October 22, 2013 • 40 mins
Is there a link between nudity and fear? Does naked combat make us more powerful or more vulnerable? Nudists and never-nudes alike can find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
we have talked about haunted houses before check yes and
haunted houses. Of course they manipulate if they toy with
(00:23):
our responses to sounds and sights and smells, just all
just bombarking our senses with all this information. And yet
there are people out there who are always thinking, what
can we do differently, what can we do that will
that will will change the haunted attraction offering? And U
a Pennsylvania haunted house has discovered just the means of
(00:45):
doing this. That's right. It's called sh october Fest Screen Park.
And I like to think of it as splicing my
nightmare about public nudity with a haunted house, because this
is what they initially offered. The park owner, Patrick kind
of Polski. He created this naked and scared challenge to
give his guests just another level of heightened fear. It's
(01:08):
an add on, it's an add on. In fact, they
had I believe the options were nude or prude, and
prude is like underwear prude is underwear? Do you get
through your underwear? You can go through completely nude. And
of course this caught many people's eyes. The story went national,
and city officials really frowned upon it. You know, presumably
(01:29):
there'd be a lot of liability here with your with
your junk hanging out, don't you think, Well, potential, I mean,
that's kind of what we're gonna talk about here, is
like to what extent? I mean, are you actually more vulnerable,
more prone to injury if you're running through hund a
house naked? Maybe? But but is it really that different,
say from like a summer aware that somebody's wearing, Like,
(01:51):
are you really if you're just wearing like swim trunks
and a tube top or something, then are you really
that that that much more protected? Well, I don't know,
when you are wearing a tubetop, how do you feel? Well,
not not a tube I guess something of like a
what do you call it, like a sleeveless kind of shirt. Yeah, well,
you know that is the question. So unfortunately, the owners
(02:15):
of the screen park, we're not able to actually pull
this off because again city officials were not liking this.
So they do have the prude option. So so the
prude option is still around. You can run through your underwear, yeah,
which I do think there's still a nice level of
venerability there and we'll definitely talk more about this. Yeah,
(02:35):
it depends on the underwear though, because like boxers, I
feel like boxers that's more protection, you know, because they
boxers look a little more like shorts. And then if
you throw in like an underwear shirt as well, I
mean you're basically clothed at that point. If you count
socks is underwear even more so. Yeah, but tidy Whitey's
are keeping it closer to the boxy t whities I
think would would need to be the rule, because tidy
(02:55):
whities are both a little more skimpy and also ridiculous looking,
so there would be no It's not like you're wearing
like wrestling tights in there and you're ready to go.
If you're wearing tidy Whitey's, you're wearing this ridiculous dingy
white underwear with a penis flap in the front, which
I've never understood that I think is for another episode. Yeah,
(03:18):
m but we should probably also discuss the television show
which is called Naked and Afraid yes, and you were
telling me about this and I thought you were making
this up. I thought this was a Julie pitch for
a for a reality show. But as it turns out,
someone beat you to it on this one. Yes, someone did,
and actually our our mother company, Discovery Really Communications, actually
(03:39):
produces this show. But it does seem like something that
would be on thirty Rock. That's like, you know, Milk Island,
but no naked and Fred takes to survivalists a man
and a woman and they dropped them in the middle
of an isolated area naked for twenty one days with
no food or water, like rural Georgia or uh no,
I think Costa Rica, Panama. Some were fabulous, some were
(04:02):
fabulous and isolated and um. But you know, again, here's
this fascination with this idea that we strip ourselves down
to the essence, you know, bear as babies, and we
go out into the world and try to fend off
all the actual real threats as well as the imagined threats. Yeah.
I mean it's the thing itself, right, I mean, it's
the the the the bare human without any of the
(04:25):
clothing and armor that we've built up over the ages. Well,
and that kind of takes us to this this other
place where we have to say, as organisms, why in
the world are we naked anyway? I mean, we are
obviously doing pretty well as a species. Homo sapiens are
killing it out there literally. Um, but you know, we
(04:46):
don't have hard shells, we don't have claws to attack
people with, because we do have these big, beautiful brains.
That's right. We've you know, we we talked about beards,
and we talked about to some degree, there are arguments
that the beard gives a certain amount of protection against
bites or scratches or strangulation or what have you. But yeah,
for the most part, like the naked human is a
(05:07):
pretty unremarkable creature. It doesn't have horns, it doesn't have
any of these crazy additions except those that we've invented
over the years with that tremendous brain. And I want
to point out I think the beard, although it could
blunt a blow to the jaw, I would think that
someone can actually like drag you around with it be hindrance. Yeah, yeah,
(05:28):
I think we got into that a little bit too,
Like the the subject of beards in fighting sports, to
what degree, you know, you can grab onto a beard,
and that was one of the reasons that Alexander the
Great supposedly told all of the soldiers they had to
shave the beard because someone could grab it and then
stab you in the eye a few times. Whereas they're
also those in the M M A world who say, well,
if you grew out just enough stubble, then you can
(05:48):
rub that into people's face and you have an offensive weapon. Uh,
just as a female. And the beards that are in
that stage, yes, are quite awful, sort of like to
archer devices. I can't help but that one. Um. All right,
So we're gonna look at a creature here, the octopus,
and we're going to try to get down to this
idea of a nudity and brain power. Yes, the octopus,
(06:12):
of course is an amazing creature. Recently, we were talking
about the way that the podcast has changed the way
that we approach our lives, and I mentioned that I
don't eat octopy anymore because I in our research, I've
discovered how brilliant they are in their own way. And
I say in their own way, because take, for instance,
the mirror test for self awareness, one of the hallmarks
of of of of of intelligence and uh, you can.
(06:36):
There are a number of organisms that can pass this test,
including including humans, including uh, some some primates, etcetera. Uh.
An octopus will fail the test because the octopus does
not have this mammalion brain. It has a very advanced brain,
but it is it is evolved in the state from
from a far distant starting point than any of these
(06:57):
other examples that we have, these vertebrate examples. So they
incredibly brilliant creatures, but in a very different sense, in
a very alien sense. Yeah. And for for a long time,
scientists have been saying, we don't understand how it could
have such extreme intelligence and be so very different from
our own nervous systems. And here's why. Octopuses have five
hundred million neurons to our one hundred billion. So you'd
(07:21):
think that they would come up short in the smarts department. Um,
but about two thirds of its brains are distributed in
its arms, and it's dedicated to the fine operation of
these limbs and and doing really nuanced and complex things camouflage,
changing its shape, changing its color, um and all of
these problems solving powers that they notoriously have that anytime
(07:43):
you read about them, you'll be hear aquarium owners or
researchers talk about what great escape artists they are. Yeah,
it's because they've got hundreds of suckers, you know, lining
these limbs, and all the neurons to go with it. Now,
the rest of the neurons are split between a central
brain that is surrounding the esophagus and large optic lobes
behind the eyes. So you think about this, and then
(08:04):
you think about different accounts of things that octopuses have done.
I'm thinking about the researcher who had something like five
different octopuses and separate tanks, and she had some old
food and she knew that they wouldn't be crazy about it,
like like rancid and not rancid, but like old frozen squid,
yeah yeah, not nothing fresh um. And she she fed
(08:24):
all of them. And then as she was walking back up,
she came up to the first tank and she saw
the octopus was staring at her, and it seemed to
her that the octopus actually waited until they made eye contact,
and the octopus stuffed the food down the drain, as
if to say, not only do I reject this, but
(08:45):
I'm going to show you to what degree I rejected,
and I want to make sure that you're paying attention here,
not mere rejection, that rejection with spite. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
So there are so many different accounts of these sorts
of great things, you know, stuffing themselves into empty coconut
shells that have fallen on the ocean for in order
to escape predators. Hot wiring cars, yeah, hot credit cards yeah. Um.
(09:08):
So from the article how the freaky octopus help us
to helps us to understand the human brain and wired,
I just wanted to read this quote says the octopus
got smart because the octopus got soft, or vice versa.
