When did our bodies become a battleground? when did it become ‘not okay’ to be exactly as we are? I mean, does it make any sense, in evolutionary terms, to feel crap about the way we look underneath the jeans and t-shirts? It baffles me.
It was, apparently, the Romans who began to consider nudity abhorrent (at least in a ‘western’ context. Asian cultures have created their own reservations on their own timelines), not because of any notions of depravity, though. More that it signified lower social status and was therefore undesirable. Clothing, in the Roman culture, displayed your success and acumen. This is in marked contrast to previous cultures, including Greek and Byzantine, which celebrated and encouraged nakedness, especially male nakedness, as a means of courting divine favour.
Here in the modern west, our cultural attitudes having taken many of their precedents from the Roman influences of the last 2000 years, culminating in the Christianity derived, Victorian attitude that nakedness was not just undesirable socially (and climatically), it was sinful. It was evidence of heresy and deviance. It’s worth noting that our pre-Roman culture may well have included nudity as a means of connecting with the spirits of divinity (if Druidry is to be believed), and as such was fiercely repressed by the Roman imperialists and Norman invaders after them. Evidence of witchcraft and sorcery needed no greater proof than that of being outside with no clothes on.
So here we are, with a Roman/Norman/Victorian hangover, peculiar in particular to the Anglophone world, still clutching our collective pearls when presented with more skin than we’re comfortable with.
It is this repression of our essential natural validity that has led to the fetishisation and collective obsession with pornography and the conflation of nudity with sexual activity.
It’s this conflation, this abstraction of the term ‘naked’ to include connotations of sexual excitement and/or exhibitionism, that I’m taking issue with. The neat and complete movement from innocence, to guilt and shame. Our bodies are private affairs, only to be revealed, if at all, to those we trust the most, lest we suffer the judgement and wrath of wider society. This itself keys into deep fears of isolation and exile that our mammalian brain fears as much as death itself (we’ll come to that in another post).
I’m questioning that. And I’m proposing that it would benefit us, culturally and personally, to let go of this repressive notion that we, at a fundamental and essential level, are both simultaneously inadequate and profane. We are not. You are not. I am not.
I feel like it’s important to express why exactly, that I feel this way;
It’s not just a case of being a bit of a naturist (which I unapologetically am). I firmly believe that to lift the lid on this taboo can of worms, will in fact relieve a large degree of the pressure built up within it. Pressure which I suspect lies beneath the objectification of human beings as merely objects for sexual gratification, as things to be conquered and obtained, rather than honoured and revered. It’s yet another manifestation of the patriarchal domination that has us all under its boot-heel.
I chose to cast that off.
I cast off the notion that my own body is something to be ashamed of. I cast off the notion that the bodies of other humans are something to be judged and condemned by their appearance. I cast off the notion that nudity equates to sexuality.
It would be understandable, at this point, to interpret the conclusion that this sexual motive, then, is the ‘wrongness’ in the picture. That the mixing up of sexual motives with simple, innocent nakedness, is either responsible for, or at least related to, the demonisation of nudity. But I don’t believe that, either.
Sexual desires and behaviours are only ever inappropriate when they are non consensual. We all know this at some level to be true. It is, I think, somewhere near the root of all this; If we conflate nudity with sex, then public nudity becomes an unconsensual sexual act. An assualt. To be naked, exposed, in the presence of someone who did not express their explicit consent for that, is to be guilty of forcing that person into a sexual situation. The nakedness is not the problem. Nor is the sexuality, actually. It is the notion of being forced. This can’t be emphasised enough; non consent in sexual activity is abhorrent, harmful and must be avoided with all effort. But the solution for this is not to prohibit the naked form, for that is to exile our own fundamental self. It is to divorce the inference of sexual motive from the simple act of not being clothed. Once we can obtain some degree of perspective there, we can begin to see ourselves as valuable and valid, rather than existing with some pre-loaded, guilt-laden, ‘original sin’.
We can also start to assess our relationship with sex and sexual energy with something approaching emotional accuracy. We’ll begin to see that sex isn’t actually the problem either. It’s the corruption and distortion of sexual energy as a force for harm and destruction, rather than joy and creation. It all comes back to the forcing; if we lack agency, then we are robbed of our power, and that is a tragedy, because our sexual power is the essential motive force beneath our creativity, drive and expression in the world. It is the most potent force within us. Something capable of creating absolute divine beauty. Something capable of literally creating life. The theft of that, the disconnection with that fundamental truth, is one of the greatest crimes committed against us as a species. I do not say that lightly. Not because I believe that it outwieghs the brutality of war, or the abject horror of genocides, but because I believe that, at some level, this corruption of our basic desires lays beneath those other things. I believe that this repression and suppression of sexual energy creates the motive force for our worst aspects as humans. It creates the confined space in which the explosion is amplified. If we could just learn to accept ourselves, our naked, primal selves, then maybe, just maybe, we could accept those around us too.
For me, nakedness isn’t just about personal liberation. It is an act of rebellion. It is to turn to the great machine that has enslaved us and say; ‘No. I will not be your agent, and I will not hate on your instruction. Not myself, and not my neighbour’