Back to Brooklyn

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Get a load of that huge... scaffold. Totally the scaffold.

"Watching a man's entrails spilling out is excellent entertainment, but the sight of his cock, well, that would be obscene." —Inquisitor Glokta, who knows his tropes well.

"The gun is good! The penis is evil!" —Zardoz

We all know that the Moral Guardians of America loathe and fear the female nipple, or yet more fearsome, vulva. But there is one thing that is even more vile, disgusting and taboo in their eyes: the penis. In fact, it's not just prudish Moral Guardians who get upset when one does make an appearance on the movie screen. Most writers (and directors, and producers, and their 'preferred' market of viewers) are male. And (nominally) straight. And are somehow convinced that seeing a penis other than their own will turn them gay.

So, when one does pop up, whether it be Fan Service, Fan Disservice, or just there, expect it to be the only thing anyone talks about.

Can be a very hypocritical form of Selective Squick, since little do writers/directors/male viewers consider that female viewers might indeed enjoy the view, as a Straight woman is normally supposed to...

In Europe, they don't make a real big deal about nudity in general, so there are a lot more examples from their films.

See Also: Right Through His Pants, for when men even have sex and do other impossible things with their pants on, so as not to even hint that men ever get naked.

Examples of Back to Brooklyn include:

Anime and Manga

Note that the Japanese don't take those adolescent boys examples seriously, seeing them as innocent, "boys will be boys" behavior. Sexualized depiction, however... Still, this trope makes their mandated censorship of genitals of any age in Hentai look quite silly.

• Gokuu's penis was censored out of Dragon Ball for the American TV release.
  • The Uncut Dragonball Z get PG-13 certificates and they show badly drawn penises on young boys from time to time.
• Shin Chan (although recent episodes pixellate his penis).
• The boys in Doraemon have this happen to them lots of times. Lots.
• The same with the Cute Shotaro Boy Gash from Zatch Bell. He loves to run around naked all over the place, and swims in the nude.
• The Littl' Bits censored some full frontal body shots in the two-part episode "The Sea".
• The original manga of Cutey Honey featured Danbei's penis. Apparently Miniature Senior Citizens count the same as children by Japan's standards.
• For post-pubescent penises in a non-pornographic, look no farther than Hajime no Ippo. There's tons of it in the manga, mainly from Takamura. (The anime adds Pixellation.)
  • The manga also pixellates early on, but later they don't bother.
• Baby Be'el in Beelzebub. He's the only character in anime who can get away with full-time unpixellated male frontal nudity in a 7AM Sunday morning kiddie timeslot!
• The Berserk manga does this quite often. Most notable is Guts during he and Casca's more intimate moments. And the fangirls went catatonic.
• Kurono Kei in Gantz has some moments of it, and some other characters too.
• All the time in Gintama and sometimes parts of male anatomy even fly about, but everything is usually pixelated.
  • This usually happens to Kondou, Madao (Hasegawa) and the Shogun.
• In the 2nd episode of Highschool Dx D, there's a single shot frame of Isei, while trying to cover up Rias, has his nether region shown uncensored.
• Tons of this in Jungle King Tar-chan, always Played for Laughs (and/or Fan Disservice). The title character has quite a few up-Loin Cloth shots, especially during Flip Takes. All of them were Bowdlerized out of the anime version, where his Loin Cloth became a Magic Skirt.
  • Notably, there are also plenty of Raging Stiffie jokes (some of which did make it into the anime), but the penis in question is always covered at the time. Apparently exposed penises and erect penises are both funny, but an exposed, erect penis is obscene.

