According to Kenneth Clark, the art historian, a man is naked if he feels deprived of his clothes, and is embarrassed and uncomfortable. On the other hand he is nude when the lack of clothes isn't a problem and he feels confident and self-assured, even though his wobbly bits are bobbing about in the open.

You may feel comfortably nude, while those around you see you as naked. It is not how much you wear, but how you wear it that can make a difference. Wear a Speedo on the beach and no one will be offended or think of you as naked. Take it off and put it on your head to keep the sun off your bald patch, you might still feel confident and self-assured, but Aunt Maude is likely to break out in an indignant sweat. Strange really, since even Aunt Maude must know that men have dicks. Why should she find them so offensive?

The male nude has been around in art and architecture for a long time. You can see sculptures and paintings of men dressed in little or nothing, depicting abstract concepts like electricity, speed, and power. The aim is to set a high moral tone, not to titillate. There are two things that make these images of nude men acceptable to Aunt Maude and her knitting club; the eyes and the size of the dicks. These classical nudes don't stare at you with come-hither eyes, nor do they have a tumescent penis casually draped over a thigh. They all have eyes that look steadfastly into the distance, not at you. And they have little-boy, non-threatening dicks. Size matters. Large dicks, even when soft are associated with sexual arousal and can be seen as threatening in a non-sexual situation.

Images of the male body haven't always been sexless. To find erotic images of Western man before the twentieth century, one needs to go back to Roman times. If it were not for the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius that preserved an entire cross-section of Roman life intact under a layer of lava, we wouldn't even have those. For the Romans the penis was not an embarrassment, they had little concept of being naked. You were either nude or clothed. There was sexual imagery everywhere, in their homes and in public places, crudely scratched in plaster and elegantly carved in marble. Time and vandalism by Christian and Islamic fanatics have eliminated virtually all other traces of early Western erotic art. Also lost is the Roman's open and off-hand acceptance of sex, an attitude that no doubt had been around since man's first hard-on.

The introduction of photography was the beginning of a change. One no longer had to rely solely on the artist or sculptor for representations of a man and his penis. The camera wasn't able to conceal the true dimensions of the adult penis nearly as easily as a paintbrush or chisel.

When in 1908 the first health and fitness magazine, Physical Culture, appeared in America, extolling the virtues of exercise and nutrition, the articles were little more than an excuse for illustrations of muscular men. This, and later magazines such as Physique Pictorial in the 1950's were the forerunners of the gay skin mags we know today. What was new then was that men's bodies were being shown for no other reason than they were good to look at. The laws of the time didn't allow the magazines to publish total nudity. With a leg artfully raised to conceal the slightest hint of dick and pubic hair, a baggy posing pouch, or something that could be mistaken for a medieval cricketer's box, the models were never more naked than was legally acceptable. Although it was never out of mind, the penis had to be out of sight. It must have been hell to be queer back then.

In 1965, full frontal male nudes, with deliberate sexual overtones, appeared for the first time in Butch, an American magazine that aimed at provoking the repressive censorship laws of the time. After several years of trials the US Supreme Court finally declared that the male body was not obscene. What a revelation.

Today you can lust over photos of hunky nude men, or watch them writhing in videos. If you want to be nude in public you can do that too by going to Sandy Bay or to The Factory. Drop your rods for the first time at The Factory and you can feel very naked. Any unease soon passes however, and the perks are enormous.

Oh, and what was that about no two words in the English language having the same meaning? What about, cock, prick, dick, dong, schlong? A penis by any other name swells just as sweetly.