'Unable To Spot Anatomical Details,' Twinkle Khanna Calls Ranveer Singh's Nude Pics Under-Exposed

This blog was originally published on The Times Of India.

The first nudist colony in the world was reportedly based in Thane in 1891. At The Fellowship of the Naked Trust, clothes were not allowed, though you were kindly permitted to wear your eyeglasses and dentures. I suppose, after seeing all the dangling bits clearly, they expected you to bite your tongue if it wasn’t pleasing to the eye.

Following in these bare footsteps, our latest nudist has caused an entire nation to put on their glasses to carefully examine his muscular frame.

AFP

Ranveer Singh’s nude photographs have been the subject of an FIR and television debates. It has been turned into a meme with captions like, ‘This is what happens after you buy a flat in Mumbai’. There is even a musical parody floating around with the stellar lyrics, ‘We can see his bum.’

His bottom has infiltrated the zeitgeist to such an extent that when I was signing bank papers, and the official repeatedly stated, ‘Ma’am, please sign on backside also.’ I was tempted to say, ‘Yours or Ranveer Singh’s?’ before better sense prevailed.

While parodies and memes are justifiable, the outrage and police complaints are bewildering reactions to a rather demure series of au naturel portraits. Ironically, a few months ago, a Man Ray print at $12.4 million tripled the record for the most expensive photograph sold at an auction. It featured a female nude who also had her posterior on display.

TOI

The role of gender in this equation cannot be disregarded.

If a man crossing the street sees a disrobed woman, he will immediately come to a halt. A woman seeing a winsome man in the buff will avert her eyes and quicken her steps. Conditioning socking biology in the gonads. A nude woman is an object of desire. A nude man signals danger.Queen Victoria seems to have agreed with this perspective. After a museum visit, she ordered a fig leaf to be placed strategically over a replica of the most famous nude in history, Michelangelo’s David. There was no cover up demanded for Venus de Milo and the Aphrodite of Knidos. They just had to continue grinning and baring it, much like their living, breathing counterparts across all forms of art. Especially cinema. A study by the Geena Davis Institute found that women movie leads were four times more likely to be shown naked than their male counterparts.

An uncovered woman is a desirable commodity. A disrobed man, on the other hand, should not be seen or heard.

Twitter

My mother-in-law would have probably aligned with this latter sentiment. A few years ago, Pommi bua, who still can’t tell the difference between an audio and a video call, swung open the bathroom door and passed the phone to her 72-year-old husband while he was reaching for a towel.

‘Mohan ji take this, Didi is calling from Bombay to wish you happy birthday!’ At which point my mother-in-law promptly hung up, as she had more than her fill of Mohan ji looking resplendent in his wrinkled but squeaky-clean birthday suit.

In her study on reactions to nudes, Beth A. Eck of James Madison University found that an image of an unclothed woman makes the heterosexual male feel more masculine. Women see the images and consider it aspirational. On the flip side, women looking at pictures of naked men feel nervous and uncomfortable. For heterosexual males, looking at naked men made them worry about their perceived heterosexuality.

PAPER

When I ask my friends about Ranveer’s photographs, it follows a similar pattern. There are embarrassed giggles and aversion of eyes from my girlfriends, and their answers fall roughly within the framework of, ‘It’s not like I kept staring or found it hot or anything. But there is nothing wrong with it.’

The straight men, instead of responding to how they felt on seeing the photographs, began giving me a lesson on fitness. One adds, ‘Arre, he should do more leg days.’

Enlarging Ranveer’s pictures on my screen and mumbling when my son walks in that it was for purely research purposes, I see nothing beyond a man devoid of clothing. Unlike meeting him in person, where he usually seems like a basketball filled with kinetic energy, bouncing off generous compliments and kisses on blushing cheeks, in these pictures he was not projecting any constructs. Not even sexuality, with a subtle and maybe sock-stuffed hint of well endowment.

Twitter

However, as a performance, I would consider it one of his greatest. Instead of putting on layers, he discarded them all.

In ‘Ways of Seeing’, John Berger says, ‘To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.’

I suppose Singh’s lawyer can use this in his argument, ‘Milord, I object. He was dressed, you just can’t see beyond his nudity.’

Photography by Ashish Shah / Creative direction by Kshitij Kankaria

Vidya Balan, who has been both the target of an obscenity case, and objectification like most actresses, said it best. When asked about her reaction to Singh’s photographs, she quipped, ‘What’s the problem? Let us also feast our eyes!’

I can assure the morally offended that while we are not advocating starting our own Fellowship of The Naked Trust, a thumping majority of women and the queer community are not bummed out by these photographs. In fact, we have only one complaint. Instead of over-exposure, the photographs seem under-exposed. Even with spectacles, magnifying glasses and zoom tools, we are unable to spot any anatomical details, just a pool of shadows between two finely muscled legs.