Full-frontal male nudity in all three series of The White Lotus has provoked waves of reaction and comment. Why does showing a penis on screen still have the ability to shock?

Episode four of The White Lotus season three, which is set in Thailand, saw the increasingly agitated millionaire dad Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) sit down for breakfast in a loosely tied dressing robe. His family are unaware that Tim is wanted by the FBI for illegal financial dealings and will likely end up in prison – and that he's been popping tablets of anti-anxiety medication Lorazepam like sweeties.

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"Everyone at the club…!" he mutters to himself in horror, and, imagining his acquaintances finding out about his crimes, he puts his hands up over his head, accidentally exposing his genitals as a result. "Oh my god, Dad!" his three near-adult children cry out in disgust. "Your balls!"

It might have been only a flash of male genitalia in this third series of Mike White's hugely successful dramedy about one-percenters on holiday, but it instantly became a much-discussed moment on social media. "Jason Isaacs I was unfamiliar with ur game," one person posted on X, while another added: "[the] full frontal made me spill my soup I wasn't ready." Others connected Isaacs' nakedness back to his other famous role as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films. "Well, I didn't expect White Lotus to show Lucius Malfoy's wand tonight, but here we are…" one user quipped.

But this was far from the first time the male anatomy was the focus in this series. In the first episode, Isaacs' on-screen son, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) was shown flashing his penis and buttocks while announcing to his younger brother that he was going to masturbate to pornography in their shared bathroom; and the two prior series have also been replete with naked men.

In fact, it's become a running theme: every opening episode from each three White Lotus series features a penis set loose. Hawaii-set series one had Steve Zahn's Mark Mossbacher ask his wife to inspect his testicles as he believed he had cancer. In the first episode of series two (set in Sicily) cocky finance bro Cameron (Theo James) goes to his friend's partner's hotel bedroom to borrow some swimming shorts, then changes in full view, giving her and the viewers a glimpse of his penis. "What do you think? A little snug, right?" he says of the shorts to Harper (Aubrey Plaza), once again directing the gaze downwards.

Back to the current series, this week's episode saw one of resort-worker Valentin's Russian friends, Vlad, stripping off and waving his genitalia around on a night out, while elsewhere across all three series there have been other nude male characters, either masturbating or having sex, such as Adam DiMarco as Albie and Will Sharpe as Ethan (both series two); while both series one and two each had genuinely jaw-dropping, bombshell all-male sex scenes. Series one saw a drug-fuelled sex session (featuring Armond the hotel manager [Murray Bartlett] and younger White Lotus staff member, Dillon [Lukas Gage]), while season two's big reveal was with two men, Quentin (Tom Hollander) and Jack (Leo Woodall) having sex, who had claimed to be uncle and nephew, but were really client and sex worker.

There's no doubt that White uses male nudity and sex scenes to provoke. And it works: season three is averaging 12.2 million viewers per episode – up 78% from the same season two time frame – and it frequently trends on social media, going into overdrive when any male nakedness pops up. But the fact that these scenes still generate headlines from news outlets around the world shows that while male nakedness might be becoming a little more common, it's still seen as a taboo, and worthy of comment, which in itself, speaks volumes as to how comfortable (or uncomfortable) many feel about seeing naked men on screen.

European film and TV has traditionally taken a more relaxed approach to showing full-frontal male and female nudity on screen. In the US and UK it's a very different story. Strict Ofcom guidelines in the UK have a "watershed" rule of no nudity permitted before 21:00 (BST). And while that may mean bare bottoms have occasionally appeared on TV in the late evenings, penises didn't really appear until the 1990s, with Eurotrash, a late-night magazine-style programme on Channel 4 that featured the exploits of the weird and wonderful people of Europe, and casually showed penises and vulvas; or the sexual adventures of the gay men in the groundbreaking Queer As Folk in 1999. But even now, seeing male genitalia on UK TV is still the exception, rather than the norm.

In the US, the first penis on TV is believed to be a split-second shot of a naked horse wrangler in 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove, based on the Western novels by Larry McMurtry. But it was the advent of cable and broadcasters like HBO and Showtime that began to push the boundaries of the naked male body; in the 1992........

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