A new exhibit at a university gallery in New Britain brings to mind that the subject of male eroticism was once a police-busting taboo in America. On April 7, 1990, uniformed city and county lawmen entered the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati to halt the opening of the touring photography exhibit, " Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment," charging the museum and its director with presenting obscene works.

In Western art of the past two centuries, the male gaze has frequently fixated on the female form. Two examples that scandalized 1860s France, and are owned by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, are Manet's "Olympia" and Courbet's "The Origin of the World," the latter clinically depicting the model's mound of Venus. Once public outrage dissipated, such frank and eroticized images of women were eventually celebrated.