It has no bones, no shell, no scary spikes. So
if the octopus wanted to go hunting in an ocean
full of fish, they're also hunting. Sometimes for octopus, it
(09:30):
had to become fiendishly clever, not unlike a certain shell less, clawless,
fur less primate. We could mention. Yeah, because when we've
discussed before, when it comes to evolution, like the ocean
is an incredibly dangerous place, like far more so than
than the surface world, just teeming with dangers. And so
(09:51):
there's just the the the arms race there is just
elevated to a degree you don't. You tend not to
see on the surface world, you know, I guess in
the jungle can say it's it's close. But but for
the most part the ocean is just this deadly race.
And so you look at the octopus and when it's
when it's alive and moving, you you are seeing all
the shifting of shapes and colors. It can make its
(10:11):
texture look hard and rough and rugged. But if you
have a dead octopus and it just you know, washes
up on the beach, it just looks like a sack
of flesh. There's nothing there's nothing hard, there's nothing rugged
about it. In a sense, it's all bluff, it's all
it's it's a it's it's neurons powering up and creating
this display. And you can maybe easily make the argument
(10:32):
that humans have done the same thing, though, instead of
making our skin crawl with crazy textures and change colors
and all, we have invested in clothing. We've invested in
in garments and and in some cases actual armor that
makes us physically tougher, but in other cases stuff that
changes the the the the visual proposition of what we
are as an individual in the species, well as landlovers
(10:56):
to um. You know, we we got our neo cortex
as mammalian have, and that really up the game too,
because now we have theory of mind. I can try
to figure out what you're thinking and trying to strategize
around that. UM. So you're normally just taking in all
that data, but you are analyzing it to such a degree.
So it is interesting how you put it that way.
You've got the ocean, which is an entirely different game,
(11:18):
and so you would have organisms developing different intelligence systems
as opposed to you know, what we're doing here on
the land. But of course the one thread that runs
through all of this is this vulnerability, this nakedness. Now,
one area where this this idea of heightened vulnerability want
while nude, really comes into play, uh is in our
promotion pictures because for the most part, most of us
(11:40):
have not had the experience of running through a hounted
house naked or fighting for our lives naked, but are
our heroes and heroin's sometimes do encounter the situation. A
few examples that instantly come to mind, of course, Eastern
promises yes with Viga Morton sence that scene of him
in the shower digging it out with a Russian mafia members,
(12:01):
like a pack of clothed Russian mafia members with knives.
That he's just naked and like like just very you know,
covered in tattoos, very loupine looking, you know, I'm gonna say,
very animal like looking, and he's just fighting for his
life and he's being stabbed and beaten. I can't think
of a scene that made me WinCE more honestly than
(12:23):
that scene. When I saw it, I was covering it
like it was just a horror, you know, film, and
that there was like blood. Of course there was no blood,
but yes, very effective use of nakedness. So that's that's
easily the one that came to mind mind the most.
Some other films that have included some some similar scenes.
I've forgotten about this, but Memento has a scene where
Guy Pierce is assaulted one naked and he's like fighting
(12:44):
him off, but it's nowhere near as as as intense
as Eastern promises. There's a scene in American Psycho where
Christian Bale's running around naked with a chainsaw, but that's
different because he's the one with the chainsaw. You know,
if you're carring a chainsaw. Then you're kind of not
really naked. Uh. There's a scene in The Hangover where
an individual is naked and attack somebody. There's a scene
(13:06):
in Beowulf School Ties there's like a shower fight. Um Fargo,
I've forgotten about this with the scene where is um
is making love to a prostitute and uh and an
individual comes in and starts roughing them up and just
throwing them all over the place. There's of course a
scene in Borat where uh where bora At wrestles an
(13:27):
individual and they're both naked and uh and it's it's awful,
it's awful. Um. There's a there's of course, the the
old Kin Russell film Women in Love. It is kind
of famous for a nude wrestling scene with Oliver read uh,
you know, very you know, in a very manly sense.
Uh and uh and then uh. When it comes to
uh to literature, I'm instantly reminded of C. S. Lewis's Perlandra,
(13:50):
which which has a lot of new like the they
could probably never film it because there's a lot of
nudity in it. The character Ransom lands on this uh,
this fictional version of Planet Venus it's also kind of
like Eten a biblical Eden. So he lands there and
he's walking around naked. And then a scientist by the
name of Professor Western lands as well in a little spaceship,
(14:11):
Western is clothed. That Western is also possessed by uh,
the devil, And it eventually gets to a situation where
they have this this fight and it's like the devil
is biting at him and all, and he's fighting him naked,
and it's and I remember it as being very very
nail biding ye yeah, um, which I think is interesting
because it brings in that element when you talk about
(14:32):
eating and talk about devil, uh, this element of shame.
And because what happened to Adam and e if they
they screwed up and so suddenly they can't walk around
naked anymore. They have to wear those leaves, and that
wrought all sorts of psychoanalysis for them. Yeah, especially when
fall fashions hit, because they just crumble at the slightest
(14:52):
movement and then they have to grab more leaves. It's
a problem. Let's take a break and when we get
back we will talk about this shame associated with nudgedness.
All right, We're back and we are going to dive
into nudity and shame. Yeah, And you know, it's it's
(15:17):
interesting to to think about nudity and shame because I
often feel like in Eastern promises, it never crossed my mind. Oh,
poor Vigo, it's so shameful that he's having to fight naked,
you know, like I don't like chain doesn't really factor
into my fear for him. But obviously shame is a
huge part of nudity in our version of nudity, particularly
in UH in Western culture. Well, what's interesting to you
(15:40):
about a lot of the clips that we saw that
we're sort of the top ten list of naked vibes
is that not one woman showed up in those Oh
excuse me, one did she was having with the nude
guy who was shooting Oh yeah, Clive Owen and Monica
well belus the one who is uh in the matrix, Okay,
(16:02):
yes her. So what's interesting about that is that those
nude scenes with women that you know, that's the violence.
Normally in a nude scene with a woman is voisted
upon them. It's not usually a fight scene in which
you know, they're toting guns around our knives. Um, so
it's kind of interesting to see shame and nudity rendered
in that way. But we have to we have to
(16:26):
think about what is shame and also we have to
differentiate shame from guilt. So how would you how would
you describe guilt? Like, if you're guilty about something, it's
a it's a rather different animal than shame. Okay, Well,
according to a collaboration between scientists at the University of
Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions and George Mason University in Fairfax,
(16:48):
shame is definitely not the same as guilt, and shame
actually has implications regarding misuse of alcohol and drugs. So
all that shame that we think about in terms of
our body, it's more of a thought construct, right, It's
not associated with an act. Usually, So if I have
a dream about being naked in public, and this is
more of a nightmare, it's more of an impending feeling
(17:10):
that I have, um, you know, I have done something.
It's little dread anxiety associated with a shame as opposed
to like, you know, I did something sexual or bad.
You know this one act. Yeah, guilt tends to imply
to that you you really did something wrong, that you're
responsible for you know that you're culpable in whereas shame
(17:32):
not necessarily like, if you're ashamed of your body, you're
not gonna be persecuted because your body doesn't match your
own personal expectations of it and uh and and likewise,
it's this study looked into uh when when they were
dealing with shame, like individuals who had like the bodily
uh signs of shame, like the sunken shoulders, and those
were the ones that were more likely to relapse into
(17:55):
their addictive behaviors. Yeah, we should mention that these studies
were all surrounding addictions and behavior. And the first study
that they had, it was three groups of participants with
different levels of alcohol or drug problems. There were two
groups that were primarily female college students about twenty years old.
The third group was comprised of predominantly male inmates from
(18:17):
a jail who were on average about thirty one years old.
And what they found is that shame is the tendency
to feel really bad about yourself following a specific event,
and people who are prone to shame when dealing with
a variety of life problems may also have a tendency
to turn towards alcohol and other drugs to cope with
this feeling. So that's what the deal is with guilt
(18:39):
and shame. It turns out that guilt um which is
again something that you're feeling bad about, which is a
specific behavior action that is unrelated to substance use problems.
