Manhood: The Bare Reality

Product Information

Stuffed with plenty of insights and curious asides this book bares more than just penises, and the thoughts and obsessions of them men who are attached to them. What do a veteran and a vicar, a porn addict and a prostate cancer survivor, a would-be father and an ex-con have in common?

It is refreshing to see mostly average sized men instead of the exaggerated organs of male porn stars. They talked about their childhoods and relationships with their parents or families, and walked you through the things that were most tender and vulnerable, and often still unresolved, for them.Before Manhood came Bare Reality - where Laura interviewed 100 anonymous women and took pictures of their chests.

It was also interesting to see how older men had matured over the years in their views towards women, men, sex and/or being gay or transgendered.

Since my experiences with testicular cancer, many of my conversations with my friends have delved into more serious topics, including taking care of their health and taking a real look at the future. The Bare Reality series has been featured and reviewed in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Mirror, The Independent, The Evening Standard, Metro, i paper, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Grazia, Stylist, DIVA, Gay Times, Huff Post, BBC World, ITV’s Loose Women, BBC Womans Hour, BBC Radio London, BBC London News, Channel 5 News, Radio 5 Live, Talk Radio, LBC, and many international newspapers, magazines, radio and television programmes. They're a way of accessing quite complex stories about being a woman, from growing up and body image, to sexuality, being a mother, cancer, and ageing. I have opened up that conversation about being a man and a woman by taking these uniquely male and female body parts.

The old way of bringing up boys, whereby you are not really supposed to express feelings much, ends up with men doing odd things, and those energies can come out in other ways which are unhealthy. This book has been followed by a similar one of 100 vulva-owning people, and I'm very much looking forward to reading that. One thing I asked absolutely everybody was how they felt about their penis, and every interview started like that, unless they went off in their own direction. By focusing on the unique attributes of each penis, circumcised and not, fleshly or strap-on, it’s possible to see the organ in a new way.

Or the man who found himself hiding a personality he wasn’t sure others would like behind a body he was confident they would. It uncovers the state of modern masculinity and how insecurities about an organ which is hardly ever seen consumes and obsesses men to the point where they change their lives to accommodate and deal with their feelings about it. From smooth Barbie dolls to internet porn, girls and women grow up with a very narrow view of what they should look like, even though in reality there is an enormous range. Each photograph is accompanied short first person stories which offer, en masse, a striking counter-narrative to the objectification of the female body. Dodsworth has previously explored bodies with her book, Bare Reality, about people's relationships with their breasts.

I realised that when I had been batting this project away, I had been batting away taking a really intimate look at myself.Through him, I learned about Manhood: The Bare Reality, which I had the opportunity to read and review in the fall. A single vicious comment in the bedroom or changing room may change how a man feels about himself for ever. During the course of creating Bare Reality, I felt very connected to my sense of womanhood,” Dodsworth tells me. There were also plenty who talked about fathers being absent or violent or alcoholic as the men were growing up.