A Question Of Decency
I want to start with a thing I heard a man say, because I think about it still. He had been coming to me for several years, and in that time the conversation before and after was always easy—he was articulate, at home in ideas, willing to follow an observation wherever it went. But on this particular afternoon, as he was dressing to leave, he stopped with his shirt half-buttoned and said, without particular emphasis: “I always feel that I’m doing something I’m not supposed to do. Even after all this time.”
He didn’t say what the thing was that he wasn’t supposed to do. He didn’t need to. I noticed that the observation arrived not as anxiety or complaint but as a flat description of fact, the way you might note that it tends to rain in April. He was observing his own experience with the same detachment he might bring to anything else. What he had noticed is that the sense of transgression seemed to be sitting somewhere beneath the ordinary conscious choices he made. He had weighed the situation, decided to come, arrived, undressed, relaxed, left—and the sense of not-supposed-to had persisted through all of that without being defeated by any of it.
Some time ago I came across a piece of writing, unsigned, published in a periodical called The London Review of Manners in 1951, and titled “The Gentleman’s Gentlemen.” I do not know who wrote it. The anonymity seems deliberate—there is a quality to the prose of a man who knew exactly what he was saying and preferred to say it without a name attached. What struck me, reading it, was how precisely it described something I had been watching in rooms for thirty years, but from the outside rather than the inside, from the perspective of a man observing the institutions that managed what the men I worked with had absorbed.
The writer opens in the National Gallery: “One cannot walk through the National Gallery without tripping over a breast.” He is being comic, but the comedy is doing accurate work. The female nude, he observes, is everywhere in Western art—illuminated, reclining, available to the cultivated eye. The male nude is almost nowhere: “Beyond an occasional David, preserved like a scandalous ancestor in the museum, one must descend to physical-culture magazines or the more adventurous advertisements for shaving soap to glimpse the male limb untrousered.” I notice the phrase “preserved like a scandalous ancestor.” The word preserved is exact. It suggests something maintained under controlled conditions, too problematic to display freely but too significant to destroy.
He goes further. The management of the male body in art, he argues, is not primarily about morality. It is about the preservation of a particular social arrangement. “The truth,” he writes, “I suspect, lies not in prudery but in fear—fear that the gaze, once freed, might look in inadmissible directions. For centuries men have trained themselves to admire women’s beauty as a public utility; to admire another man’s beauty is to endanger the tariff.” The word tariff is the one I keep returning to. A tariff is a price control, a trade regulation, a mechanism by which authorities manage what flows across a border. He is proposing that the suppression of the male body in art is a trade regulation—something designed not to protect the public from harm but to maintain a particular economy of looking.
The economy he describes is operated by what he calls “the gentleman’s gentlemen”—the permanent secretaries of taste, the institutional men who sign off on half-naked goddesses and cannot abide a sculpted thigh on the mantelpiece. “Were we to hang Titian’s Venus opposite a comparable Mars,” he writes, “some civil servant would call for curtains ‘in the interests of symmetry.’” This is satire, but it is satire aimed at a real target. The historical record supports the joke. The Council of Trent in 1563 formalised the campaign to cover male genitalia in religious art—to add the drapery and loincloths that Michelangelo had conspicuously omitted. Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini, the Ambassador of Mantua, led the charge. These were not members of the public requesting relief from an unwanted sight. They were officials managing what the public was to be permitted to see. When Michelangelo’s David was installed in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence in 1504, a garland of copper leaves was placed around his waist that same year. The statue had been made. The public had not asked for the garland. The authorities had decided the public required one.
The 1951 writer understood this mechanism with a precision that I find difficult to improve on. “Decency is less a principle than a panic,” he writes: “it exists chiefly to obscure appetite.” I held that sentence for a long time. The word panic is clinical rather than dismissive—it describes an involuntary response, something that arrives before the considered position. Decency-as-panic is not hypocrisy exactly. It is a genuine alarm, but one whose source has been misidentified. The alarm is attributed to the body on view. The writer is suggesting it comes from somewhere else—from the viewer who does not trust what the view might reveal about his own looking.
I noticed this in the men who came to me, sometimes. Not often, and not in the simple way—it was rarely as clear as a man arriving frightened. It was more present in the language, in the qualifications and the distancing. “I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here,” one man said, and I understood from context that he meant not that he doubted the practical arrangement but that he doubted what his presence there said about him. He had made a considered decision to come. He was still, in some part of himself, panicking at the fact of having made it. The panic predated the decision. It had nothing to do with what was actually about to occur. It was the residue of an older alarm, one that had been installed before he was in a position to evaluate it.