And as you had mentioned, there was a follow up
study that looked at the body language of people who
felt shame about their addiction and could accurately predict whether
(19:01):
or not that person would have a relapse. Yeah, and
you know, the more I think about, shame seems to
really make more sense in terms of something that is
an ongoing issue, you know, something that could be seen
as a if not a character flaw, then a then
a deep flaw in that person, either physically or spiritually mentally,
(19:22):
what have you. Yeah, and I think that's with the
interesting part of the body language what it's telling the
observers here in this study. I said that was a
follow up and it's actually not. It's University of British
Columbia study. So there's forty six participants who were videotaped
several sessions throughout the year that they found those greater
(19:42):
levels of shame behaviors, and that first session showed that
they were more likely to relapse by the second session.
And by the way, any sort of written or verbal
expressions of shame did not predict the likelihood of relapse.
It was that again, the physical manifestation of what shame
looks like, which leads into the research conducted by Burnet Brown,
(20:04):
who's a professor of University of Houston Graduate College of
Social Work, and she studies shame for six years and
she found a lot of a lot of correlation between
shame and not only addiction, which we've been discussing, but
also depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, and eating disorders. So
she makes the argument that that guilt is more useful, uncomfortable,
(20:25):
but but adaptive, you know. It's it's something that can
actually be spun off into positive growth, where a shame
is more And we get into, you know, discussing shame
spirals and this idea that that that shame is not
only feeling feeling responsible for what you did and realizing
that what you did is wrong on some level, but
but feeling this this low level of self worth about
(20:47):
it that you almost don't have the the energy to
to to fight the temptation or the or the need
to do it again. You know what's interesting about that
is when you talk about the human body, you talk
about nudity, some people will have very strong reactions to
their image and they might have, you know, eating disorders
or other disorders that sort of warped their sense of
(21:09):
um self esteem. And what Brown says is that perfectionism,
which you often see with eating disorders, is a form
of shame. And she said, where we struggle with perfectionism,
we struggle with shame. Research shows that perfections perfectionism hampers achievement.
Perfectionism is correlated with depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis
(21:32):
or missed opportunities. The fear of failing, making mistakes, not
meeting people's expectations, of being criticized, keeps us outside of
the arena were healthy competition and striving unfolds. It reminds
me of that episode of Community where where they're all
taking this pottery class and uh and uh and Jeff
Wingers failing miserably added and it's just really frustrated with
(21:52):
his miserable pottery because he was hoping it would be
an easy class and to pick up women. And then
there's this there's this doctor in the class. Uh, you know,
so he's already an overachiever in some respects and then
he's also creating this beautiful pottery even though it's like
a pottery one on one class and uh, and so
the characters are arguing over whether this guy is you know,
(22:13):
an expert who's come in to just pretend that he's
just starting and he's a natural or you know, or
or he just is a natural. And at the end
of the episode, you you get insight into this, uh,
this doctor's uh like dark inner monologue where he's he's
really striving after this perfectionism met out of this deep
sense of shame. Isn't that funny? And that that that
(22:33):
even the results will never be good enough. Right, so
even if he produces this piece of pottery that's museum grade, yeah,
because he's because he's coming in it from the sense
of shame, the sense that you'll never achieve what is
expected up. Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit more
about some of burn A. Brown's insights into shame and vulnerability.
But I did want to mention um that bowling in nudity,
(22:58):
in in virtual reality is a thing. Um. The point
of this two thousand and seventh study of the game
Second Life was actually just tried to figure out how
bowling would work with new residents of Second Life. I'm
sure everybody is familiar with Second Life. Uh, this virtual
(23:18):
representation of yourself and this virtual world that you can
insert yourself into, and it's a highly social world. Yeah,
it's not just creatures running around killing monsters or you know,
or fighting each other. There's like, for instance, I attended
a church service in one once. I'm not really a
Second Life user, but I was attending a church service
(23:39):
and one of the organizers they're put on uh like
on the screen a church service that was going on
in Second life, and so there were all these characters
they were worshiping and as their avatars in this virtual environment.
So if you're not familiar with Second Life, just be
aware of at any and everything seems to go on there, right,
(24:02):
I mean, you basically can conduct a version of your
life in Second Life your avatar. You can do things
obviously that you never could do in your life. Right,
And for many people creates, it's a tremendous social outlet
that they might not have, especially if you know, if
they're uh, you know, they're they're in an area or
in a place in their life where they don't have
you know, physical access to to you know, some sort
(24:23):
of supporting community. Well. Researchers from Nottingham University Business School
with the permission of Lindon Lamb, who who developed Second Life,
they set up a cyber based focus group to discuss
the problem of bullying directly with residents of Second Life.
Um and the new residents they found were often the
target of bullying, which included destroying a newbie's house, right, so,
(24:46):
a newbie avatar's house, shooting him or her swearing at
them and then displays a public nudity from the bully,
or like making the other person naked from the bully. Now,
in some ways, this is this is trying to shame
the residents by showing them how how highly they have
mastered their their abilities of their avatar, you know, to
(25:11):
say like this is how you get naked. Well, I'm
gonna show you. I'm gonna get naked in front of
you right now, because that's that's the level of my abilities.
But um, and you knew you don't even know how
to put your clothes on. But on on another level too,
it's sort of an aggressive act in the sense that
nudity itself is offensive or just sort of breaking social norms.
(25:34):
I think it's breaking social norms, taking on the power
of nudity to to expose oneself in this virtual realm.
It's got a lot of layers to it. Actually, yeah, well,
I mean yeah. Like, for instance, um, one of the
stories you've told before is when you were in New
York World Science Festival and like a new order the
(25:55):
few topless stopless. I think right, she was topless. She
just had like cut off geane shore shoes on, but
no top and she was just walking down the street
and she had crossed in front of a church. Now
at the same time, there was a bride emerging from
a car and about to to go up the steps.
So at the same time this was happening, and I
(26:16):
was absolutely amazed because I felt like I was the
only person who noticed, you know, bare breasted woman coming
at me, but everybody else was looking at the bride.
M So to I wonder what extent she was weaponizing nudity,
or you know, using it as a blunt instrument. I
did not get the sense that she was just had
(26:37):
forgotten to put her shirt on that day. I did
get the sense that she was doing in a very
intentional way, and I kept looking around for cameras and
I did not see any. Well, we've spoken about performance
artists before, and there are many, many examples of performance
artists using nudity as a way to in some cases
you knows, as an alluring method, but often it's kind
(26:58):
of like a shock. Uh. Some for instance, and I
forget the name of the artist here. It's referenced in
our how hula hoops article works on how stuff works,
but there was I want to say it was an
Israeli or Palestinian artist who did this video series where
it's like a woman naked hula hooping with a hula
hoop made out of barbed wire. So it's not alluring
(27:20):
at all. I mean some maybe, but um, but there's
this you know, you're hit with the sense of she's naked,
she's vulnerable, and then for some reason, the whula hoop
is made out of barbed wire and you see it
like cutting into her flesh, and uh, it's it's very disturbing.
It reminds me of some of the work that we've
talked about with Maria Abramovitch, who, um, she had one
performance art installation in which she was naked and then
(27:42):
she laid down next to a variety of objects. I
think there was a gun, there, there was a rose,
a couple of other objects, and people could interact with
her using those objects, and she found that people got
progressively uh more violent or just even threatening with her.
So what we're seeing here is that nudity is both
the seat of vulnerability but can also be the seat
(28:04):
of courage. Because on one hand, we can think of
of the Emperor's new Clothing, where here's this uh, here's
this buffoon who thinks he's wearing clothing and everyone's mocking
him because he's just walking around naked through the streets.
Or you think of any example from uh, you know,
in any kind of historical or biblical account where individuals
(28:24):
are stripped naked and reduced, you know, any any kind
of slavery or imprisonment situation. Uh, you know, examples of
Babu Grabe come to mind as well, where individuals are
are stripped of their clothing and and and in doing
so the strip of their dignity, and it's and it's used,
you know, as a as a weapon against them. But
then there are other examples where the nudity is very
much a symbol of cur I mean, think of all
(28:46):
the Greek statues we have of of these nude individuals,
you know, wrestling with each other, or a nude man
wrestling a centaur um in any any example like this
where the nudy is is their their seat of strength.
