The Limp Dick: Hollywood’s Latest Obsession

Through the 1980s, penises were taboo in Hollywood. The first instance of male nudity in a mainstream movie came, thanks to Tom Berenger, in 1991’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Films like the Crying Game, Boogie Nights, and Eastern Promises, among others, soon followed. In these movies, penises were often visually shocking, intriguing, unsettling, occasionally erotic, and always meant to be taken seriously. As the novelty wore off, and audiences became more inured to seeing cocks in art house cinema, it became increasingly difficult to escape the truth: The flaccid penis doesn’t convey power or eroticism. It looks like a finger puppet.

Maybe this realization was inevitable. Unlike women’s bodies, male nudity has rarely been appreciated, simply, as beautiful. As Jason Segal, who went full monty in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, put it, "When a woman does nudity in a movie, men immediately switch into a sexual mode. For women, from what I understand, it's not like that. They see a naked, out-of-shape man crying and it's funny—something weird, disturbing and disgusting we can all laugh at." A recent New York Times story on the science of desire found that women, more than men, were turned on by pictures of heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, monkey sex, naked female bodies, and naked male bodies if the fellow in question was erect. Just about the only thing they weren’t turned on by? An attractive man without a boner.

Judd Apatow, the director of films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, has most fully, and successfully, exploited the penis’ lackluster appearance. After inserting an entirely gratuitous dick (his own) into a scene in Walk Hard, a send up of music biopics like Walk the Line, Apatow vowed, “I'm gonna get a penis in every movie I do from now on ... It really makes me laugh in this day and age, with how psychotic our world is, that anyone is troubled by seeing any part of the human body."

But that’s a bit of swagger. Flaccid penises are more than just another body part to Apatow; they’re the perfect metaphor for his characters: sissymen and overgrown boys who willfully avoid growing up and pay for it with their inability to get it up. Erections are what men have—limp dicks belong to the stoners, virgins, and perpetual adolescents that populate (very charmingly) Apatow’s universe.