Bare Facts About the Unbalanced Scale of Nudity in Hollywood

You can’t show your bosom ‘fore 3 o’clock.

--Hattie McDaniel to Vivien Leigh in “Gone With the Wind” You’ll notice that Mammy stopped short of telling Scarlett she couldn’t show her bosom at all. This was a movie, after all, and even in 1939, film makers knew the commercial value of a perky decolletage.

The scene was also historically accurate. Cleavage was an essential feature of Southern belles’ formal wear, as it was for women in other countries, in other centuries, before them.

It’s still going on. Have you looked in on a senior prom lately?

You can blame the popular preoccupation with women’s anatomy on nature’s excess in assuring human sexual attraction. Females of all species are provided with enough physical cues to attract mates, but this is ridiculous. No matter where a man looks on a woman, he is reminded.

Add lace, makeup, high heels and a few monthly magazines to exploit them and . . . well, you know why there are 220 million people in the United States alone.

The double standard--the notion that people appreciate nude women but not nude men--exists in movies and other entertainment media because men, to disproportionate degrees, still dominate the media. It is mostly men who determine the content of our entertainment, and it is mostly men (or hormone-high teen-age boys) for whom the content is designed.

If the point seems weak, just ask yourself how “Porky’s” might have done at the box office had its big scene been girls peeking in on a boys’ shower room. (And, setting aside the beefcake nights at Chippendale’s, when was the last time you saw a bar advertising “Boys!, Boys! Boys!”?)

There are several layers to the issue of nudity in the entertainment media. Some feminists argue that it’s dehumanizing for an actress to take off her clothes for pay and that, in shedding her self-respect, she sheds a little of the self-respect of her whole gender.

If the accused were inclined to defend themselves, they would probably argue that they aren’t taking their clothes off for pay, but because it’s in the script.

Anyway, it’s hard to understand how it could be more dehumanizing for an actress to bare her breasts on camera than to have them taped together and then artificially hoisted into camera range, which is what the modestly endowed Vivien Leigh endured in order to simulate the fictional cleavage of Scarlett O’Hara.

Fewer than 10 years after that, ample Jane Russell was asked to wear a pair of torpedo holsters designed by producer Howard Hughes for “The Outlaw.” Hughes got the eclipse he was after, even though the film was banned for three years, and nearly four decades later Russell is still wearing bras for pay.

Female sexuality has been a staple of movies since the nickelodeon. (If you don’t know why, call Dr. Ruth. She’ll get a kick out of the question.) What’s new is that the various censoring bodies that placed limits on what could be shown on screen lost their power during the social re-engineering of the ‘60s.

Film makers no longer have to cut to a tunnel or a rocking chair or a crashing surf to denote sex, and actresses can take baths without being cloaked in a sea of opaque bubbles.

You can pine for the old days when you filled in the details yourself, but the facts are that audiences today expect more explicit presentations, and for those actors taking roles that require nudity, there is little risk of harming their careers.

Most of the top actresses of the last 15 years have appeared at least partially nude in pictures. Among them: Jessica Lange (“King Kong”), Sissy Spacek (“Carrie”), Diane Keaton (“Looking for Mr. Goodbar”), Ann-Margret (“Carnal Knowledge”), Debra Winger (“An Officer and a Gentleman”) and Kathleen Turner (“Body Heat,” “Crimes of Passion”).

The phenomenon hasn’t been limited to the glamour stars, either. Glenda Jackson, Liv Ullmann, Vanessa Redgrave and Julie Andrews have all found nudity a crucial enough element of a script to do it. Even Meryl Streep flashed a breast--for a split second--in “Silkwood,” without causing a scandal.

The context in which nudity occurs is obviously important. Sissy Spacek’s full-frame shower in the opening scene of “Carrie,” for instance, was vital to that story, while we probably would have got the point of Dino De Laurentiis’ “King Kong” without watching the big ape paw Jessica Lange’s breasts.

Still, the indignity had less to do with Lange’s post-Kong career depression than the fact that she couldn’t get out of her seven-year contract with De Laurentiis.

Recent magazine history is strewn with the layouts of famous actresses. Few of the serious ones have willingly posed in the nude. There is also a double standard about where an actress reveals herself. It’s OK in the dramatic context of a film; it’s exploitative in a magazine.

But crafty magazine editors, often with the aid of unit publicists and film producers, have managed to get still photos and publish them above the objections of the stars.

Celebrity flesh has become valued real estate. We have become so jaded by the proliferation of anonymous nude forms in film and magazines that the slightest recognition of the person posing substantially boosts its titillation quotient.

The result has been some Hall of Shame exploitation. Remember the Playboy spread on boxer Jake La Motta’s middle-aged ex-wife, which fed off the success of the La Motta biographical film “Raging Bull”? Or, more recently, the unseemly race between Playboy and Penthouse to beat the other to the stands with third-rate nude photos of Madonna?

Sometimes, the symbiotic relationship between films and magazines gets pretty weird. Unknown Bo Derek had a nude scene in Blake Edwards’ “10,” which made her enough of a celebrity to tempt magazine editors into publishing nude photos taken by her husband John Derek. The next thing you knew, the Dereks were hot enough to be making movies all by themselves (John directed Bo in the equally lamentable “Tarzan, the Ape Man” and “Bolero”).

It’s hard to imagine what the men’s magazines would have done without such contributions. Those layouts in Playboy, along with historian Arthur Knight’s periodic and generously illustrated “Sex in Cinema” essays, have added dimension to star worship that Photoplay’s editors could never have envisioned.

A few men have given it their all too. Bare male backsides have been commonly displayed, by stars ranging from Warren Beatty (“Shampoo”) to--we mentioned eclipses earlier--Arnold Schwarzenegger (“The Terminator”).

A few actors, more courageous and far better paid than the timid deejays discussed in the accompanying article, have even faced the camera.

The scene that sticks in the mind is the nude wrestling match between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in “Women in Love.” (If that is what the original Olympics looked like, we know why the whole thing was called off.)

Credit for any developing trend toward male frontal nudity, however, will have to go to Richard Gere, a true pioneer in such films as “American Gigolo” and “Breathless.”

There would probably be more male nudity in movies if producers and distributors perceived a market for it. Nowhere in the free enterprise system does the principle of supply and demand kick in faster than it does in Hollywood. But so far, women have not been beating down the doors.

For reasons that are delicate to write about, parity of male and female nudity on the screen is not about to occur. It would conflict with the more important demands of dramatic execution. Audiences today don’t want to be aware that anybody is faking anything, and the truth is that a nude woman, with minimal acting skill, can appear aroused without drawing suspicion.

Not even Laurence Olivier could. . . .