And I think a lot of those examples, not the
Steve b. Simione, but some of those examples that we
talked about in movies, that's what they're really going for
(29:07):
there too. It's like the man himself is, you know,
without clothing, is bravely fighting like like some Greek statue
who are some classical painting. Yeah, I mean there is
this idea that um in the flesh, completely stripped down,
you are actually taking the shackles of whatever it is
(29:28):
that we settle ourselves with and casting them away. And
I think of our friends, the Germans, who did this
really well. In fact, there's something called frank culture which
I listened to fourvo about fifty times to try to
say that. And I still will apologize to her German
friends out there, but this translates to free body culture
(29:49):
and naturism is really big for for Germans. This is so,
this is nudism, this is uh, this is being free
with your body, walking around nude in in a not
necessarily sexual just saying I am a nature boy. But
it's more than what we think of here in the
United States when we think about nudity and public nudity
and we think about these different areas where basically like
(30:12):
recreation parks where you can go and be nude. I mean,
this has its roots pretty strongly in Germany. In fact,
that movement that nature is a movement got its foothold
in the late nineteenth century during the Victorian area era.
So that's pretty amazing, right, And the first nudist camp
opened near Hamburg in nineteen o three. Now one in
(30:33):
ten Germans take a naked vacation at least once a year.
Oh that's awesome, But I know that's just according to
Kirk Fisher, a president of German Association for Free Body Culture.
By the way, so again there's this idea that there's
more of an exceptence of one's body. Yeah, I mean
I get it. I definitely get a sense of that
when I go to the Korean sauna that we have locally,
(30:55):
and granted it's it's segregated by by gender, but in
the the in the men's side, decide that I go
to um you see all different body types. So they
will be, you know, there'll be some like young dude
who's like super cut, There'll be some just old wretched
looking individually everything in between, and and what you know,
your first exposure to it may be a little you know,
(31:16):
like whoa, everyone's naked and I'm naked, what's going on here?
But then I do feel like it quickly settles and
you suddenly really don't care. My experience there was that,
and I was on the female side, was that I
could not believe the variety of body types because as
a female, taking in all the various bits of media,
(31:40):
you know, you tend to see the same bodies over
and over again. And I don't go around seeing a
lot of naked women around me. So to be in
a room with women who were not representative of media
but representative of the greater culture was amazing. And that
was what my brain was trying to square as all
this different shapes and then, as you say, it just
(32:01):
sort of became like these are bodies. Yeah, so I
can see where that would be really liberating for people,
and it can I think I can see where. It's
also difficult to understand if you haven't you know, gone
to a sauna environment like that, if you haven't skinny
dip you know, it's some hippie get together or something
where on the outside it seems like it might be
something kind of sleazy, like people are going to be
(32:22):
naked in the same area. There's something wrong going on here.
But no, it's uh, I mean, has its roots with
with ancient bath cultures that outside of you know, Scandinavia
really dried up over the past several centuries. I will
be honest though and say that I hoped um that
I wouldn't see anybody that I knew. Uh. Yeah, I've
(32:44):
never encountered someone that I know. But my wife has
like encountered people where they she either knew them or
they knew somebody she knew, And I guess that could
be a little weird. But on the men's side, there's
not a lot of like I understand that the lady
said is more chit chat. But on the min's side,
it's a lot of dudes sly sort of staring at
the floor. Yeah, there's a lot going on the on
the female side. I'm not even going to get into it.
(33:07):
I'm sure you've heard um all right. So I wanted
to bring up Burnet Brown again because she has a
really nice ted talk on vulnerability, emotional nakedness what we're
talking about here, and um, she has said that as
a culture, that we are doing harm to ourselves and
not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable or show that, um,
(33:30):
show our weaknesses and that trying to covering them up again,
just like perfectionism closes us down and closes us down
to opportunity. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of our
recent episode on clothes Cognition about how clothing that we
wear changes that the the idea of who we are,
the feeling, the internal feeling of who we are, but
also the version of ourselves that we're putting out there.
(33:52):
And uh, and when you you strip it all down
and you're just dealing with the creature itself, then I
mean that the speed with which we actually understand another
person increases. So have all these levels of clothing that
change the proposition of who we are both to ourselves
and to outsiders what happens in the mind, in the
(34:13):
brain itself when we strip away all that clothing, when
we consider each other, well, your brain actually gets a
boost and power. It turns out, because if someone were
to look at a bunch of images of nude people
as opposed to clothe people, signists have seen that their brains,
which of course our scan by m R I, are
(34:33):
able to process those images much faster. So on one hand,
you could say, no, that's because they don't have to
deal with all of the detail that in clothes. Cognition,
for instance, might put forth all those symbols inherent in
the clothing, bird symbols and then clothing symbols, color theory,
(34:54):
um reshaping of the body, and camouflaging of our he
faults through clothing. Thanks thanks that that takes up a
lot of time in cognition there does um. You could
say though, that just seeing the naked human form, get
that you get a boost in your brain because that's
something that is so easily recognized to us, and it's
(35:17):
something that I guess on a reproductive level, we would
have a response to which someone could argue that that's
one of the reasons we enjoy looking at nudity and art,
not merely from a you know, a sort of you know,
alluring subside, though obviously, uh, you know, figures of the
naked female or male form are pleasing to the eye.
(35:39):
But but then they also may just sort of refresh
us in a way. It's kind of like, imagine a
workplace where you just have it like an anatomical almost
you know, voyager plaque esque image of the nude male
and a nude female on the wall, and just so
every now and then, like things start getting complicated and
and and uh and and worrisome, you can look up
and be like, oh, well, that's what we are right
(36:00):
there that creates that creature, and that creature well, and
there's something that's um that that's equalizing about that. Right.
So everybody is naked, right, and they always say that
when you go and you give a talk, right, yeah,
And and it it makes more sense when you think
of it that way. It's like, look at the they're
just people just like you and me, and if you
were to take their clothes off, they all look varying
(36:23):
degrees of ridiculous. Now, that's what burn A Brown says.
That is the courage of doing that emotionally and to
show people that at the bottom of everything, we are
all human. We all have, you know, the same emotions,
the same sort of um hurts and and and the
same sort of joys and rewards in life. So she
says that we should be able to show that, to
(36:45):
show our our emotional nudity to people. And she says
that that actually is what makes something accessible, because otherwise
it's very hard to relate to other people if they
seem perfect, right, if they don't seem emotionally available vulnerable. Yeah,
And I've also found that like like real nudity, Like
there's emotional nudity where it's coming from a place of
(37:07):
honesty and you're like, oh, well this is this is
a real person. And then there's kind of aggressive emotional nudity.
It's like narcissistic nudity. Yeah, like stop waving your emotions
in my face kind of kind of thing. Well, I
wanted to to read this bit that Berne Brown actually
brought up in her book Daring Greatly, because she said
she got this idea of shame and vulnerability from rereading
(37:29):
a passage in Theodore Roosevelt speech Citizenship in a republic.
The passage is it's not the critic who counts, not
the man who points out how the strong man stumbles
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in
the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat
and blood, who strives valiantly, who at best knows the
(37:52):
triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails,
at least fails well daring greatly. And he gave that
speech naked. Most people don't realize that, and mar with
dust and sweat and blood. He was referring to a
naked fight in that passage. Yeah, so there you go
a little insight into the links between nudity and shame,
nudity and strength, nudity and pair. Uh. Certainly think about
(38:16):
that as you watch some of the films we mentioned here,
or any of the other films out there that have
scenes that feature male and or female nudity and scenes
of ror or suspense. What role is the nudity playing,
How are they how are they tweaking the message of
the film by using that nudity, or are they just
using it gratuitously? Yeah, let us know. And I have
(38:37):
to say, us doing the podcast nude, it's not as
weird as I thought it was. Me No, what do
you know? Yeah, our producer he's fine with it too.
So yeah, well there, Yeah it worked out. Now would
you do would you go through a haunted house naked? Though?
I would not? Yeah? You. I mean, first of all,
it takes a lot to get me into a haunted house,
(38:58):
So to ask me to to drop trout that would
be sort of problematic. Yeah, I guess I would. I
would be up for it if it were if it
were a good haunted house and not just like some
sort of a gimmicky thing, because there were there have been.