Comic Books

• In Richard Corben's Den comics, originally presented in the comic Heavy Metal, the title character is thrown into the fantasy world of Neverwhere where he and other humans from Earth become physical ideals and buck naked and most of the stories never hide it. However, that world is a place where nudity taboos don't exist since Den and his girlfriend, Cath, find that they are completely comfortable naked and meet others who are clothed to varying degrees and no one considers their nudity as anything remarkable.
  • Only applies to the first two volumes, though -- later ones have more clothes and occasionally make use of Censor Shadow and Scenery Censor.
  • Lampshaded and parodied in the animated Heavy Metal movie, where he puts on a Loin Cloth, saying that he doesn't want to walk around with his "dork hanging out".
• Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. There was a lot of controversy about this. That there is a giant flopping blue wang is all many non-fans know about the film adaptation, in fact.
  • In the comic book, however, it was intentionally drawn with very low amounts of detail and wasn't particularly big, as to avoid Every One Remembers the Stripper.
• Supreme Power was the first Marvel comic to feature both male and female full-frontal nudity (though the former appeared in only one panel).
  • Unless you wanted to count comics from Marvel's old Epic line. Elektra Lives Again provides rather... unique views of some established Marvel characters.
• Yorick in Y: The Last Man.
• The Sin City comics are loaded with Fan Service so much so that even the guys get in on it. Every major male character gets at least one full frontal nude scene... except for Marv.
• Also the 300 comic. Spartans love their cloaks, but love to feel the wind on their franks and beans more.
• German comic artist Brösel is really fond of drawing penises. Many of the longer story arcs in Werner include people losing their clothes somewhere along the way. This is almost never sexy.
• Image Comics ongoing series The Beauty features full frontal male nudity.

Film

• Bruno had a rotating, talking penis.
• Robin Williams in The Fisher King.
  • And again in World's Greatest Dad. This one was really blown... I mean stretched... I mean exaggerated out of proportion by the press. The "full frontal" part only lasted for a few seconds. Darn.
• According to Wikipedia, Kinsey was the first film permitted to show uncensored genitalia in Japan.
• Color of Night had Bruce Willis's penis.
• Walk Hard does this for laughs.
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall has Jason Segel doing two full-frontal scenes for laughs.
• Boogie Nights with a fake penis.
• The Last Circus has full-frontal nudity with the overweight protagonist in less than hygienic conditions.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator film, at least in one of the DVD releases.
• Jonah Falcon (the man with the world's biggest penis), in several documentaries.
• Ewan McGregor is definitely not shy about getting it out on camera (and the fangirls fans are grateful):
  • Trainspotting
  • Velvet Goldmine
  • The Pillow Book
  • Young Adam
  • And probably more
  • Speaking of Ewan, he actually said he wanted to drop his Jedi knickers and show the audience a real lightsaber.
• Happens in Monty Python's Life of Brian, when Brian (Graham Chapman) opens his window shutter to find an entire crowd of followers camped outside his house.
• Jaye Davidson in The Reveal of The Crying Game. Come on, you should know this by now.
• Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later.
• Sam Rockwell in Lawn Dogs.
• Battlestar Galactica: The Plan features a now-infamous "cock-shot" where the camera purposefully zooms in on a penis. According to an interview with Katee Sackhoff, Edward James Olmos (director of the movie) insisted that the camera "zoom in on the cock" and even directed actors to not cover it up for the shot.
• Come Undone, a LGBT film, is a example of european relaxness with nudity, not only features frontal nudity from both needs, but it has... more
• Kevin Bacon had a quick frontal shot in Wild Things.
• Y Tu Mama Tambien: both protagonist had quick nude scenes.
• Huey Lewis, believe it or not, in Short Cuts.
• Scandinavians tend to view nudity as something natural, and thus the children's movie Ronja the Robbers Daughter includes a scene where eleven completely nude men are forced outside in the snow to clean themselves during winter. And that's actual snow the actors are running around in.
• Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises
• Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom contains a lake's worth of this, along with female frontal nudity. Neither is arousing, given the circumstances.
• Fight Club. Tyler Durden's hobby of inserting random penis into other movies seems to be making fun of this trope. Also, the very-visible shot of an actual penis at the end.
• American Gigolo established Richard Gere as a sex symbol by having him walk around completely naked in one scene.
• Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves, as mentioned in Scream.
• In Rare Exports Santa's elves look like feral old men who run naked save for their beards in midwinter. And once again, it was all shot in real snow with real naked people.
• Simon Scuddamore in Slaughter High.
• The end of Sleepaway Camp.
• Harvey Keitel shows his hairy manmeat in The Piano.
  • As well as briefly in Bad Lieutenant.
• Tom Hardy for about half of Bronson. And then he did it again for the short film Sergeant Slaughter, My Big Brother.
• Background characters of both genders are seen fully nude in Prospero's Books, Peter Greenaway's adaptation of The Tempest.
• Ever wondered if Daniel Craig was a natural blonde? The answer can be found in Love is the Devil. He is.
• In the third Re-Animator, there's an extended fight sequence between a rat and a zombie penis.
• A man's testicles are shown being graphically crushed in the unrated version of Carver.
• Any Given Sunday.
• Pretty much every film Peter Greenaway has ever directed.
• In Hostel 2 due to complaints from female viewers of too much female nudity in the first movie,Eli roth made sure the first frontal nude shot is with a man. Also the scene with the dog near the end of the movie will make of tons of male viewers clutch their privates in fear.
• Geoffrey Rush in Quills.
• Joe Lo Truglio in Wanderust.
• Christopher Eccleston has never been shy about onscreen nudity (working as an artist's model during your 20s will have that effect), but it took him until Lennon Naked to do a movie in which the director wasn't taking measures that his dick wouldn't be visible during these scenes. (It's not a sexual scene, though. He and Naoko Mori are replicating the album cover mentioned below.)
• Seen several times in Shame.
• Will Smith in Wild Wild West, briefly.