The 1951 piece is at its sharpest when it identifies the paradox at the centre of the British arrangement the writer is describing. “Our civilisation is, by any social measure, homosocial to the marrow,” he observes. “Men make the laws, bankroll the art, manage the press, and dine together nightly, congratulating one another on the splendour of the female form.” The male body is managed, covered, kept off the walls and out of the newspapers, by men who spend most of their waking lives in the company of other men. The regulation of the male body is conducted by the very group whose bodies are being regulated. “They appear to suspect,” he continues, “that admitting admiration for their own apparatus of power—the male physique itself—might reveal an intimacy too accurate for comfort.”
I find myself turning that phrase over. An intimacy too accurate for comfort. What it suggests is that the men managing the suppression of the male body know, at some level, exactly what they are suppressing and why—that the suppression is not conducted in ignorance of what lies beneath it but precisely because of what lies beneath it. The gentleman’s gentlemen are not confused about what they are doing. They are managing it.
He extends this into the market. “The patrons of art are still overwhelmingly masculine, and they prefer their aesthetic excitement safely heterosexualised. A curled, reclining Venus reassures the collector that he is both cultured and virile. A similarly posed Adonis might complicate dinner conversation.” I have read enough economic history of art to know that this observation has substantial support—the collecting practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were heavily weighted toward male patrons, and the female nude was the dominant form of figurative art those patrons bought.
The male nude was a smaller, more contested market, requiring different institutional framings—the classical reference, the mythological alibi, the athletic context—to move it from the category of the problematic into the category of the acceptable. Anthony Comstock, the American vice crusader who by his own account had destroyed nearly four million obscene pictures by the time of his death in 1915, was prosecuting a market he had helped to define. What was obscene was partly what he said was obscene, enforced by the laws he had helped to pass.
The 1951 writer does not mention Comstock. He is writing about Britain, and about a specifically British form of the suppression—one conducted less through law than through social code, through the raised eyebrow and the curtain and the unspoken understanding that certain things are simply not done. “What passes for censorship is thus more affectionate hypocrisy than oppression,” he concludes. “The gentleman’s gentlemen, who run our affairs, know perfectly well that society rests upon male intimacy; they simply prefer it cloaked in protocol.”
I notice the word affectionate. It is an unexpected word to find in a critique of censorship. It suggests not malice but something closer to collusion—a shared agreement to maintain a fiction because the fiction is comfortable and the alternative is a kind of exposure that no one wants to manage. The gentlemen look away. The looking-away is maintained by mutual consent. The protocol is agreed, unspoken, durable.
The men who came to me over thirty years had, to varying degrees, stepped outside that protocol. The decision to come at all was already a small act of non-compliance with the mutual looking-away the writer describes. What I observed, again and again, was that this non-compliance left a residue. The man arriving, however decided and comfortable, was still a man who had transgressed an unspoken agreement—and the agreement left its mark in the hesitations, in the qualifications, in the language. “I hope you don’t mind me like this,” one man said, as he stood without his clothes, and what he was doing, I understood, was apologising for his presence in a room that the social order had spent considerable institutional energy making unavailable.
The 1951 writer ends with something that might be resignation or might be its opposite—it is hard to tell: “The English male nude, unseen but suspected, has become our last mystery, hanging invisibly between the National Gallery and the men’s changing room, unnoticed by the art historians and adored by everyone else.” I find myself sitting with the word adored. It is extravagant, deliberately so. He is not arguing that the male body is secretly loved by a repressed public. He is making a more precise claim: that the suppression has generated something—a charged absence, an invisible but present thing—that functions differently from either acknowledgement or simple denial. The body that cannot be shown becomes, by that very prohibition, more significant than it might otherwise be.
I do not know whether that is true in the way the writer meant it. What I know is more limited and more concrete: that the men who came to me were not arriving primarily from curiosity about the male body in the abstract. They were arriving with their own particular bodies, and with whatever the culture had told them those bodies meant, and with the residue of all the protocol and the curtains and the garlands of copper leaves that had accumulated between the body as lived experience and the body as something that could be shown and attended to without apology.
The man who said he always felt he was doing something not supposed to was, I think, describing the end-point of a very long institutional process. The protocol, maintained by the gentleman’s gentlemen for the best part of two centuries in the form the 1951 writer describes, and for longer still in the forms the Council of Trent preferred, had settled into a feeling. Not a thought, not a principle, not even quite a belief. Just a feeling, sitting below the level of conscious decision, that the male body in a room being attended to was doing something it had been told very firmly, by a very large number of serious people over a very long time, it was not supposed to do.
He finished buttoning his shirt and left. I noticed, as I always did, that he seemed lighter going out than he had arriving.
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