The Male Nude and the Nude Male
by Mike Walker
On the twentieth of December, 2023, various Russian celebrities — mostly young actors, pop stars, social media icons, and rappers — gathered for an “Almost Naked” party at a club in Moscow. Much of what leaked out in photos was attractive, well-known, women in basically just lingerie. The rapper Vacío (Nikolay Vasilyev) wore only a Balenciaga sock over his penis and sneakers on his feet and faced the harshest condemnation from authorities: jail time, a fine, and issuing a public apology. His charge was not public nudity or indecency — he was after all in a night club for a private event where all attendees were either ticket-purchasers or VIPs invited to attend per their fame. In other words, people who made a decision to be in a venue where people would, indeed, be “Almost Naked”. Vacío was instead charged with “disrupting public order” and promoting non-traditional sexual relationships. The latter, basically saying he promoted male homosexuality by being nearly nude and male, came from not his actions at the actual party but the fact images of him undressed made it onto social media — a rather intriguing approach to prosecution.
I wrote about this party and its aftermath back in early 2024 for the Moscow Times, one of Russia’s most-respected non-state-supported media outlets. The Kremlin’s thesis was that the party’s guests should be punished for such scandalous behavior when Russia was at war in Ukraine, itself ironic, since that war has been repeatedly called by the Kremlin not a war at all, but simply a “special military operation”. Such naked antics are simply not correct in war-time — even apparently, when you won’t admit to being at war.
However, as I noted in my article there is a glaring difference between how the female party-goers were received for their barely-there garments and how a male rapper was, with the latter being punished far more severely than anyone else. Most importantly, the revealing charge is that even images of him in this condition could do criminal and moral harm to minors via their dissemination. Women in Russia get to be almost naked: they can do this in music videos, fashion ads, and elsewhere. And of course not in just Russia but in the United States and in many other nations. Yet male nudity has long run a different course: it was for a substantial period in the States acceptable and typical in the locker-room and may still be in pro sports but increasingly not in grade school and even college locker-rooms. When I worked at a major state university, I would go swimming at our natatorium and witness college boys in the locker-room awkwardly change in and out of suits under a towel or if they showered at all in the gang shower, kept their suits soundly on whilst showering. In Russia and Eastern Europe, casual nudity is a more unconcerned matter between men, especially in athletic contexts, but it seems even in the USA that’s been . . . well I supposed I could say, stripped away.
These examples may seem random and loosely joined only by their male nudity and surely, male nudity in a locker-room differs from that of a party or that of a music video or movie. And it does, but in all cases, despite there being far more male nudity — including full frontal nudity — in film in recent years, there is a pattern swiftly locked down: Male nudity is not an invitation as is female nudity. Male nudity is to service something larger, a need either pragmatic or narrative. The locker-room was a place where there was pragmatic nudity until there wasn’t and the reasons that changed are complex ones worthy of an article of their own, but kids more commonly having their own bedrooms and even bathrooms, not seeing a brother naked at home perhaps ever, fostering expectations of privacy coupled with concerns about abuse and over body image and bullying lead the change. Despite recently seeing more and more male nudity in film and television, the conventional typology of such was it was comic relief not sexual allure and the penis was almost never seen. A bare butt or something held in front of the genitals — much like Vacío’s sock — kept the male nude outside of sexual directness. And erections, the most direct of sexual visuals, were almost never encountered outside pornography which made their presence in due turn a marker of something being pornographic.
Art history of course tells a different story. The Greeks had incredible statues of nude men and boys and often in service of memorializing a fallen warrior or athlete. This was the onset of tradition of the heroic nude — a tradition under those same classical trappings which continued through Jacques-Louis David’s use of it to explore grand narratives to Jean-Léon Gérôme painting Le charmeur de serpents. (Oil on canvas, 39” x 48”, 1879) depicting a boy in an exotic Oriental land fully nude and holding a snake while a cluster of clothed older men watch his performance. The nudity here is especially interesting because it has commonly been read, again, as pragmatic in the sense it strips this youth of any means of hiding or controlling the snake via artifice — it makes whatever magic might be present pulled out from behind the proverbial curtain and made obvious. But it also makes the boy especially vulnerable: nude and holding a large, dangerous, animal. While this painting has met fair criticism for its pandering to stereotypes of exoticism, it’s remained a favorite of mine because it tells the truth of a purpose in nudity which is that when we flip the script on the embarrassment of being nude, it can become both performative and empowering.
