Summer of Schlong: ‘Sex/Life,’ ‘The White Lotus,’ And The Explosion of Full Frontal Male Nudity on Streaming


When we first truly meet Steve Zahn‘s character Mark in HBO’s The White Lotus, he is in a most vulnerable situation. Sitting on a hotel bed wearing nothing but a bathrobe, he is lifting up his penis to show his wife Nicole (Connie Britton) how distressingly large his testicles have become. “Nicole, they’re fucking huge!” he shouts before claiming it must be cancer. While his wife off-handedly mentions she doesn’t know because she hasn’t “seen them in a while,” writer/director/creator Mike White’s camera gives the audience a full frontal look at Mark’s distressed balls. It’s a bold choice to show full frontal male nudity at anytime, let alone in the anxious way seen in The White Lotus. The irony is Steve Zahn’s big full frontal moment isn’t the first major one of summer 2021, nor is it the only one desperately concerned with masculine insecurities.

Netflix’s Sex/Life has made headlines for its raunchy sex scenes, but one moment in particular has been shocking viewers left and right. In Sex/Life Episode 3, actor Adam Demos seemingly goes full frontal for a decidedly un-sexy shower scene. It’s a moment meant to underline the anxieties that Mike Vogel’s character, Cooper, feels upon discovering that his wife Billie (Sarah Shahi) is still hung up on her hot ex, Brad (Adam Demos).

So what is going on here? How did this become the summer of male anxiety-fueled full frontal nude scenes? And are they just prosthetics or what? Let’s break down the one way in which HBO’s brilliant and nuanced dreamed The White Lotus is just like Netflix’s tawdry hit Sex/Life.

Steve Zahn in The White Lotus
Photo: HBO

Created by Mike White, The White Lotus is a acid-witted look at the gulf between the classes. The series follows a week in the life of a luxury resort, giving us an upstairs/downstairs view of both the terribly self-absorbed VIPs and staff trying desperately to live up to standards. It’s nuanced, layered, and full of some wonderfully quirky storytelling that drifts between hilarity and horror. Zahn’s character is quickly established as a modern middle aged man whose mid-life crisis is grappling with the one-two punch of his mortality and his masculinity. All this is encompassed in his obsession with the bulging size of his balls. He believes that he will die because of them. So when we see them onscreen, it’s not erotic so much as mortifying.

On the other hand, Netflix’s Sex/Life is a shallow exploration of one woman’s overwhelming sex drive. Sarah Shahi’s Billie seems to have it all, except the hard sex she once enjoyed. This leads her to writing a journal about her former sexploits, which comes under the scrutiny of her straight-laced hubby. Consumed by jealousy, he spies on the competition, following Billie’s ex into the showers only to grimace at the man’s obscenely large package. Everything about Sex/Life is tawdry and seedy and designed to be taken at surface value. However this scene is bizarrely antiseptic. For all its gratuitousness, it’s not about sex or sensuality, Billie or her fantasies. It’s about Cooper grappling with his own insecurities as a man.

Shower scene Sex//life
Photo: Netflix

Ultimately, what’s memorable and powerful about both The White Lotus and Sex/Life‘s uses of full frontal male nudity is how each scene delves into sensitive territory. For Zahn’s Mark, his fixation on his testicles is tied to his mortality, his virility, and his connection to his dead father. For Vogel’s Cooper, his curiosity in Brad’s penis size speaks to his insecurities as a sexual partner for his wife. In both cases, men are grappling with deep-rooted insecurities about being, well, men. Nudity here is used to express vulnerability, and that is fascinating.

Another reason why both scenes stood out? Full frontal male nudity of any sort — whether real or using prosthetics like Zahn did — is still a rarity on television. The fact that both high profile shows went there for big storytelling moments establishing insecurities? Also not the norm. When full frontal male nudity does appear, it’s often for laughs and occasionally for gratuitous sexy reasons. Neither And while you might have laughed at the darkly comic White Lotus scene or thought of Demos’s shower scene at other times watching Sex/Life, the purpose of both scenes transcended those reactions.

Summer 2021 is the summer of full out dong and balls on TV, and not for silly reasons, either. This time, we’re looking at full frontal male nudity to better underline the toxic demons dragging these show’s male characters into crisis mode.

Where to stream The White Lotus

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