There have been some haunted houses that have come through
or popped up in the Atlanta area that have featured
nudity on the part of the performers. And it just
(39:19):
sounds a little yeah, like I don't really want anything again.
I just I'm so pragmatically towards the liability thing. You know,
stuff hanging out, you know, you don't have much light
going through, Something's going to happen to someone's parts. Well,
I feel the same way when my son is running
around naked, like my thought is he's going to fall
and skin his winger on the concrete, and I and
I just like, let's let's get some pants on him
(39:41):
just so when he falls that he's not gonna hurt
his wir You're good dad. Alright, guys, let us know,
would you go through Haunted House naked? Yes? And scenes
from films, comics, literature that have featured nude fights that
were really that it actually worked and actually had had
(40:02):
some sort of effect on you as a viewer a reader.
Let us know about those as well. You can find
us in all the normal places, of course. Our mothership
is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where
everything floats to the surface. But you can also find
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is blow the Mind and you can always drop us
a line at below the Mind at discovery dot com
(40:28):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
it how stuff works. Dot Com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
we have talked about haunted houses before check yes and
haunted houses. Of course they manipulate if they toy with
(00:23):
our responses to sounds and sights and smells, just all
just bombarking our senses with all this information. And yet
there are people out there who are always thinking, what
can we do differently, what can we do that will
that will will change the haunted attraction offering? And U
a Pennsylvania haunted house has discovered just the means of
(00:45):
doing this. That's right. It's called sh october Fest Screen Park.
And I like to think of it as splicing my
nightmare about public nudity with a haunted house, because this
is what they initially offered. The park owner, Patrick kind
of Polski. He created this naked and scared challenge to
give his guests just another level of heightened fear. It's
(01:08):
an add on, it's an add on. In fact, they
had I believe the options were nude or prude, and
prude is like underwear prude is underwear? Do you get
through your underwear? You can go through completely nude. And
of course this caught many people's eyes. The story went national,
and city officials really frowned upon it. You know, presumably
(01:29):
there'd be a lot of liability here with your with
your junk hanging out, don't you think, Well, potential, I mean,
that's kind of what we're gonna talk about here, is
like to what extent? I mean, are you actually more vulnerable,
more prone to injury if you're running through hund a
house naked? Maybe? But but is it really that different,
say from like a summer aware that somebody's wearing, Like,
(01:51):
are you really if you're just wearing like swim trunks
and a tube top or something, then are you really
that that that much more protected? Well, I don't know,
when you are wearing a tubetop, how do you feel? Well,
not not a tube I guess something of like a
what do you call it, like a sleeveless kind of shirt. Yeah, well,
you know that is the question. So unfortunately, the owners
(02:15):
of the screen park, we're not able to actually pull
this off because again city officials were not liking this.
So they do have the prude option. So so the
prude option is still around. You can run through your underwear, yeah,
which I do think there's still a nice level of
venerability there and we'll definitely talk more about this. Yeah,
(02:35):
it depends on the underwear though, because like boxers, I
feel like boxers that's more protection, you know, because they
boxers look a little more like shorts. And then if
you throw in like an underwear shirt as well, I
mean you're basically clothed at that point. If you count
socks is underwear even more so. Yeah, but tidy Whitey's
are keeping it closer to the boxy t whities I
think would would need to be the rule, because tidy
(02:55):
whities are both a little more skimpy and also ridiculous looking,
so there would be no It's not like you're wearing
like wrestling tights in there and you're ready to go.
If you're wearing tidy Whitey's, you're wearing this ridiculous dingy
white underwear with a penis flap in the front, which
I've never understood that I think is for another episode. Yeah,
(03:18):
m but we should probably also discuss the television show
which is called Naked and Afraid yes, and you were
telling me about this and I thought you were making
this up. I thought this was a Julie pitch for
a for a reality show. But as it turns out,
someone beat you to it on this one. Yes, someone did,
and actually our our mother company, Discovery Really Communications, actually
(03:39):
produces this show. But it does seem like something that
would be on thirty Rock. That's like, you know, Milk Island,
but no naked and Fred takes to survivalists a man
and a woman and they dropped them in the middle
of an isolated area naked for twenty one days with
no food or water, like rural Georgia or uh no,
I think Costa Rica, Panama. Some were fabulous, some were
(04:02):
fabulous and isolated and um. But you know, again, here's
this fascination with this idea that we strip ourselves down
to the essence, you know, bear as babies, and we
go out into the world and try to fend off
all the actual real threats as well as the imagined threats. Yeah.
I mean it's the thing itself, right, I mean, it's
the the the the bare human without any of the
(04:25):
clothing and armor that we've built up over the ages. Well,
and that kind of takes us to this this other
place where we have to say, as organisms, why in
the world are we naked anyway? I mean, we are
obviously doing pretty well as a species. Homo sapiens are
killing it out there literally. Um, but you know, we
(04:46):
don't have hard shells, we don't have claws to attack
people with, because we do have these big, beautiful brains.
That's right. We've you know, we we talked about beards,
and we talked about to some degree, there are arguments
that the beard gives a certain amount of protection against
bites or scratches or strangulation or what have you. But yeah,
for the most part, like the naked human is a
(05:07):
pretty unremarkable creature. It doesn't have horns, it doesn't have
any of these crazy additions except those that we've invented
over the years with that tremendous brain. And I want
to point out I think the beard, although it could
blunt a blow to the jaw, I would think that
someone can actually like drag you around with it be hindrance. Yeah, yeah,
(05:28):
I think we got into that a little bit too,
Like the the subject of beards in fighting sports, to
what degree, you know, you can grab onto a beard,
and that was one of the reasons that Alexander the
Great supposedly told all of the soldiers they had to
shave the beard because someone could grab it and then
stab you in the eye a few times. Whereas they're
also those in the M M A world who say, well,
if you grew out just enough stubble, then you can
(05:48):
rub that into people's face and you have an offensive weapon. Uh,
just as a female. And the beards that are in
that stage, yes, are quite awful, sort of like to
archer devices. I can't help but that one. Um. All right,
So we're gonna look at a creature here, the octopus,
and we're going to try to get down to this
idea of a nudity and brain power. Yes, the octopus,
(06:12):
of course is an amazing creature. Recently, we were talking
about the way that the podcast has changed the way
that we approach our lives, and I mentioned that I
don't eat octopy anymore because I in our research, I've
discovered how brilliant they are in their own way. And
I say in their own way, because take, for instance,
the mirror test for self awareness, one of the hallmarks
of of of of of intelligence and uh, you can.
(06:36):
There are a number of organisms that can pass this test,
including including humans, including uh, some some primates, etcetera. Uh.
An octopus will fail the test because the octopus does
not have this mammalion brain. It has a very advanced brain,
but it is it is evolved in the state from
from a far distant starting point than any of these
(06:57):
other examples that we have, these vertebrate examples. So they
incredibly brilliant creatures, but in a very different sense, in
a very alien sense. Yeah. And for for a long time,
scientists have been saying, we don't understand how it could
have such extreme intelligence and be so very different from
our own nervous systems. And here's why. Octopuses have five
hundred million neurons to our one hundred billion. So you'd
(07:21):
think that they would come up short in the smarts department. Um,
but about two thirds of its brains are distributed in
its arms, and it's dedicated to the fine operation of
these limbs and and doing really nuanced and complex things camouflage,
changing its shape, changing its color, um and all of
these problems solving powers that they notoriously have that anytime
(07:43):
you read about them, you'll be hear aquarium owners or
researchers talk about what great escape artists they are. Yeah,
it's because they've got hundreds of suckers, you know, lining
these limbs, and all the neurons to go with it. Now,
the rest of the neurons are split between a central
brain that is surrounding the esophagus and large optic lobes
behind the eyes. So you think about this, and then
(08:04):
you think about different accounts of things that octopuses have done.