My own MFA thesis was about the body of the male athlete and largely autobiographical. It has ample nudity — both paintings which were part of the thesis work itself and photographs of myself nude used as references for those paintings. Being nude to me has always been pragmatic as an athlete: I don’t see the need for a towel and the shower after swimming is more effective if actually naked beneath the water. However, nudity has for me in my work been also highly performative and symbolic. For one, it interrogates the place of nudity in the life of a male athlete like myself: stripping out and showering after a match or even a run. There is also a sexual aspect that gets pushed aside too much — even in ESPN’s Body Issue where famous athletes both male and female were photographed nude but with their genitals strategically covered, the beauty of the female athletes was emphasized while the ways in which a nude photo could illustrate the physiques of the males in relation to what their sports demanded was the main focus when it came to men.
In sports, we celebrate powerful, graceful, and swift bodies but how much do we consider what their actions produce in the moment for them? Yes, most of our focus is on the sport at hand and what’s happening within its frame, in that moment. Yet I won’t lie: there however is a pleasure to how the glans of my penis — nearly visible anyways through thin, tight, lycra running shorts — feels as those shorts are pulled off, sticky with sweat. I wanted in my photos and paintings the actuality of those types of moments and that means also nudity revealed realistically which in turn means not covering the penis or scrotum.
In my photography and paintings, largely self-portraits but some also of other men, I have also explored the symbolism of men nude in unique or unlikely environments. A “naked lady” can be stuck nearly anywhere, or a nearly-naked one can at least. This is the concept of the pin-up, after all, but a nude man has to have reason and in art school life drawing in my own experience as a student that reason was often dressed as classical. Poses and even props were designed to reflect those Greek and Roman origins just as Jacques-Louis David used such. In my thesis work, I fought back against this, representing myself instead in Converse or Vans sneakers, ball caps, and beanies — wearing my G-shock watch or spiky punk bracelets and carrying my skateboard or basketball, too. David of course painted grand: he went big in the biggest way possible. But when nudity enters that arena it is there for two purposes: to show the painter’s own mastery of painting the human form and to place Classical authority on what at the time was contemporary painting.
Part of my motivation for doing nudes also was courage. I am very comfortable being nude or nearly nude in front of people and being photographed or otherwise represented that way. I’m a platform diver and a track athlete. So I am in Speedos or tight lycra a lot. Plus, I’m a skateboarder too and most college-aged skaters or beyond don’t care about being nude—not all, but plenty. Why? Because we just don’t care, we trend towards cynical and nothing is more cynical than this being in your natural state and it being seen as shameful. So back to courage: as long as nudity is shameful and also seen as a fair field to judge someone, to discern without filter their physical looks, then to enter that arena willingly demands courage. We always hear of the “naked dream” where someone dreams they are at work or school and naked and no one else is nude—that would just not bother me. As an artist what bothers me is when we lose the nude despite its long and lofty tradition in the Western canon, or when we exclude the male from that tradition though he is actually crucial to the early basis of that tradition, or when we say “it’s an honorable tradition, the David and all that, but leave it resting in a century ago”. When it is truncated, omitted, we lose something.
Thomas Eakins, one of our greatest American figurative painters, painted The Swimming Hole in 1884 using his male students—nude—as his models and subjects. I don’t know if they considered themselves brave or just swimemrs. At that time, swimming was a rare opportunity for men to be naked together and with broad social allowance for such. It allowed Eakins something rare: a place and event outside the strictures of a studio to paint multiple nude men and at the same time, a means of recording history. It was both perfectly staged and no fiction at all.
Over a century later, I was in Covington, Virginia hanging out with my friend Ryan. It was late summer and very warm. We’d been riding our mountain bikes by the Jackson River and came upon some of his old friends from his high school days. He had just graduated college at this time in 2024. We all decided to dive and swim in the river as we were at a decently deep part of (an in general not very deep) river there. Ryan and I both stripped fully nude because we had on only lycra bike shorts and T-shirts. Not even underwear, so this was a pragmatic choice. A couple months back I painted the scene, taking some liberties with Ryan in the water and myself on the shore, nude, but other guys jumping in in Speedos and sneakers—in reality they were in boardshorts or one in underwear. Several kept sneakers on due to the rocks—a typical cliff diver safeguard. The Speedos I wanted here for some sense of eroticism spoken beyond just one nude figure. Because it was erotic, yet that part never got spoken and Ryan and I were likely the only gay guys of the small group, but eroticism was part of the constellation of feelings and memories of that long hot summer day. In the shadow of a hulking paper mill, we were the brave ones nude as if having walked out of history from another time of carefree young men enjoying the local river waters.
