Balder and Dash | Roger Ebert: Hollywood is built on negotiations. Managers negotiate rates, stars negotiate their time. But actresses are often gifted an additional element to negotiate: the surrender of their bodies for the camera. Where a bare breast was once considered taboo, now audiences barely bat an eye at female nudity. It’s expected, anticipated, demanded. With the rise of #MeToo and #TimesUp we’ve seen women gain equal pay and a more comforting atmosphere regarding sexual harassment, yet on-screen nudity remains an ambiguous gray area.
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I’m really happy this article mentioned Call Me By Your Name because this is the movie that I loved so much but had such an issue with at the same time. It is a groundbreaking movie for the male queer audience but contains almost no revealing shots of the male actors. Sure, there’s shirtless swim scenes and maybe a butt but nothing like the intense and shocking scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie I find utterly unnerving and disturbing even though the plot lines are roughly similar minus the fact that Elio and Oliver do not have a toxic breakup and actually grow from the relationship in a healthy way. I think the objectification of women is to blame for the dramatic differences in these films as the male actors had contract prohibiting, which is insane for the content of the film, while the female actors were pushed past their comfort zones just for the director’s “image”.
This article puts together a really good analysis on female nudity on screens from both sides of the argument- one stating that being nude, or choosing to be nude, empowers the actresses, the other still wondering if women being nude is just playing into the male audience and using the women as object so men will watch. The huge gap in number of nude scenes with women versus with men seems to indicate that no matter the view of the actress who is asked to go nude, the writers and directors and everyone who chooses what a character does in a scene are feeding into the objectification of the female body which automatically feeds into sexism. It’s also really problematic that an actress’s acting ability is judged based on her willingness to be nude and that she can only be edgy if she does go nude. I think this article makes a lot of good points and I hope we keep thinking about this issue and can put more systems in place to put the decisions in the hands of the actresses and not in the male directors and writer’s hands.
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