Deconstructing THAT Scene in “The White Lotus”

The male body and its discontents.

“Phallic displays are baked into the show’s DNA” So why the shock about this one?

Frontal male nudity is “something of a White Lotus tradition,” writes Philip Ellis in “Men’s Health” magazine. The pilot episode in 2021 featured a close-up of Steve Zahn's character's genitals. In season two, Cameron (Theo James) unnerves Harper (Aubrey Plaza) by “casually” exposing himself while changing into a bathing suit. This season Saxton Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who is (suspiciously) obsessed with turning his shy younger brother into a “real man,” goes off to the bathroom to masturbate, revealing his penis to both his bro and viewers.

Many viewers enjoyed these displays. But when Saxton’s dad Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), stoned on his wife’s Lorazepam, leans back and his robe fall open, exposing his naked penis to his cringing children, the internet went nuts.

Partly, the ruckus was about the fact that Timothy had exposed himself in front of his kids; partly it was about the truly “full-frontal” nature of the shot. In most penis-exposing scenes—both on The White Lotus and elsewhere—the camera doesn’t approach men’s penis’s head-on (so to speak), but sneaks in a sideways flash.

But there’s more to it than either of these transgressions.

Ken’s Penis and Google’s Double-Standard

To begin with the obvious, there’s always been—and still is—a gendered double-standard when it comes to filmed exposure of the naked body. Aside from “nature” documentaries and explicitly pornographic films, even women’s naked breasts were off-limits in the United States until the early sixties, when The Motion Picture Production Code started to give way to Hollywood competition with more explicit European films. Once that taboo was broken (in 1964, in The Pawnbroker) naked breasts steadily became more common, especially after cosmetic enhancement became a norm. Full-frontal female nudity has been rarer (I remember being shocked to catch a glimpse of pubic hair in Antonioni’s 1966 Blow-Up) but if Poor Things and The Substance are any indication, we’re becoming blasé about that, too.

Apparently, though, we haven’t become as blasé about male nudity. Most naked penis shots since Richard Gere first flashed us in American Gigolo (1980) have been of the “blink-and-you-may-miss-it” variety. And when I went Google- searching for stills of any of the White Lotus penis-scenes I couldn’t find any that hadn’t been visually censored, not even when I turned the “safe” option off. It was only when I stumbled into the more pornographic, x-rated sites that I found unaltered stills. In contrast, uncensored full-frontal shots of Emma Stone in Poor Things and Margaret Qualley in The Substance (as well as many others) are plentiful. You don’t need to search through the sexual underworld of the internet to find them.

Google’s Double-Standard

It may seem that this difference is just another example of the sexual “objectification” of the female body and the belief that one of our main cultural values is to provide visual entertainment for men. But, as I illustrate in The Male Body, Hollywood has never shied from eroticizing the naked male chest (think all those biblical spectacles; think Charleston Heston, Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, William Holden, Paul Newman—and of course, Marlon Brando.) And, thanks to Calvin Klein’s introduction of gay male aesthetics into the world of “straight” advertising, phallic eroticism has become the main currency in the marketing of underwear.¹

It goes deeper than resistance to the sexualization of the male body.

In 1999, I devoted the opening chapter of my book The Male Body to the history of our cultural reticence to putting male “privates” on display. Even saying the word “penis” used to be a problem² And it created a furor in 1961 at Mattel, Inc., when female executives argued that Barbie's new partner Ken ought to have a bulge in his groin. Barbie's own breasts, if translated into human proportions, would have made her Jayne Mansfield. She had been modeled almost exactly on the German "Bild Lilli" doll, originally marketed as a mini sex toy for adult men: big breasts, cinched waist, long legs, and slightly lascivious face. Her biographer, M. G. Lord, describes her body as "la différence incarnate."

But when they tried to endow Ken with his "difference incarnate" all hell broke loose. The designers had to try out three versions of Ken's crotch in an effort to appease nervous male executives. Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's clothing designer, recalls:

"One was—you couldn't even see it. The next one was a little bit rounded, and the next one really was. So the men—especially one of the vice presidents-were terribly embarrassed. So Mrs. [Ruth] Handler and I picked the middle one as being the one that was nice-looking. And he said he would never have it in the toy line unless we painted Jockey shorts over it.”

Some might argue that the squeamish executives only wanted to protect innocent children from a too sexually explicit plaything. After all, these dolls weren't designed as a course in sex instruction. But we're not talking here about testicles, shaft, head—just a little plastic mound. And if keeping sexual messages muted was the issue, then how did Barbie get away with being a bosomy vamp while even an anatomically vague allusion to Ken's sexuality was so problematic?

It’s a significant clue that the plan to put a permanent swimsuit on Ken was abandoned when Johnson pointed out that the "clinging" swimsuit would only make Ken's "hidden" parts more enticing. Little girls, she argued, would undoubtedly scrabble at that painted swimsuit and scratch it off any-way—an invasion of Ken's privacy that seemed even more loathsome to the male execs. Better that Ken be undressed to begin with than have little girls strip him of his dignity.

