Nudity in western society is generally considered a taboo to a greater or lesser extent. Even if it is tolerated, it is regulated by legal or social constraints, such as in the cases of pornography, naturism, nude art, or undressing at the doctor’s surgery. Small children have also been regarded as a special case, although even this has been subject to a moral panic about child pornography. Needless to say, all these categories are distinguished by context, and by different extents to which the naked body may be disclosed. There is a complex web of often unspo- ken but visibly applied rules, which, depending on the context, allow for a spe- cific way of manifesting one’s nudity.
1 For most of us, what is generally considered the most basic and pure form of nudity is that of a small child, which is perceived as innocent and non-sexual. It is all right to undress or change small children in public without causing any public outrage and disgust, and it usually goes unnoticed. But it is important to note here, that even this kind of occurrence is slowly becoming regulated and frowned upon. Only two decades ago, the prominent British journalist and news- reader Julia Somerville was reported by a chemist to whom she had consigned her family photos for developing;40 a law against possession of photographs of
naked children had been passed in Britain under pressure from Mrs Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA). The gov- ernment minister responsible for the new law had stated at the time that the law was not intended to apply to innocent family photographs, and the matter did not come to court, but it caused Ms Somerville great embarrassment. A similar scan- dal erupted in Australia in May 2008, over an exhibition by the famous photog- rapher Bill Henson.41 Twenty years on, the late Mrs Whitehouse is generally
regarded in Britain as a comic figure, and yet a more serious moral panic is in full swing about the dangers of paedophilia.42 Using naked photographs of your
own children may easily be interpreted these days as illicit, and is slowly becom- ing taboo in the western world.
40 See the report in The Independent (London), 5 November 1995.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/julia-somerville-defends-innocent-family-photos- 1538516.html, downloaded 3 August 2015.
41 See the Sydney Morning Herald, 22 May 2008.
42 The concept of ‘moral panic’ needs little introduction. It stems from Stan Cohen’s book Folk
Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972). A major recent con-
tribution to the literature on moral panics is the body of work by Amanda Rohloff, including her PhD thesis entitled ‘Climate Change, Moral Panics, and Civilisation: On the Development of Global Warming as a Social Problem’ (2012), Brunel University. See also Petley et al. (2013).
2 The next category belongs to the type of nudity which lies only one step below childhood nudity, or at least it seems to be perceived that way: the nudity of a patient in a doctor’s surgery. This is especially the case from the point of view of females, who have been disadvantaged for centuries when they are forced to be examined by male health practitioners. Talcott Parsons discussed the relationship between doctor and patient in classic essays dating from the mid- twentieth century (1951: 428–79). Even though he discussed many aspects of the relationship in detail, little, if anything, was said about the tension between the doctor and his or her naked patients. It is a category that became ‘clinical’ in its own sense, meaning that almost by default it became accepted that entering the medical domain meant automatic separation from seeing naked body as sexual. It became merely a biological object, and feelings of arousal or shame and em- barrassment had no place. We could say that very strong elements both of exter- nal constraints (Fremdzwänge) and self-constraints (Selbstzwänge) are very visi- ble here. The doctor internalises the external constraints upon looking at the patient in any other than a purely instrumental and medical way; anything else carries the risk of losing his or her licence to practise medicine or even of a crim- inal prosecution. So even if a doctor – such as a gynaecologist – is experiencing any ‘forbidden’ sentiments towards the patient, in no circumstances is he or she allowed to show it.
3 Another category is nudity in art. Reaching as far back as antiquity, we find a plethora of nudes in works of art. Throughout medieval times there are numer- ous examples of nakedness in art; it was always present to a greater or lesser extent. Things change: by the nineteenth century, it was very common – espe- cially in religious circles – for veils to be painted over the sexual organs in works of art. That can often be seen in Ireland, for example in Newman House in Dub- lin, where the Catholic University of Ireland was founded in 1851. It is perhaps surprising that so many of Ireland’s famous sheela-na-gigs, grotesque medieval carvings of females, survived undamaged.
Pubic hair in art and the symbolic nature of it is especially intriguing. Saints and other holy people were represented without pubic hair; only the common or ‘evil’ characters were presented with pubic hair. The pubis was considered a symbol of repugnance, something impure and shameful; it appears only to de- note sexual and guilty representations of people.
It was also significant which naked parts of the human body were shown. For example, it was more common for the woman’s breasts to be featured in art than the man’s penis. It was also far more common for a woman than a man to be displayed completely naked. Even if a woman was naked, it was not until much later – perhaps in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century – for her to be displayed with her legs open (except of course in specifically pornographic
168 7 Nakedness and the theory of taboo
images). Even today it is rarer for a man to be portrayed like that (though there are examples, such as in the work of Lucien Freud). Traditionally the female body was always considered more beautiful, at least after antiquity. Berger pro- vides an elaborate analysis of the differences of portraying nude women and men in art. He argues that a woman ‘has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and … her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another’ (Ber- ger, 2009: 40).
If we were to consider movies as art, we must also mention censorship laws and regulations, especially the Irish history of censorship. Rockett (2004) de- scribes the extent of the suppression of any references to sexual relations in Irish films, which was carried to an especially extreme extent between the 1920s and the 1970s.
4 The next category of permitted nudity is the naturist movement, which in many respects may seem to be very distant from the above categories, but that is quite deceptive. Some people may consider naturists to be able to abandon all the inhibitions and restrictions about the naked body; yet that is not quite the case, as we already know. It is more common for naturists to disapprove of showing any signs or signals of sexual nature while in the company of other naturists.43 A
large number of rules and regulations are to be observed by everyone who wants to take part in nudist activities – for example, no staring, gawking, inappropriate touching of oneself or others, not showing any signs of sexual arousal.
5 The last category in which nudity is ‘allowed’ is the pornography business. Pornography is the most controversial aspect of nudity, since it is not considered fully legal in most countries. What is mainly of interest for us here is the means of classification between different ‘genres’ of pornography. So, for instance, what constitutes the parts of the body that are allowed to be shown in soft por- nography? Where do the boundaries lie between soft and hard pornography? And how is that to be explained? But to undertake that task is beyond the scope of this book.