Live-Action TV

• Oz.
• Channel Five's notorious one-off game show Naked Jungle was just that... a jungle adventure game where all the contestants and the presenter were nude, with no censorship.
• HBO documentary "Private Dicks", you can guess what is about includes the above mentioned Jonah Falcon.
• Queer as Folk often has male nudity and occasional frontal nudity, rarely from any main character.
• Rome gives us Mark Antony (in clear view), Brutus (seen from the side) and Pullo (though it's rather dark). Plus the poor slave who was sent as a gift to Servilia because "a large penis is always welcome" (though apparently he was enhanced digitally in post production).
  • And lets not forget the Squick when Vorenus drops the huge, mummified phallos from his moneybag - apparently a war memento taken from a fallen enemy.
• Dantes Cove features full-frontal male nudity at least Once an Episode.
• The Wire gives us Ziggy Sobotka's penis at least twice in season 2, once as part of an Establishing Character Moment. Season four gives us an extremely brief look at Omar nude.
  • Not to mentioned the "blowjob incident" with Mayor Royce at the beginning of season four.
• True Blood, in a grand HBO tradition, also features some during Marianne's orgies in Season 2. Considering it was some old guest star dude, it was a clear Fan Disservice.
  • Although when Detective Andy Bellefleur breaks up another orgy, quick-eyed viewers will note a couple naked extra that are quite a bit easier on the eyes.
• Lucky Louie, an HBO comedy, eschewed female nudity (erotic, therefore not funny) but often featured male nudity as show creator Louie C.K. considered the nude male form funny-looking. Louie himself bolts out of bed naked just after sex in the second episode. Other occurrences are always Played for Laughs.
• Boardwalk Empire has Vincent Piazza as Lucky Luciano doing full-frontal after getting it on with Gillian Darmody, who he thinks is Jimmy's wife, not his mother.
• HBO strikes again in Game of Thrones.
  • Theon Greyjoy, during a sex scene.
  • As punishment for attempting to sell poisoned wine to Daenerys, the Dothraki force a merchant to march with them naked and tied to a horse, where he would ultimately die of exhaustion or be dragged to death.
  • Even Hodor (!), while bathing in hot springs. Osha notes her approval.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand, mostly for Fan Service. However, one does get cut off, and it was the biggest one shown.
• The Borgias: Cardinal della Rovere (Colm Feore) doesn't have time to grab a towel while escaping an assassin in a public bath.

Music

• John Lennon and Yoko Ono's album "Two Virgins" shows them both naked on the cover.

Theater

• Alan Strang in Equus is one of the few roles in theatre (male or female) to require on-stage nudity.
  • When Daniel Radcliffe starred in Equus, there were a million billion jokes about Harry Potter showing his "wand".
• Prior Walter, the main protagonist of Angels in America strips down completely on-stage during an examination scene. The scene is maintained in the HBO miniseries. Joe Pitt also strips in a different scene, though the miniseries only showed a rear view.
• Ian McKellen's recent run as King Lear had him going nude as a part of Lear's madness. Eyewitness accounts range from "well-endowed" to "old and floppy"
• Hair notoriously strips the majority of the cast, male and female, briefly at the end of Act I.
• A 2009 Berlin performance of Mr. Puntila and His Hired Man Matti (by Bertolt Brecht) had Matti undress completely halfway through the play.
• Oh! Calcutta! was the second show on Broadway to feature male full frontal nudity (in 1971. It opened in the West End in 1970). However, for some reason (most likely because there was a lot more nudity than in Hair) it's far more notorious.
• The National Theatre's 2011 production of Frankenstein had Benedict Cumberbatch or Johnny Lee Miller (depending on the night) spending about 20 minutes completely nude as the Creature, as he came to life and learned how to move, walk etc.