The protection of male dignity. That may be a key to it. And maybe, as Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, the preservation of myths of male superiority:

"Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his own anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it."

Translation: To be a body that is “weighed down” by our femaleness is fine for girls—in fact, being “the sex” is what we're supposed to be. But men are not supposed to be guided by the rhythms of bodily cycles, susceptible to hormonal tides. They are not supposed to be slaves to sexual moods and needs, to physical and emotional dependency. They are supposed to think like Man with a capital letter, discerner of Eternal Truth, the Universal Subject of History, Philosophy, Religion. They're not supposed to think with their penises!

When the emperor takes off his pants, however, it's hard to deny the fact that his body has a specific sex which (no matter how culturally "constructed") limits and influences him. So men just keep those pants on (metaphorically speaking), treating their penises (as cultural theorist Roger Horrocks puts it) "as an unfortunate by-product of evolution."

This self-deception is fragile, however. In every man's life are memories of being led, as it were, by his penis.

“Who wins the argument with a hard-on? ... When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground! When the prick stands up, the brains are as good as dead!" That's Philip Roth, in his Alexander Portnoy persona. Portnoy has a particularly difficult time keeping his penis in line. But so did St.Augustine, who described himself as ruled (before his conversion) by two laws, one of the heart, spirit, and intellect, the other "the law of lust that is in my member." Augustine, like Portnoy, spent most of his youth ridden with guilt over unwanted erections.

There are other ways a penis can lead a man into indignity and humiliation besides getting hard at inappropriate times, or when the conscience says no. There's also the problem of getting soft when the will is intent on being hard, when being hard seems expected, required, when the desire of another is waiting, judging, ready to be hurt, or angry, or resigned.

Men sometimes describe the penis as "having a mind of its own" — and that mind is rarely seen as admirable in its mode of "reasoning." Often, the penis is likened to a pathetic little child. John Updike has said that men's bodies feel "only partly theirs" because of the "demon of sorts... attached to their lower torsos, whose performance is erratic and whose errands seem, at times, ridiculous. It is like having a (much) smaller brother toward whom you feel both fond and impatient; if he is you, it is you in curiously simplified and ignoble form."

"You can think with your head all day, and maybe all night," Roger Horrocks writes, "but you must go to the toilet, and pull out your penis. You wake up early in the morning and it's hard. Think your way out of that one!" Yet the penis also reminds us, as one of my students aptly put it, "that [men] are just people, just some mothers' sons who once needed their weenies washed and probably will again."

Nonerect, the penis has a unique ability to suggest vulnerability, fragility, a sleepy sweetness. It lolls, can be gently played with, cuddled. Few other parts of the body, especially in our implanted culture, are quite like that. Even breasts, nowadays, are likely to be harder than a soft penis. In literature, tender descriptions of the penis are usually evoked when it is soft. The most famous is offered by D. H. Lawrence through the persona of Connie Chatterley, who murmurs to Mellors's soft penis as though it were her infant baby, even a fetus.

"And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!" she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. "Isn't he somehow lovely! so on his own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must never insult him, you know. He's mine too. He's not only yours. He's mine! And so lovely and innocent!" And she held the penis soft in her hand.”

The literature from the various men’s movements, over the past couple of decades, wants no part of the “little bud.” No, their icon is the penis in its proudest, most phallic state. "To become a man," wrote men’s movement guru Sam Keen in A Fire in the Belly, "we must first leave woman behind.” Looking in the mirror after a night of sex, he describes "the image of a man I had never seen before-his cock, resting but proud, pulsated with life, his chest swelled with the joy of being, his sinuous muscles were full of power." Proud. Pulsating, Swollen. Full of power.” Keen's cock itself may be "resting," but don't be fooled-his consciousness is clearly still in a burstingly tumescent state.

Big rig. Blowtorch. Bolt. Cockpit. Crank. Crowbar. Destroyer. Dipstick. Drill. Knob. Engine. Hammer. Hand tool. Hardware. Hose. Power tool. Rod. Torpedo. Rocket.

Hide behind whatever phallic metaphors you like—these stiff machines and tools still have a soft being living inside, like a snail within a shell. Stripped of its shell, no longer an armored warrior, it becomes a creature that’s exposed, defenseless. A human organ of flesh and blood is subject to anxiety, ambivalence, uncertainty. A torpedo, rocket, or power tool, "Jupiter" or "Genghis Khan," in contrast, would never let one down.

Why that scene in “The White Lotus” was so unnerving to viewers.

Being undressed does not necessarily mean being naked. When, in the 1996 French film Ridicule, an aristocrat took his penis out of his pants and pissed in the lap of another man, he seemed more to be whipping out a weapon than a body part. Similarly, during the second season of “The White Lotus,” when Theo James' character Cameron Babcock follows Harper Spiller (Aubrey Plaza) up to her hotel room in order to borrow a bathing suit from her husband, and proceeds to strip down in her presence, there’s nothing vulnerable about his nudity; we know he’s being deliberately provocative, even intimidating. He’s dangerous; he’s in control; he’s “manly” (although of a toxic variety.)

