Implied eroticism that is encoded in such a site. The relative adjustment of the

'heterosexual matrix' which sees an increasing legitimation of a gender-sexuality

system where the trajectory of sexual or alluring desire is allowed to expand

to either sex (so long as it's an ostensible, coherent gender) destabilizes the

non-sexuality of the website. Where the gender exclusiveness CAn't be under-

stood to guard against the presence of want as homoerotic want, and where the

potential fall of homosociality with homosexuality is increasingly billed,

understood as alone non sexual forms of pleasurable action.

Nevertheless, the uncertainty between the framework of the communal showers and

that of the sexual is normally understood by participants. Specific rites are

in place to stop the homosociality of communal nakedness sliding into homo-

sexuality. As Janene Hancock recently points out, these rituals are practised in

the sorts of 'appropriate' dialog:

to women, the semantics used are not always complimentary. They discuss issues such as their

sexual conquests, their prowess at picking-up, taking out and 'screwing' the girls they meet,

as well as fairly frequently-lurid details concerning their sexual exploits. . . . Locker room conversa-

tion is about making guys feel positive about themselves, solidifying their maleness and

rejecting any understanding that they may belong to the marginalised masculinity of homosexuals or

poofters. It's a kind of bonding between guys, reinforcing their relationship with each other

-- verbally more than physically.

Among men, statements of homophobia, dialogues about women and the

ways in which the gaze is performed as a non-sexual looking shield the

communal nakedness of men from signifying nakedness-as-sexual. Likewise,

among women there are particular codes of behaviour that discontinue the nakedness in

communal showers from stealing into the sexual. I'm reliably informed that

women in such a website will frequently either have a conversation that avoids drawing

Cozy, stay perfectly silent. These also are special ritualistic codes

which prevent the nakedness/gaze duality from being understood as having a

sexual element, no matter the ways in which such nakedness/gazing might

be involved in actions of policing the physical.

So what, lately, has been occurring to the site of the communal shower as

Based on a 1996 New York Times article, showering after

Physical education course by secondary school males is not only on the decline but has now

become a signicant rarity (Johnson, 1996). Although the writer speculates that

this decline intersects with issues of modesty and expectancies of body image and

tness, he also points to an erotic element:

... some health and physical education experts state that many pupils withdraw [from

post-exercise showering] precisely due to the overload of erotic images -- so many totally

toned bodies cannot help but leave ordinary mortals feeling a bit inadequate. (Johnson, 1996)

Advertisements, joined with the collapse of 'compulsory heterosexuality' and the

heterosexual matrix raises the fear that communal nakedness among boys will

be gazed upon in sexual or sexualized ways that have formerly been shielded

participants in the showers are heterosexual and can therefore merely perform a

sexual gazing at another sex. This 'ethnic concern' is augmented further as

the stereotype of gay men as non-sporting is increasingly discredited.

trates this recent ethnic matter over shower-space nudity increasingly coupled

with sexual or sensual sorts of gazing. While portrayals of naked women in lm

have been common and cannot easily be separated from a desire for erotic gazing

The Nude Subject

by a phallocentric lm industry, the depiction of naked men in lm is by no

means recent. As early as the 1925 production of Ben-Hur, male frontal nudity

was shown on-screen and, despite the prohibition on nudity through the intervention of

the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code between 1934 and

1968 (Russo, 1981: 121--2), a spate of popular lms from the 1970s onwards

depicted male nudity -- Born to Win (1971), The Blue Lagoon (1980), Ace Ventura