The Look Turned Inward
I could write about penises. I have encountered enough of them, in sufficient variety, to fill an essay with specifics—the ones that expand dramatically from apparent modesty, the ones that present confidently and then stay exactly as they began, the ones that seem almost incidental to the man attached to them and the ones that clearly are not.
None of this is what I most want to write about. The body, as a physical fact, exhausts its interest fairly quickly. What does not exhaust its interest is how a man sits inside his body, what he thinks is happening when he is looked at, what he imagines is happening when he looks.
I am thinking about men who stand at the top of the steps above a nude beach. The question a “gawker” is carrying is his own. I think the same thing applies to the men on the beach, and to the men who came to my massage studio, and possibly to men in general in relation to their bodies. The body is the occasion for something that is always also about something else.
A man who makes a habit of standing at the top of those steps in his clothes is possibly afraid of what his own body would reveal if he joined the people below. I want to be careful here, because afraid is a loaded word and I am not sure it always fits. What I observed more precisely, in the men who came to me and who talked, sometimes, about how they related to their bodies in public—on beaches, in changing rooms, in the other places where the male body is present without its usual cover—was something more various than simple fear. Some men were afraid, yes. But some were something closer to uncertain—unsure what register to adopt, unsure what the situation required of them, unsure whether they would get it right. And some were simply accustomed to being in their bodies as a private fact and had not developed a vocabulary for being in them as a public one.
The changing room after sport was something several men mentioned over the years, always with a quality of recall that suggested it had mattered and still did. What happened there—the brief compulsory exposure, the other male bodies present, the unwritten conventions about where eyes should go—was, for many of them, the primary early experience of the male body as a social fact rather than a private one.
What I noticed in those accounts was that the changing room had produced very different experiences in different men. Some described it as simply where you changed after sport—functional, unremarkable, slightly cold. Others described something more charged: a place where they first became aware that male bodies differed from one another in ways the sports kit had concealed, and that the differences mattered, though in what way they couldn’t quite say.
The question of what the differences matter runs through almost everything I have been observing. A man who stands above the nude beach comparing himself to the men below is doing something very specific. He has taken the differences he can see—this body and that one, this size and shape against his own, this ease and that apparent self-consciousness—and he is running some kind of calculation. Whether the calculation results in relief or in deflation depends on what he is measuring against, and what he is measuring against depends on something I couldn’t usually see from outside the room, which was the image he carried of what a male body was supposed to look like.
I have noticed this in a specific form. Men who arrived carrying the most acute body anxiety were not always the men whose bodies gave them the most obvious reason for it. I saw men who were, by any external measure I could apply, well-built, well-proportioned, healthy, attractive—and who spent the early part of our time together making apologies for their bodies that bore no relationship to what I was looking at. And I saw men with bodies that had been marked by illness or age or accident or simply by decades of ordinary life, who arrived with a quality of ease that the other men seemed not to have found. The ease did not come from having a body that matched the image. It came from somewhere else, and I could not always locate where.
What I came to notice was that the ease was partly about the relationship between the man and what he thought he was being seen as. The men who were easiest in their bodies were not always the men who expected to be found attractive. Some of them had given up expecting to be found attractive and had arrived at something more interesting: a relationship with their own physical presence that did not require any particular verdict from outside. They had decoupled the body from the assessment. The body was the body. What anyone else made of it was a separate matter.
I find this distinction genuinely interesting to hold beside what I have read about exhibitionism, which is a word that gets applied to the man on the nude beach who seems to be enjoying being looked at rather than simply accepting it. The word exhibitionism carries a presumption about motive—that the person displaying is doing so from desire, from confidence, from a wish to present the body as an attractive object and receive the expected response. What I observed was more complicated.
Some men who put themselves in positions where they were visible—who arranged themselves on the beach, who presented with a particular quality of availability—were doing so from something that looked more like defiance than confidence. They had decided, or were in the process of deciding, that the body they had was the body they had, and they were going to be in it in public, and if anyone found that uncomfortable that was the observer’s problem rather than theirs. The exhibitionism was willed rather than natural—a position taken, not a condition inhabited.
This is a distinction I find hard to sustain clearly, because from the outside the defiant exhibitionist and the genuinely confident one can look the same. What I noticed in the room was a quality of the skin, or of the breath, or of something in the way a man carried himself—something that told me whether the ease was settled or performed. I do not want to overstate my ability to read this accurately. I noticed it and sometimes I was wrong.
What I want to stay with is the looking, and specifically the man who likes to look at other male bodies and what he might be doing when he does it. I have spent some time in the company of men who were explicit about this—who came to me having also spent time at nude beaches or at other places where the male body was available for inspection—and what I found in their accounts was more varied than the single label of voyeurism would suggest.
Some of those men were gathering information. They were comparing their own bodies, privately, with the range of what they were seeing—not to arrive at a definitive ranking but to build a more accurate picture of what male bodies actually were, as distinct from the heavily curated images of male bodies they had grown up with. The man who has spent decades seeing male bodies only in advertising and sport develops a relationship to his own body that is calibrated against a range that has been selected for specific qualities. The nude beach, or the changing room, or thirty years of men arriving in my room, offers a different and more representative sample. Many men who looked at other male bodies were, I think, doing something like recalibration—correcting the image they had been given against something closer to reality.
Others were doing something I find harder to describe but recognise clearly. They were simply present with the fact of other male bodies—not comparing, not assessing, not extracting information, but attending to something that the culture they lived in had not given them many legitimate contexts for attending to. The male body, in the tradition I have been tracing across these essays, has been managed, covered, idealised, pathologised, legislated and philosophised about.
One of the things that management has produced is a shortage of ordinary contexts in which a man can simply be in the presence of other male bodies without the experience requiring a frame—a sporting frame, a medical frame, an erotic frame, a naturist-philosophy frame. The looking, in some of the men I observed, was the experience of simply being present with what the body of another man actually was, without any of those frames being required.
The man at the top of the steps above the beach who is dressed while others are not—I keep returning to him, because I think he contains most of the things I have been trying to say. He might be there for titillation, or for confirmation of his disapproval, or because he is afraid of what his own body would offer if he joined the people below. He might be there because he is a first-timer doing reconnaissance. He might be there because watching other men be in their bodies is as close as he has found, so far, to being in his own. He might be all of these simultaneously, or none of them, and his own account of why he is there might not match any of these categories.
What I notice is that none of the things he might be doing require the bodies on the beach to be doing anything other than what they are doing, which is lying in the sun. The charge he places on what he is looking at comes from somewhere inside the looking rather than from the thing being looked at. The bodies below are, for the most part, just there. The man above is somewhere more complicated.
I have spent thirty years in rooms where men came and went, where the unclothed male body was ordinary and various and sometimes, in specific moments, extraordinary. I have written about how that body has been depicted and managed and covered and uncovered by cultures with very different ideas about what it meant. What I keep coming back to is this: the body itself is not what is most interesting. What is most interesting is the man inside it and what he has concluded, rightly or wrongly, about what it is.
Those conclusions are rarely stable. They can change in a room, in an afternoon, in the company of someone who is not assessing the body in the way the man has been expecting. I watched that happen. Not always, and not dramatically. But often enough to notice that the image a man had of his own body was not fixed the way he thought it was. It was held in place by what he had been told and what he had concluded and what he had not yet been given the occasion to revise.
The revision could arrive from many directions. It did not have to arrive from me. It arrived sometimes on a beach.
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