Other painters have not desired grand, but to find the beauty of the mundane and presented far more realistic male nudes, such as Konstantin Andreevich Somov’s Reclining Male Nude (oil on canvas, 1938) which portrays a nude young man lying in a bed by a fireplace. There is a lit fire, and the man’s faithful dog lays across his feet. It’s a scene neither classical in form nor erotic — but just cozy.
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The male nude so rarely gets to be “cozy” or anything close to it and there is a reason why: the reclining female nude of course existed for the male gaze. If nineteenth century paintings are to be believed, pretty girls did little more than lounge around wearing very little. Somov did his male model justice: while the man appears young and not roaringly masculine, he also is athletic and with his dog seems in a plausible position of inaction for a youth. Somov manages to take a form dominated by portrayals of women and make it work for a male without feminine underpinnings.
Which brings us back to both Vacío and my own work. Vacío wore only a sock covering his genitals and hi-top sneakers. His costume, such as it was, was indeed about sex. What it showed was as important as what it concealed but also–with the sneakers — pragmatic and serviceable. My own studio self-portraits in sneakers engaged in athletic actions such as skating, soccer, and basketball a few years before Vacío’s antics, I retained the sneakers as a nod to the contemporary nature of this work but also to their utility in the sports in question. Vacío’s sock on the cock of course had been done decades prior by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and others, too. In Vacío’s newest studio album cover he appears shirtless in white boxer-brief underwear and with an apparent erection beneath them. Again, the covering of the nudity being nearly as much a telling feature as what it attempts to conceal.
I’ve long been fascinated by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon’s work on feminism and pornography though I disagree with her markedly in most respects when it comes to porn, which she vehemently opposed. However, her work — at least her most-famous work — was a clear product of the 1980s when it was written as part of her doctoral studies in jurisprudence. MacKinnon saw porn as highly destructive to women and women’s social agency because porn of this time was largely studio-based and women who acted in it did, in fact, in many cases lack agency. Men, too, for that matter. And porn was seen as dirty and therefore hidden so MacKinnon also correctly noted that “the unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.”.
However, today most pornographic material resides on the internet and much especially with the advent of Only Fans and similar sites is the work of solo or small collaboratives of creators and not larger, commercial, studios. Porn is far less hidden away nowadays and its production and producers though still often the butt of jokes enjoy greater respectability. Plus, everyone may know a friend of a friend at least who has an Only Fans whereas if you lived outside major metro areas where porn was produced prior to the internet, you might never have had met a porn actor. Porn has in part become more accepted because it is simply more present. MacKinnon wrote about a reality which, unbeknownst to her or anyone else, was about to change vastly in the coming decades.
And while MacKinnon may have crusaded against porn in the name of feminism, reading her intrigued me to experiment and find experience with erotic images of myself. Why? Because she claimed porn could only diminish its actors, however her detractors such as fellow legal theorist Drucilla Cornell and cultural historian Camille Paglia offered compelling rebuttals as to how even porn itself could be an empowering experience for its actors beyond their paycheck.
My own self-shot (and sometimes accomplished with a friend’s help behind the camera) nudes were focused as artistic explorations but never avoided the fact that someone, probably a man, would find them of interest in the same manner men find pornography of interest. Porn of course avoids easy definition aside from the famous claim of “knowing it when you see it”, however, porn always seeks beyond all else to arouse in a sexual manner. It is material which comes with sex as its objective and normally in that quest brings sexual content of some stripe with it. Porn also in nearly all cases no matter how clever its own narrative draws upon known tropes. The pizza delivery boy who comes in for more, the sexy cop, the encounter at the gym — porn has to be understood with the sex it contains bookended between stories and known narratives found elsewhere. In my photos, especially the more erotic ones, I’ve always sought for the viewer to ask, what is going on? Is this a candid snapshot of him in his bedroom and that’s all? Is it staged? Is he wearing his sneakers but otherwise nude for reasons practical or related to fetishes? It also has always said “creator” before that was a common term for those who make online content.
Nothing about my work, even if an image is shot with a professional camera, intends the trappings of a studio. Instead, it intends the trappings of process, of working reference photos created for drawing from later or selfies for a friend. Prior to the internet, most men who shot nudes of themselves were . . . well, were few in number. With the internet, women and men alike shoot nudes for the sake of sending partners, so for very private consumption. The early forum posts and LiveJournal groups containing erotic photos were still limited in distribution. It was a circuit, it was a microcosm of the porn world too: people on forums came to have favorite creators. It was the onset of the adult content creator arena, really.
