My scholarly interest in nudity began with a paradox: sometimes it’s less embarrassing to be naked in front of a stranger than to be covered. There was a precise moment when I realised this. I was having an acupuncture treatment with a practitioner I didn’t know, who asked me to strip right down. He offered me a tiny towel that only just covered the essentials. [...]
At the time, I saw nakedness as paradoxical – mundane yet controversial, simultaneously natural and unnatural. For there is a fundamental ambiguity in the nature of human existence: humans are originally naked (for however brief a moment!) and yet clothing and/or body ornamentation is a social inevitability. [...]
Nakedness is also conceptually interesting. Once you think about it, it’s not even clear what counts as nakedness. Can a face be naked? An elbow? A finger? And maybe what counts as clothing isn’t straightforward either. To the European explorers and colonists, Aboriginal people were naked; their cloaks, ceremonial adornments and headgear didn’t count as clothes. This, in their view, disqualified Aboriginal people from full humanness. [...]
And nor is being covered up a guarantee that one will be looked kindly upon. Being covered “too much” can, it turns out, still cause fear, outrage or affront. This was made clear in August of this year, when a woman in Nice was forced to strip off her burkini because it was not “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism.” A woman in nearby Cannes was also fined for wearing too much clothing on the beach. These incidents occurred almost 70 years to the day after the first bikini – a French invention of 1946 – scandalised the world.
