Mr. Man Celebrates 10 Years of Featuring Male Celebrity Skin Below the Belt

Adult entertainment site Mr. Man isn't like other social media pages that feature male nudity. This one presents images and clips of Hollywood's biggest celebrities.

Have you ever tried to pause the movie "American Gigolo" at the precise moment Richard Gere exposes himself, or when Tom Cruise gives a glimpse of his manhood in "All the Right Moves"? It's nothing to be ashamed of. Hot male celebrities aren't called sex symbols for nothing. And what symbolizes sex more than the reproductive organ?

Nowadays young actors aren't so shy about letting it all hang out on film. You don't have to pause the movie and let Pareidolia make up what you can't see clearly. Thankfully for those who appreciate full frontals, young celebrities like Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan aren't timid when the wardrobe department isn't required.

"We like to think that celebrities are on a different level, put them on a pedestal. At the end of the day, this sort of brings them back down to Earth," said Steven Attanasie, the editorial manager of Mr. Man (NSFW), hired the same month the website launched. He talked to EDGE about the site celebrating its 10th anniversary and why it continues to be as popular today as it was a decade ago.

Attanasie says Mr. Man is a website born from its parent site Mr. Skin, which launched 25 years ago. Content-wise, Mr. Skin focused on female nudity in television and film. But it seemed unfair just to only spotlight an actress's anatomy.

Despite the material, both sites aren't meant to be hardcore. Mainly, founder Jim McBride's idea was to honor the human form. Appeasing the curiosity of humans wanting to see their celluloid crushes in the buff was naturally grandfathered in.

"Their whole theme was always a celebration; this should be a celebration of nudity," Attanasie says. "You know, the example that [McBride] always used was, like, Kathy Bates and getting nude in 'About Schmidt.'"

They weren't trying to take themselves too seriously either. But there is a fine line between making fun of something and being offensive.

"He's like, we can't be mean about that because some dude out there is gonna come to the site specifically to see that," he explained. "And if he thinks that we're shaming him for looking at it, then he's never gonna visit our website again. So that sort of light-hearted tone was carried over from Mr. Skin."

The site is not only an aggregation of clips and pictures. The writing is crisp and humorous thanks to Nick Kania the head writer who happens to be gay. "He started in 2015 and really helped because Mr. Man was launched with the intention of being Mr. Skin for women," says Attanasie.

A female audience was the intent for Mr. Man, but it didn't quite work out that way. At least not as far as sexuality or gender was concerned.

"As anyone in the adult space will tell you the bulk of adult content consumers are men," he says. "When Nick came on, it sort of really helped as we were not necessarily pivoting, but doing a soft pivot, focusing more of our content toward the gay audience, focusing more on out actors, focusing specifically on gay sex scenes as opposed to just general nude scenes. It wasn't necessarily that we were saying we're now a gay site, we were saying we understand who our audience is and we're still going to offer a wide array of things, but more targeted toward the gay male audience who is becoming our dominant subscriber base."

It's a great balance because Attanasie identifies as straight. He's also an ally. Before he began working at Mr. Man, he had a full-time job in retail and did freelance writing on the side. Before that, he graduated high school in 1997 and then went off to North Carolina for college to study theater.

"Coming from a small town in New Jersey as I did, I was not necessarily narrow-minded, but just had zero exposure to anything outside of Roman Catholic straight people," he says. The theater helped broaden his mind.

That intellectual culture boost has helped him with Mr. Man. Still there's a question that might be hard even for him to answer: why do people want to see their favorite heartthrob's penis? He has an idea.

"That's sort of the age-old mystery, isn't it?" he ponders. "I think, and this is sort of my own philosophy that I've developed over the years of doing this and learning from Mr. Skin and founder Jim McBride and listening to his philosophy on things. I think that it humanizes celebrities in a way that nothing else can. When you see them naked, you've seen them at their most vulnerable as a human being. And that somehow what makes them more relatable to you as a person. I'm not discounting the sexual aspect of it, the titillation factor and the notion of, 'oh, my goodness, you know, this person is in a movie this weekend that made $100 million and I can see what they look like naked!' That's 100% a thing. But I do think that ultimately the desire is base and human."

That human part might be good for now, but with the rise of AI, deep fakes, and CGI, one might not know who or what to trust online in the future. It's something he has thought about. But it's a hard quandary to answer since we are at the starting line of uncharted territory.

"We haven't even waded into the waters of what A.I. is gonna unleash," he says. "So it's really hard to predict, but I know that just from the last 10 years, the thing that we can do is just continue producing high quality content and listen to the needs of our customers and subscriber base. And always be receptive to what they want, you know."

One of those requests was to create more top five videos.

"Those do really well. So, we flood the market with that. I think just continuing to do what we do but also being open to whatever is out there, whatever comes next, whatever the new trend is."

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