Video Games

• Grand Theft Auto IV the Lost And Damned provides this courtesy of Congressman Stubbs.
• Several times in Amnesia the Dark Descent, a swedish game. It's mostly on disected corpses and a corpse-like creature.
• In the Castlevania series, the werewolf in Rondo of Blood (and every other game that uses the same sprites) turns into a naked, anatomically correct human when it dies (it's a small sprite, but there's definitely something there). Eventually censored in The Dracula X Chronicles (with black briefs, both in 2D and 3D) and Order of Ecclesia (with magically-appearing boxer shorts).
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has naked statues of both men and women. The most notable male statues are the stone guardians on either side of each of the "warp doors" which transport you somewhere else in the castle.
• The characters in Rampage (Two Guys and a Girl) have always turned into naked humans when they die, but only in Rampage: World Tour did you get a completely unobstructed shot of their naked bodies. This being a higher bittage than the Castlevania example above, the penis is clearly defined.
• Lucifer in Dantes Inferno has a very large, very bouncy, furry penis.
  • You can also make out Dante's penis during the ending.
• In Asura's Wrath, you can catch a glimpse of Asura's crotch for a split second. It's hard to make out anything specific, but he clearly doesn't have Barbie Doll Anatomy (NSFW image here).

Web Original

• Broken Saints features all three male heroes naked (albeit drawn in a stylized fashion) during the Dream Sequence that is Chapter 20, Act V.

Webcomics

• Sonichu: One of the most grotesque episodes of the series, referred to by trolls as the "Giant Penis Comic", depicts the Author Avatar posing nude in preparation for sex with his girlfriend of the moment. It's not erotic due to the sloppy art, but it's notable in that his penis is depicted as at least the size of his leg, and was possibly traced. The author still insists that it's a childrens' comic.
• One of the sketches for Niels shows most of the cast dancing in their underwear. Turns out Peter doesn't wear any.
• During the story arc in Questionable Content where Marten, Marigold, and Hannelore travel to the space station where Hanners grew up, when the space plane's AI fully manifests, he does so without pants. This is the first time that genitals have been depicted in the comic, which up to that point has had a lot of sexual content but no bared breasts or genitals.

Newspaper Comics

• The Dutch comic "Fokke & Sukke" (Yes, I know what it sounds like) has two naked birds as the main characters. With their penises showing all the time, and sometimes they are even part of the joke. Did I mention this comic shows up daily in newspapers?

Western Animation

• Bart Simpson in The Simpsons Movie. The film got only a PG-13 rating for numerous reasons. One, the penis did not have much detail, the latter of which lessens most films' impacts of certain scenes. Two, it was done in a non-sexual manner. Three, it was shown onscreen for all of two seconds before it was covered by another shrub.
  • There's an episode that features the actual David statue coming to Springfield. And it's uncensored.
• In South Park, Cartman's naked penis was far more important than the fact that they threw a shruiken into Butters' eye.
  • And in a meta-example, later airings would actually blur the penis out, while scenes of Butters are left intact.
• All over the place in the third season of The Venture Brothers, where most of it counted as Fan Disservice. Case in point: young Rusty Venture getting an eyeful of his dad's penis hanging out the front of his trousers in a flashback, which traumatized the boy for life.
• The first season of The Boondocks contains lots of male nudity, but only the DVD version has Full Frontal male nudity uncensored.
• There is a brief moment of this In the animated movie Dead Space Downfall, inspired by the Dead Space videogames.
• The creator of Brazilian comic Monica's Gang said in an interview that while exporting the animated adaptations, he had problems in some Muslim countries with one of the characters, hillbilly Chuck Billy (Chico Bento), who swims naked. The interviewer replied that the upcry was too much for such a small... you know.
  • It should be noted that Chuck Billy is a kid. If you are "offended" by a kid's penis for some reason you're a creepy pedophile.
• In an episode of Bob And Margaret, Bob has a nightmare where he is naked and falling. We get the 'upskirt' view (sans skirt).
• In the Foghorn Leghorn short, "Crockett Doodle Doo", Egghead Jr. uses a paper airplane and dry ice, making a storm for the Indian rain dance, Foggy ends up getting struck by thunder and lightning, having his feathers blown off of him, standing in front of Egghead Jr., naked and featherless.