How to innovate in male nudes

(UPDATED) It borders on impossible. The reasons have been explored at length (really, beaten to death) by academics and intellectuals, and I have no choice but to agree with them.

Camille Paglia (“Women and Magic in Alfred Hitchcock,” Provocations) explains the effect of the female on the male eye.

Hitchcock’s great films of the 1950s and early ’60s show the tension between men’s fear of emotional dependency and their worship of women’s beauty, which floods the eye and enforces an erotic response over which a man has ethical but not conceptual control. Beautiful women are a fascinating conflation of nature and art. They often have an elusive, dreamy apartness, suggesting a remote inner realm to which a man can claim only momentary access.

The voluptuousness of the female body opens up room for ambiguity and creates lines that are actually curves. While the bosom is noticeable, it is plural, hence not a singular point of fixation like male genitalia. Men are parallel lines that converge at the phallus. (Having neither focus nor line, bears photograph atrociously.)

I have not that many examples of actual innovation in the male nude. Interestingly, “nude” here tends to mean “shirtless.”