I'm thinking about the researcher who had something like five
different octopuses and separate tanks, and she had some old
food and she knew that they wouldn't be crazy about it,
like like rancid and not rancid, but like old frozen squid,
yeah yeah, not nothing fresh um. And she she fed
(08:24):
all of them. And then as she was walking back up,
she came up to the first tank and she saw
the octopus was staring at her, and it seemed to
her that the octopus actually waited until they made eye contact,
and the octopus stuffed the food down the drain, as
if to say, not only do I reject this, but
(08:45):
I'm going to show you to what degree I rejected,
and I want to make sure that you're paying attention here,
not mere rejection, that rejection with spite. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
So there are so many different accounts of these sorts
of great things, you know, stuffing themselves into empty coconut
shells that have fallen on the ocean for in order
to escape predators. Hot wiring cars, yeah, hot credit cards yeah. Um.
(09:08):
So from the article how the freaky octopus help us
to helps us to understand the human brain and wired,
I just wanted to read this quote says the octopus
got smart because the octopus got soft, or vice versa.
It has no bones, no shell, no scary spikes. So
if the octopus wanted to go hunting in an ocean
full of fish, they're also hunting. Sometimes for octopus, it
(09:30):
had to become fiendishly clever, not unlike a certain shell less, clawless,
fur less primate. We could mention. Yeah, because when we've
discussed before, when it comes to evolution, like the ocean
is an incredibly dangerous place, like far more so than
than the surface world, just teeming with dangers. And so
(09:51):
there's just the the the arms race there is just
elevated to a degree you don't. You tend not to
see on the surface world, you know, I guess in
the jungle can say it's it's close. But but for
the most part the ocean is just this deadly race.
And so you look at the octopus and when it's
when it's alive and moving, you you are seeing all
the shifting of shapes and colors. It can make its
(10:11):
texture look hard and rough and rugged. But if you
have a dead octopus and it just you know, washes
up on the beach, it just looks like a sack
of flesh. There's nothing there's nothing hard, there's nothing rugged
about it. In a sense, it's all bluff, it's all
it's it's a it's it's neurons powering up and creating
this display. And you can maybe easily make the argument
(10:32):
that humans have done the same thing, though, instead of
making our skin crawl with crazy textures and change colors
and all, we have invested in clothing. We've invested in
in garments and and in some cases actual armor that
makes us physically tougher, but in other cases stuff that
changes the the the the visual proposition of what we
are as an individual in the species, well as landlovers
(10:56):
to um. You know, we we got our neo cortex
as mammalian have, and that really up the game too,
because now we have theory of mind. I can try
to figure out what you're thinking and trying to strategize
around that. UM. So you're normally just taking in all
that data, but you are analyzing it to such a degree.
So it is interesting how you put it that way.
You've got the ocean, which is an entirely different game,
(11:18):
and so you would have organisms developing different intelligence systems
as opposed to you know, what we're doing here on
the land. But of course the one thread that runs
through all of this is this vulnerability, this nakedness. Now,
one area where this this idea of heightened vulnerability want
while nude, really comes into play, uh is in our
promotion pictures because for the most part, most of us
(11:40):
have not had the experience of running through a hounted
house naked or fighting for our lives naked, but are
our heroes and heroin's sometimes do encounter the situation. A
few examples that instantly come to mind, of course, Eastern
promises yes with Viga Morton sence that scene of him
in the shower digging it out with a Russian mafia members,
(12:01):
like a pack of clothed Russian mafia members with knives.
That he's just naked and like like just very you know,
covered in tattoos, very loupine looking, you know, I'm gonna say,
very animal like looking, and he's just fighting for his
life and he's being stabbed and beaten. I can't think
of a scene that made me WinCE more honestly than
(12:23):
that scene. When I saw it, I was covering it
like it was just a horror, you know, film, and
that there was like blood. Of course there was no blood,
but yes, very effective use of nakedness. So that's that's
easily the one that came to mind mind the most.
Some other films that have included some some similar scenes.
I've forgotten about this, but Memento has a scene where
Guy Pierce is assaulted one naked and he's like fighting
(12:44):
him off, but it's nowhere near as as as intense
as Eastern promises. There's a scene in American Psycho where
Christian Bale's running around naked with a chainsaw, but that's
different because he's the one with the chainsaw. You know,
if you're carring a chainsaw. Then you're kind of not
really naked. Uh. There's a scene in The Hangover where
an individual is naked and attack somebody. There's a scene
(13:06):
in Beowulf School Ties there's like a shower fight. Um Fargo,
I've forgotten about this with the scene where is um
is making love to a prostitute and uh and an
individual comes in and starts roughing them up and just
throwing them all over the place. There's of course a
scene in Borat where uh where bora At wrestles an
(13:27):
individual and they're both naked and uh and it's it's awful,
it's awful. Um. There's a there's of course, the the
old Kin Russell film Women in Love. It is kind
of famous for a nude wrestling scene with Oliver read uh,
you know, very you know, in a very manly sense.
Uh and uh and then uh. When it comes to
uh to literature, I'm instantly reminded of C. S. Lewis's Perlandra,
(13:50):
which which has a lot of new like the they
could probably never film it because there's a lot of
nudity in it. The character Ransom lands on this uh,
this fictional version of Planet Venus it's also kind of
like Eten a biblical Eden. So he lands there and
he's walking around naked. And then a scientist by the
name of Professor Western lands as well in a little spaceship,
(14:11):
Western is clothed. That Western is also possessed by uh,
the devil, And it eventually gets to a situation where
they have this this fight and it's like the devil
is biting at him and all, and he's fighting him naked,
and it's and I remember it as being very very
nail biding ye yeah, um, which I think is interesting
because it brings in that element when you talk about
(14:32):
eating and talk about devil, uh, this element of shame.
And because what happened to Adam and e if they
they screwed up and so suddenly they can't walk around
naked anymore. They have to wear those leaves, and that
wrought all sorts of psychoanalysis for them. Yeah, especially when
fall fashions hit, because they just crumble at the slightest
(14:52):
movement and then they have to grab more leaves. It's
a problem. Let's take a break and when we get
back we will talk about this shame associated with nudgedness.
All right, We're back and we are going to dive
into nudity and shame. Yeah, And you know, it's it's
(15:17):
interesting to to think about nudity and shame because I
often feel like in Eastern promises, it never crossed my mind. Oh,
poor Vigo, it's so shameful that he's having to fight naked,
you know, like I don't like chain doesn't really factor
into my fear for him. But obviously shame is a
huge part of nudity in our version of nudity, particularly
in UH in Western culture. Well, what's interesting to you
(15:40):
about a lot of the clips that we saw that
we're sort of the top ten list of naked vibes
is that not one woman showed up in those Oh
excuse me, one did she was having with the nude
guy who was shooting Oh yeah, Clive Owen and Monica
well belus the one who is uh in the matrix, Okay,
(16:02):
yes her. So what's interesting about that is that those
nude scenes with women that you know, that's the violence.
Normally in a nude scene with a woman is voisted
upon them. It's not usually a fight scene in which
you know, they're toting guns around our knives. Um, so
it's kind of interesting to see shame and nudity rendered
in that way. But we have to we have to
(16:26):
think about what is shame and also we have to
differentiate shame from guilt. So how would you how would
you describe guilt? Like, if you're guilty about something, it's
a it's a rather different animal than shame. Okay, Well,
according to a collaboration between scientists at the University of
Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions and George Mason University in Fairfax,
(16:48):
shame is definitely not the same as guilt, and shame
actually has implications regarding misuse of alcohol and drugs. So
all that shame that we think about in terms of
our body, it's more of a thought construct, right, It's
not associated with an act. Usually, So if I have
a dream about being naked in public, and this is
more of a nightmare, it's more of an impending feeling
(17:10):
that I have, um, you know, I have done something.
It's little dread anxiety associated with a shame as opposed
to like, you know, I did something sexual or bad.
You know this one act. Yeah, guilt tends to imply
to that you you really did something wrong, that you're
responsible for you know that you're culpable in whereas shame
(17:32):
not necessarily like, if you're ashamed of your body, you're
not gonna be persecuted because your body doesn't match your
own personal expectations of it and uh and and likewise,
it's this study looked into uh when when they were
dealing with shame, like individuals who had like the bodily
uh signs of shame, like the sunken shoulders, and those
were the ones that were more likely to relapse into
(17:55):
their addictive behaviors. Yeah, we should mention that these studies
were all surrounding addictions and behavior. And the first study
that they had, it was three groups of participants with
different levels of alcohol or drug problems. There were two
groups that were primarily female college students about twenty years old.
