Little did Titian know that 500 years on from his classical masterpieces real life Adonises and Venuses would congregate in a villa in Mallorca clad in small Lycra loincloths, on a television show called Love Island.
Whether you watch religiously or actively abstain, say what you like about this year’s contestants but they are certainly not shy about baring their honed flesh. Which brings me to this week’s archive Observer Magazine all about the male form, or lack of it in 1978.
Margaret Walters, author of The Nude Male, writes that the male nude had been all but forgotten in the canon of popular culture, art and literature. The reason for this? ‘Women, with their modesty and delicate sensibilities and higher moral standards are not interested in looking at the male body.
‘Women are not encouraged to express their sexuality by looking at all,’ she added. ‘They are expected from the day they are born to suppress any curiosity about the male body. Prudishness was one of the defining traits of bourgeois femininity; we have still not shaken it off.’
One thing we can certainly credit Love Island with is the death of female prudishness when faced with a set of rippling abs. The tanned and oiled males are ogled like hunks of meat as they thrash around performing intricate gym sequences in the midday sun. This is not (I’d argue) objectification, but rather a celebration of both the male form and the female gaze.
‘A woman is expected to take narcissistic pleasure in fulfilling male fantasies rather than in exploring and acting out her own’, writes Walters. ‘There is still a rigid division between the sex that looks and the sex that is looked at.’
I’m happy to say this is no longer the case, and yes I am using Love Island as proof of the emancipation of female sexuality. Long live the swimming trunks-clad male nude. Ladies, am I right?
