In terms of an attention-grabbing tagline, the Belgian movie Patrick had me at “Naturist campsite handyman loses his hammer”. Don’t expect anything saucy, though: Patrick, out on digital platforms on Friday, is a spare, sombre character study, set in a woodland community where everybody happens to be naked. After a few minutes, you stop noticing, even though the film occasionally embraces the absurdism, especially in a fight scene between two angry naked men in a flimsy mobile home.

Let’s admit it: when it comes to male nudity on screen, we have still got some growing up to do. Its female counterpart has been far more prevalent and often exploitative, but male nudity is often couched in terms of comedy or combat. In the latter sense, Patrick’s fight scene could well be filed alongside Oliver Reed and Alan Bates’s once-shocking grapple in Women in Love or, more recently, Viggo Mortensen’s bathhouse dust-up in Eastern Promises. Neither is it a million miles away from flesh-exposing but defiantly masculine stuff such as HBO’s prison series Oz or sword-and-sandal movies such as 300.

Then there is the school of willy comedy, best practised by Judd Apatow, whose penis gag in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story had audiences either walking out or in stitches. “America fears the penis,” said Apatow at the time. Cock-related comedy is alive and well: witness Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest, where Borat proudly shows photos of his son’s “chram”. Baron Cohen has a track record: the first Borat movie’s notorious wrestling scene was comedy and combat combined.

The day dick jokes stop being funny is the day comedy dies, arguably, but things are changing. For one, behind the camera there are relatively fewer men with questionable attitudes towards female nudity, and fewer women willing to comply with their demands. Meanwhile, some male actors – such as Tom Hiddleston (The Night Manager) and Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats) – have embraced nudity in the name of redressing the balance. There is more nudity on our screens than ever before, but – looking at shows such as Normal People, Euphoria, Sex Education, The Deuce and (latterly) Game of Thrones – it is much more equitable gender-wise. The use of intimacy coordinators, prosthetics and CGI has also helped.

You could call that progress, even if the flesh on display in these films and TV shows is invariably young, fit and conventionally attractive. Billing the ripped Paul Mescal as “normal” is hardly a giant leap for body image. By contrast, the actor Kevin Janssens actually gained weight to play the part of Patrick, and the movie is a parade of average bodies: middle-aged ones, out-of-shape ones, imperfect ones. As is often the case off screen, naked people on screen can be just … normal people.

Patrick is on digital platforms from 20 Nov