The third group was comprised of predominantly male inmates from
(18:17):
a jail who were on average about thirty one years old.
And what they found is that shame is the tendency
to feel really bad about yourself following a specific event,
and people who are prone to shame when dealing with
a variety of life problems may also have a tendency
to turn towards alcohol and other drugs to cope with
this feeling. So that's what the deal is with guilt
(18:39):
and shame. It turns out that guilt um which is
again something that you're feeling bad about, which is a
specific behavior action that is unrelated to substance use problems.
And as you had mentioned, there was a follow up
study that looked at the body language of people who
felt shame about their addiction and could accurately predict whether
(19:01):
or not that person would have a relapse. Yeah, and
you know, the more I think about, shame seems to
really make more sense in terms of something that is
an ongoing issue, you know, something that could be seen
as a if not a character flaw, then a then
a deep flaw in that person, either physically or spiritually mentally,
(19:22):
what have you. Yeah, and I think that's with the
interesting part of the body language what it's telling the
observers here in this study. I said that was a
follow up and it's actually not. It's University of British
Columbia study. So there's forty six participants who were videotaped
several sessions throughout the year that they found those greater
(19:42):
levels of shame behaviors, and that first session showed that
they were more likely to relapse by the second session.
And by the way, any sort of written or verbal
expressions of shame did not predict the likelihood of relapse.
It was that again, the physical manifestation of what shame
looks like, which leads into the research conducted by Burnet Brown,
(20:04):
who's a professor of University of Houston Graduate College of
Social Work, and she studies shame for six years and
she found a lot of a lot of correlation between
shame and not only addiction, which we've been discussing, but
also depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, and eating disorders. So
she makes the argument that that guilt is more useful, uncomfortable,
(20:25):
but but adaptive, you know. It's it's something that can
actually be spun off into positive growth, where a shame
is more And we get into, you know, discussing shame
spirals and this idea that that that shame is not
only feeling feeling responsible for what you did and realizing
that what you did is wrong on some level, but
but feeling this this low level of self worth about
(20:47):
it that you almost don't have the the energy to
to to fight the temptation or the or the need
to do it again. You know what's interesting about that
is when you talk about the human body, you talk
about nudity, some people will have very strong reactions to
their image and they might have, you know, eating disorders
or other disorders that sort of warped their sense of
(21:09):
um self esteem. And what Brown says is that perfectionism,
which you often see with eating disorders, is a form
of shame. And she said, where we struggle with perfectionism,
we struggle with shame. Research shows that perfections perfectionism hampers achievement.
Perfectionism is correlated with depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis
(21:32):
or missed opportunities. The fear of failing, making mistakes, not
meeting people's expectations, of being criticized, keeps us outside of
the arena were healthy competition and striving unfolds. It reminds
me of that episode of Community where where they're all
taking this pottery class and uh and uh and Jeff
Wingers failing miserably added and it's just really frustrated with
(21:52):
his miserable pottery because he was hoping it would be
an easy class and to pick up women. And then
there's this there's this doctor in the class. Uh, you know,
so he's already an overachiever in some respects and then
he's also creating this beautiful pottery even though it's like
a pottery one on one class and uh, and so
the characters are arguing over whether this guy is you know,
(22:13):
an expert who's come in to just pretend that he's
just starting and he's a natural or you know, or
or he just is a natural. And at the end
of the episode, you you get insight into this, uh,
this doctor's uh like dark inner monologue where he's he's
really striving after this perfectionism met out of this deep
sense of shame. Isn't that funny? And that that that
(22:33):
even the results will never be good enough. Right, so
even if he produces this piece of pottery that's museum grade, yeah,
because he's because he's coming in it from the sense
of shame, the sense that you'll never achieve what is
expected up. Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit more
about some of burn A. Brown's insights into shame and vulnerability.
But I did want to mention um that bowling in nudity,
(22:58):
in in virtual reality is a thing. Um. The point
of this two thousand and seventh study of the game
Second Life was actually just tried to figure out how
bowling would work with new residents of Second Life. I'm
sure everybody is familiar with Second Life. Uh, this virtual
(23:18):
representation of yourself and this virtual world that you can
insert yourself into, and it's a highly social world. Yeah,
it's not just creatures running around killing monsters or you know,
or fighting each other. There's like, for instance, I attended
a church service in one once. I'm not really a
Second Life user, but I was attending a church service
(23:39):
and one of the organizers they're put on uh like
on the screen a church service that was going on
in Second life, and so there were all these characters
they were worshiping and as their avatars in this virtual environment.
So if you're not familiar with Second Life, just be
aware of at any and everything seems to go on there, right,
(24:02):
I mean, you basically can conduct a version of your
life in Second Life your avatar. You can do things
obviously that you never could do in your life. Right,
And for many people creates, it's a tremendous social outlet
that they might not have, especially if you know, if
they're uh, you know, they're they're in an area or
in a place in their life where they don't have
you know, physical access to to you know, some sort
(24:23):
of supporting community. Well. Researchers from Nottingham University Business School
with the permission of Lindon Lamb, who who developed Second Life,
they set up a cyber based focus group to discuss
the problem of bullying directly with residents of Second Life.
Um and the new residents they found were often the
target of bullying, which included destroying a newbie's house, right, so,
(24:46):
a newbie avatar's house, shooting him or her swearing at
them and then displays a public nudity from the bully,
or like making the other person naked from the bully. Now,
in some ways, this is this is trying to shame
the residents by showing them how how highly they have
mastered their their abilities of their avatar, you know, to
(25:11):
say like this is how you get naked. Well, I'm
gonna show you. I'm gonna get naked in front of
you right now, because that's that's the level of my abilities.
But um, and you knew you don't even know how
to put your clothes on. But on on another level too,
it's sort of an aggressive act in the sense that
nudity itself is offensive or just sort of breaking social norms.
(25:34):
I think it's breaking social norms, taking on the power
of nudity to to expose oneself in this virtual realm.
It's got a lot of layers to it. Actually, yeah, well,
I mean yeah. Like, for instance, um, one of the
stories you've told before is when you were in New
York World Science Festival and like a new order the
(25:55):
few topless stopless. I think right, she was topless. She
just had like cut off geane shore shoes on, but
no top and she was just walking down the street
and she had crossed in front of a church. Now
at the same time, there was a bride emerging from
a car and about to to go up the steps.
So at the same time this was happening, and I
(26:16):
was absolutely amazed because I felt like I was the
only person who noticed, you know, bare breasted woman coming
at me, but everybody else was looking at the bride.
M So to I wonder what extent she was weaponizing nudity,
or you know, using it as a blunt instrument. I
did not get the sense that she was just had
(26:37):
forgotten to put her shirt on that day. I did
get the sense that she was doing in a very
intentional way, and I kept looking around for cameras and
I did not see any. Well, we've spoken about performance
artists before, and there are many, many examples of performance
artists using nudity as a way to in some cases
you knows, as an alluring method, but often it's kind
(26:58):
of like a shock. Uh. Some for instance, and I
forget the name of the artist here. It's referenced in
our how hula hoops article works on how stuff works,
but there was I want to say it was an
Israeli or Palestinian artist who did this video series where
it's like a woman naked hula hooping with a hula
hoop made out of barbed wire. So it's not alluring
(27:20):
at all. I mean some maybe, but um, but there's
this you know, you're hit with the sense of she's naked,
she's vulnerable, and then for some reason, the whula hoop
is made out of barbed wire and you see it
like cutting into her flesh, and uh, it's it's very disturbing.
It reminds me of some of the work that we've
talked about with Maria Abramovitch, who, um, she had one
performance art installation in which she was naked and then
(27:42):
she laid down next to a variety of objects. I
think there was a gun, there, there was a rose,
a couple of other objects, and people could interact with
her using those objects, and she found that people got
progressively uh more violent or just even threatening with her.