When papa Ratliff’s robe falls open, however, he’s the very opposite of a man in control. He’s been insanely agitated by the immanent exposure of his pilfering funds from the company he works for. He’s taken enough sedatives to put a horse to sleep. He’s unaware that when he leans back, his robe will slip open. And when exposed, his penis is just lounging there, large but soft, non-threatening, oblivious. Not a warhead or even a knob. Just unconscious flesh, just body, “weighed down,” by everything, as Beauvoir describes it, that men project onto women and try to avoid confronting in themselves.

Those who love The White Lotus see this stripping of male armor as one of the main themes that showrunner Mike White is exploring, both by revealing the dark undercurrents of homosocial relationships and the fragility of masculine posturing.

Whether it's Patrick Schwarzenegger's porn-obsessed sleazebag, Theo James's intensely competitive friendship with Will Sharpe, or Murray Bartlett coercing his employee into a cocaine-fueled office hookup, The White Lotus is consistently provocative, which is what we have come to expect from that coveted Sunday night slot on HBO. But it's never provocation for its own sake. Mike White is clearly fascinated by flawed, often-unlikeable men, and loves to holds them up to the light like a kid who has just found some exciting new creepy-crawlies under a rock.

"Look at my weird little guys," he seems to be saying. "Watch them slither and squirm."

Ironically, these fictionally “exposed” penises are rarely actually exposed.

Theo James freely admits that his intimidating penis in season two was a prosthetic.³ So was Jason Isaacs’—but we only know that because his onscreen children Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook revealed it behind Isaacs’ back. . “That wasn’t his real penis!” Nivola, 21, divulged. Hook added: “It was really funny. He was very excited to do it. I think he took pride in the prosthetic. He gave that guy a nice shot.”

“He took pride in his prosthetic.”

Isaacs, however, wasn’t so excited by the “was it real” controversy the scene stimulated among viewers. He found such questions “embarrassing and inappropriate,” refused to answer them, and in an interview on “The Morning Show,” complained of a “double-standard”:

“[T]he best actress this year is Mikey Madison at the Oscars. And I don’t see anybody discussing her vulva, which was on [the screen] all the time…When women are naked, Margaret Qualley as well, in ‘The Substance,’ nobody would dream of talking to her about her genitalia or her nipples or any of those things. So, it’s odd that there’s a double standard.”

Later, Isaacs tried to correct what some people saw as him implying that men were being treated unfairly:

"The point I then wanted to make, but made badly, is that women have been exploited and exposed and treated wildly inappropriately on and off screen forever and, even then, I’d never witnessed any woman being grilled so specifically about their genitalia. I shouldn’t have invoked any actresses or used the phrase 'double standard', which was just poor phrasing — there has long been a double standard around nudity on film and it’s not men who’ve suffered from it — in fact, it’s something White Lotus has been correcting! Somehow it either came out wrong or was misinterpreted."

Hmmm. Maybe a little too much “correction” there, with the “exploited and exposed and treated wildly inappropriately on and off screen forever.” And although Isaacs is right that there is a double-standard, pinning it to women not being “grilled about their genitalia” is off the mark. The fact is that whether or not actresses breasts are “real” or not, whether their sex scenes make use of body-doubles or not, etc., is a pretty regular feature of internet speculation. (Vulvas and nipples—maybe not so much! But why, one wonders, did Isaacs choose those examples?)

And while Isaac puzzles over our “odd obsession” (as he calls it) with the penis, isn’t he just perpetuating it by being so coy about his own? Why not just answer the question and admit that humongous thing resting on his leg was a prosthetic? Perhaps the real “double-standard” is that while we eroticize the exposed vulnerability of women’s naked bodies, we still cloak the (supposedly naked) penis in phallic costuming.

For more Bordo on bodies:

Shame, Sex, and the Female Body

1. See my book, The Male Body, for a discussion of how Calvin Klein revolutionized the representation of the male body.

2. I’d even had an Op Ed on Bill Clinton rejected by several well-known papers because it had the word “penis” in it. And during the Thomas/Hill hearings, prim senators bent their tongues out of shape avoiding the word.

3. By the way, Margaret Qualley’s boobs in The Substance were too:

While speaking to The Sunday Times, Qualley — who plays Sue alongside Demi Moore's Elisabeth Sparkle in the film — recalled working with an "incredible" prosthetics team to get the right look for the movie.

Qualley, 29, explained how director Coralie Fargeat's “vision of Sue was '80s inspired, with butt and boobs, think Jessica Rabbit.”

“Unfortunately there is no magic boob potion, so we had to glue those on,” the actress told the outlet. “Coralie found an incredible prosthetic team to endow me with the rack of a lifetime, just not my lifetime.”