Associated Press

New York:

A smitten young man in Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘The Dreamers’ steals a photo of his inamorata and puts it next to his private parts, then is understandably embarrassed when she forcibly peels off his briefs and discovers it.

Rather than being appalled, she appears quite complimented by this different kind of Kodak moment — a close-up that leaves nothing to the imagination as the picture gently catapults toward her.

Such scenes got an NC-17 rating slapped on the new film by the director whose oeuvre includes the 1972 X-rated ‘Last Tango in Paris’. But in the three decades since then, scenes with full-frontal male nudity usually can be timed with a stopwatch while those with nude women can be measured with a sundial.

Even in ‘The Full Monty’ filmgoers didn’t get the full Monty — not even for a split second. Pop-culture observers maintain that is because a de facto sexism still exists in Hollywood, where women can parade around in the altogether but men can’t.

The instances of actors in mainstream American movies swinging in the breeze are so rare that movie buffs can catalogue them off the top of their heads. Harvey Keitel has let it all hang out at least twice (‘The Piano’ and ‘Bad Lieutenant’) and Ewan McGregor at least four times, including the upcoming ‘Young Adam’. Bruce Willis in 1994’s ‘Color of Night’, Kevin Bacon in 1998’s ‘Wild Things’ and Geoffrey Rush in 2000’s ‘Quills’ as well as the prosthetically enhanced Mark Wahlberg in 1997’s ‘Boogie Nights’ are some examples.

Sarah Riddick, an English professor who heads the film programme at William Woods University in Fulton, Missouri, attributes it simply to the industry’s gender makeup: “It is still a male-dominated business, and men are more likely to show female nudity.”

Elayne Rapping, a professor of women’s studies and media studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo, said: “That’s been a constant of Western culture for centuries in representational art — that women have been presented as objects for what in film theory is called ‘the male gaze.’ The assumed viewer is male, and the woman is to be looked at for male pleasure.” She said another reason is that it raises an issue of vulnerability for men.

One theory holds that while women have several areas to satisfy scopophilia — the term sometimes used in feminist film criticism that literally means the “love of looking” — men really have just one, where size matters.

Fox Searchlight’s release of ‘The Dreamers’ — uncut and with an NC-17 rating — has refocused attention on the issue of sexuality in movies.

Bertolucci’s movie may help destigmatise the rating, he averred. Even an X rating John Schlesinger’s ‘Midnight Cowboy’ won the 1969 best-picture Oscar. “How is it in 2004 we are more puritanical than 30 years ago?” Bertolucci said.

And even before the exposure of Janet Jackson’s right breast at the Super Bowl halftime show, Bertolucci talked about how kids at home in their rooms see what he deems an incredible amount of sex and violence.