Culture, Clothing, Conditioning, Conformity and Change

In order to understand the widely varying public perceptions of decency vs. indecency, one has to first take a look at history. Jim Gaines in the Bowling Green Kentucky Daily News has written an astute and wide-ranging essay on the subject, and while he professes that he is not personally an advocate for more public exposure, he concludes that there is little practical reason to outlaw the flashing of the flesh.

Gaines quotes author Peter McWilliams, who states “Frankly, I don't think nudity in public should be a major concern for the same reason I don't think we need to concern ourselves about people wearing fried eggs on their foreheads,” he wrote. “I mean, how many people actually want to do it?" This is so true. In our current climate of modesty and shame, very few people would be willing to walk down Main Street stark naked. On the other hand, witness the Spencer Tunick phenomenon where thousands of people willingly shed their clothes for the sake of art. This does, at the very least, show that there is an inherent desire or willingness within people to be nude.

Leaving aside the overarching question of whether personal morals should guide public policy - far too complex to tackle here - it can easily be argued there is no absolute standard for decency of clothing; even within the same culture, attitudes can change dramatically inside of a few decades.

And there are signs today of a culture shift. Nude recreation is booming. Teenagers are stripping down in Vermont. Nude protests are rampant worldwide from bike rides to PETA demonstrations. Charitable organizations that are bastions of morality and taste are launching nude fundraising calendars. And so on.

Gaines quotes Oliver Thomson from "A History of Sin": “There is no universal human law of decent or immoral exposure; naked barbarians were so used to their condition that they would excite themselves greatly by putting on clothes,” he wrote. “The one universal rule is that human beings dress with as much or as little as they think will win attention, so the necklines and hemlines keep rising and falling.”

Conditioning is the key. Today the female breast is so sexualized in culture that the mere sight of a mother breastfeeding a child is enough to create a disturbance. The male nipple is ubiquitous, the female nipple is verboten. It makes no legal or logical sense, but the conditioning of society through religious moralizing has made most people believe that the boob is bad. Somehow we accept the tit as a sexual icon, in Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, in Playboy, in advertising, and we are willing to allow women to alter themselves to achieve that "ideal" that is in the mind's eye, yet we are uncomfortable when we are confronted with the breast in non-sexual situations.

What causes a public stir is not the absolute coverage of a garment, but what it covers relative to what last year's fashion exposed. That fashion changes because, against all personal expectation, we can very quickly become accustomed to whatever is shown...In pre-industrial times, clothing was usually conditioned by climate as much as it was shaped by public morality. In a climate-controlled global culture, we can afford to wear what we want, but still half-forgotten social forces shape our clothes.

We are conditioned, we accept, we conform. We do as others do because we want to fit it, we want to be accepted, we don't want to make waves. Yet we do not question why we do as we do. When looked upon with simple logic, the wearing of clothing in most everyday situations is not necessary. We do not need clothing as protection when we are in environmentally controlled surroundings. In fact, the wearing of clothes coupled with the use of air-conditioning is downright foolish.

Nudists and Naturists need to keep speaking out in calm and logical terms. Even though cultural perceptions are showing signs of change, there is also the religious right that believes that any exposure of the human body is sinful, and those moralists have succeeded in part by getting the FCC to increase fines and police the airwaves for anything "indecent". The struggle goes on.

Tags: nudity, nudism, Spencer Tunick, naked, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, breastfeeding, naturism, clothing, sociology, nude