made sexualizing nonsexual on-screen male nudity almost a leisure activity, a talent as inhuman as sneezing with your eyes open. Like a cold-blooded survivor of brainwashing wearing custom horse-blinders of depravement, I managed to disassociate, successfully or not, incest in The Dreamers (2003), the zombie apocalypse in 28 Days Later… (2002), jubilant violence in A Clockwork Orange (1971), a pedophile’s looming presence in Little Children (2006), eye-gouging in Eastern Promises (2007), a Nazi’s shower rape in American History X (1998), and even Jesus’s assault and crucifixion in The Last Temptation of Christ (1998).

If disconnecting stimulating content from the dark and disturbing camouflage that surrounds it means an eternity in hell, then the Bible should at least feature a centerfold.  

Luckily for me, the naked male form does not exist exclusively alongside disturbing subject matter – it can also serve the purpose of heightening humor or a sense of raw masculinity. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that male nudity found a home for the purpose of physical comedy and shock value in films like Eurotrip (2004), Wild Wild West (1999), Borat (2006), and the Jackass features (2002-2010) – just to name a few. While nudity for the sake of an outrageous, unexpected gag is not explicitly sexual, the fact that we’re all here for a light-hearted laugh eases hesitancy and leaves more clearance to make it so. Likewise, the locker room scenes in football films like Jerry McGuire (1996) and Any Given Sunday (1999) do not shy away from showing full-frontal cock-and-balls. In an environment as brazen and immodest as an athletic changing room where exposure is inevitable, in lieu of vulnerable and harrowing, this nakedness is proud, recreational and flashy. 