For me, personally, it was something else, too: it was finally a place where I could have nudity in my photography and people see it and it not require any censorship whatsoever or a professor asking what was the purpose. Nudity in fine art always requests a purpose or pretends one: the David-esque battle scene with warriors puzzlingly nude (think of his L’Intervention des Sabines) or the attractive woman posed with poise on her bed for the painter. Again, porn did the same: placing nude actors or ones who would get that way in narratives that had to bend to accommodate them. While I was keen on narratives, I also wanted to focus on just my body — as an athlete I was both in close tune with it and often puzzled by it, by injuries, by various movement, by how it looked photographed or painted. By our decisions, especially as men, in showing our bodies which so often became truncated or hidden in part behind something so the penis was not in the picture. That also puzzled me.
Now, as of this very writing on the second of November 2026, I attempted to post the painting Meeting Pavel for the First Time on my Instagram account and its automated filters immediately removed it due to frontal nudity. My previous understanding was that artistic, non-pornographic, depictions of nudity were allowed but when asked to clarify Instagram noted that no, they are not: any depiction of genitals male or female or buttocks was forbidden as were women’s nipples in most instances. So this is a furtherance of blocking nudity, even defined as artistic via non-photographic media like drawing and painting. This would, if exceptions do not provide otherwise (and one can only hope they do) forbid some of the most iconic and canonical historical works of Western art as well as things conjured up by lil ol’ me.
Restriction of content happens for valid reasons at times. Keeping adult material away from children, keeping photos or AI-generated images of people which may have been circulated or even made without their consent — revenge porn in example — from violating rightfully expected privacy safeguards. However, the Vacío incident where a man was blamed for not exactly what he did — wearing very little at an invite-only event at a private venue — but that circulated photos showed that he did this and the supposed negative impact such photographs could have. Was the Kremlin really worried legions of Russian boys would drop their trousers and parade around with only socks over their genitals? Likely not, but the very idea of a man nude in this way obvious struck a chord. Why, we must wonder. Looking at the photos of Vacío I think it’s rather clear. We can see the base of his penis, the sock swings just like the appendage it conceals, the sneakers say he’s out and about like normal, except naked — a means of pose I’ve experimented with a lot in my own artistic depictions. His near-nudity functioned as nudity and what was concealed was also displayed via its concealment — a trick Vacío repeats with his recent album cover where his apparent erection is viewed beneath his boxer-briefs.
Showing the penis, not covered by a hand or some random strategic item in front of it even when flaccid seems in many minds to do something scandalous: it admits male sexuality as something itself performative and awaiting an audience, whereas the traditional straight, male, gaze has always been on women. I am not of course by far the first person to notice this. But the man cannot be nude and his genitals revealed as freedom — that act then produces him as a commodity. No matter a man’s personal agency and freedom, his penis cannot be seen. It is really not so different in a sense than societies that demand women cover their legs or their hair or their entire bodies and faces because otherwise these women would tempt men — yet the inverse, that the fully-nude man would not be an object of temptation per se himself, but an acknowledgment that men can be such objects. It’s the “can” and its surrounding discussion which are the real catalyst for censorship. Erect or not, the penis is anatomy which does something sexual and if seen has to ask, who is watching?
In my own photos and paintings, the penis itself is rarely the main attraction. Often, even when full frontal, it’s simply part of a much larger composition — as it should be, simply a physical reality of male anatomy with nothing between itself and the viewer. Yet that “nothing between” is such a loaded space, and one the world no matter what liberation or progress we have had still seems to grapple with today.
Mike Walker is a writer, athlete, translator of Russian, and arts academic. He received his BFA and MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design where his MFA thesis Kleos, or How we are Victory: The Male Athlete and His Varied Proxies concerned how male athletes are represented in visual art. He has taught studio art and art history at the Los Angeles Film School and published and presented peer-reviewed research on varied arts and architectural-historical topics ranging from beachside motel architecture of the mid twentieth century to K-pop dance choreography. His publication credits as an academic and journalist include: CroatiaWeek, SEE: A Fortnight in Review, CutBank, the Moscow Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Tottenville Review, Slate, Coal Hill Review, Gently Read Literature, Translation Journal, Multilingual Computing and Technology, and the Tipton Poetry Review.