So what we're seeing here is that nudity is both
the seat of vulnerability but can also be the seat
(28:04):
of courage. Because on one hand, we can think of
of the Emperor's new Clothing, where here's this uh, here's
this buffoon who thinks he's wearing clothing and everyone's mocking
him because he's just walking around naked through the streets.
Or you think of any example from uh, you know,
in any kind of historical or biblical account where individuals
(28:24):
are stripped naked and reduced, you know, any any kind
of slavery or imprisonment situation. Uh, you know, examples of
Babu Grabe come to mind as well, where individuals are
are stripped of their clothing and and and in doing
so the strip of their dignity, and it's and it's used,
you know, as a as a weapon against them. But
then there are other examples where the nudity is very
much a symbol of cur I mean, think of all
(28:46):
the Greek statues we have of of these nude individuals,
you know, wrestling with each other, or a nude man
wrestling a centaur um in any any example like this
where the nudy is is their their seat of strength.
And I think a lot of those examples, not the
Steve b. Simione, but some of those examples that we
talked about in movies, that's what they're really going for
(29:07):
there too. It's like the man himself is, you know,
without clothing, is bravely fighting like like some Greek statue
who are some classical painting. Yeah, I mean there is
this idea that um in the flesh, completely stripped down,
you are actually taking the shackles of whatever it is
(29:28):
that we settle ourselves with and casting them away. And
I think of our friends, the Germans, who did this
really well. In fact, there's something called frank culture which
I listened to fourvo about fifty times to try to
say that. And I still will apologize to her German
friends out there, but this translates to free body culture
(29:49):
and naturism is really big for for Germans. This is so,
this is nudism, this is uh, this is being free
with your body, walking around nude in in a not
necessarily sexual just saying I am a nature boy. But
it's more than what we think of here in the
United States when we think about nudity and public nudity
and we think about these different areas where basically like
(30:12):
recreation parks where you can go and be nude. I mean,
this has its roots pretty strongly in Germany. In fact,
that movement that nature is a movement got its foothold
in the late nineteenth century during the Victorian area era.
So that's pretty amazing, right, And the first nudist camp
opened near Hamburg in nineteen o three. Now one in
(30:33):
ten Germans take a naked vacation at least once a year.
Oh that's awesome, But I know that's just according to
Kirk Fisher, a president of German Association for Free Body Culture.
By the way, so again there's this idea that there's
more of an exceptence of one's body. Yeah, I mean
I get it. I definitely get a sense of that
when I go to the Korean sauna that we have locally,
(30:55):
and granted it's it's segregated by by gender, but in
the the in the men's side, decide that I go
to um you see all different body types. So they
will be, you know, there'll be some like young dude
who's like super cut, There'll be some just old wretched
looking individually everything in between, and and what you know,
your first exposure to it may be a little you know,
(31:16):
like whoa, everyone's naked and I'm naked, what's going on here?
But then I do feel like it quickly settles and
you suddenly really don't care. My experience there was that,
and I was on the female side, was that I
could not believe the variety of body types because as
a female, taking in all the various bits of media,
(31:40):
you know, you tend to see the same bodies over
and over again. And I don't go around seeing a
lot of naked women around me. So to be in
a room with women who were not representative of media
but representative of the greater culture was amazing. And that
was what my brain was trying to square as all
this different shapes and then, as you say, it just
(32:01):
sort of became like these are bodies. Yeah, so I
can see where that would be really liberating for people,
and it can I think I can see where. It's
also difficult to understand if you haven't you know, gone
to a sauna environment like that, if you haven't skinny
dip you know, it's some hippie get together or something
where on the outside it seems like it might be
something kind of sleazy, like people are going to be
(32:22):
naked in the same area. There's something wrong going on here.
But no, it's uh, I mean, has its roots with
with ancient bath cultures that outside of you know, Scandinavia
really dried up over the past several centuries. I will
be honest though and say that I hoped um that
I wouldn't see anybody that I knew. Uh. Yeah, I've
(32:44):
never encountered someone that I know. But my wife has
like encountered people where they she either knew them or
they knew somebody she knew, And I guess that could
be a little weird. But on the men's side, there's
not a lot of like I understand that the lady
said is more chit chat. But on the min's side,
it's a lot of dudes sly sort of staring at
the floor. Yeah, there's a lot going on the on
the female side. I'm not even going to get into it.
(33:07):
I'm sure you've heard um all right. So I wanted
to bring up Burnet Brown again because she has a
really nice ted talk on vulnerability, emotional nakedness what we're
talking about here, and um, she has said that as
a culture, that we are doing harm to ourselves and
not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable or show that, um,
(33:30):
show our weaknesses and that trying to covering them up again,
just like perfectionism closes us down and closes us down
to opportunity. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of our
recent episode on clothes Cognition about how clothing that we
wear changes that the the idea of who we are,
the feeling, the internal feeling of who we are, but
also the version of ourselves that we're putting out there.
(33:52):
And uh, and when you you strip it all down
and you're just dealing with the creature itself, then I
mean that the speed with which we actually understand another
person increases. So have all these levels of clothing that
change the proposition of who we are both to ourselves
and to outsiders what happens in the mind, in the
(34:13):
brain itself when we strip away all that clothing, when
we consider each other, well, your brain actually gets a
boost and power. It turns out, because if someone were
to look at a bunch of images of nude people
as opposed to clothe people, signists have seen that their brains,
which of course our scan by m R I, are
(34:33):
able to process those images much faster. So on one hand,
you could say, no, that's because they don't have to
deal with all of the detail that in clothes. Cognition,
for instance, might put forth all those symbols inherent in
the clothing, bird symbols and then clothing symbols, color theory,
(34:54):
um reshaping of the body, and camouflaging of our he
faults through clothing. Thanks thanks that that takes up a
lot of time in cognition there does um. You could
say though, that just seeing the naked human form, get
that you get a boost in your brain because that's
something that is so easily recognized to us, and it's
(35:17):
something that I guess on a reproductive level, we would
have a response to which someone could argue that that's
one of the reasons we enjoy looking at nudity and art,
not merely from a you know, a sort of you know,
alluring subside, though obviously, uh, you know, figures of the
naked female or male form are pleasing to the eye.
(35:39):
But but then they also may just sort of refresh
us in a way. It's kind of like, imagine a
workplace where you just have it like an anatomical almost
you know, voyager plaque esque image of the nude male
and a nude female on the wall, and just so
every now and then, like things start getting complicated and
and and uh and and worrisome, you can look up
and be like, oh, well, that's what we are right
(36:00):
there that creates that creature, and that creature well, and
there's something that's um that that's equalizing about that. Right.
So everybody is naked, right, and they always say that
when you go and you give a talk, right, yeah,
And and it it makes more sense when you think
of it that way. It's like, look at the they're
just people just like you and me, and if you
were to take their clothes off, they all look varying
(36:23):
degrees of ridiculous. Now, that's what burn A Brown says.
That is the courage of doing that emotionally and to
show people that at the bottom of everything, we are
all human. We all have, you know, the same emotions,
the same sort of um hurts and and and the
same sort of joys and rewards in life. So she
says that we should be able to show that, to
(36:45):
show our our emotional nudity to people. And she says
that that actually is what makes something accessible, because otherwise
it's very hard to relate to other people if they
seem perfect, right, if they don't seem emotionally available vulnerable. Yeah,
And I've also found that like like real nudity, Like
there's emotional nudity where it's coming from a place of
(37:07):
honesty and you're like, oh, well this is this is
a real person. And then there's kind of aggressive emotional nudity.
It's like narcissistic nudity. Yeah, like stop waving your emotions
in my face kind of kind of thing. Well, I
wanted to to read this bit that Berne Brown actually
brought up in her book Daring Greatly, because she said
she got this idea of shame and vulnerability from rereading
(37:29):
a passage in Theodore Roosevelt speech Citizenship in a republic.
The passage is it's not the critic who counts, not
the man who points out how the strong man stumbles
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in
the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat
and blood, who strives valiantly, who at best knows the
(37:52):
triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails,
at least fails well daring greatly. And he gave that
speech naked. Most people don't realize that, and mar with
dust and sweat and blood. He was referring to a
naked fight in that passage. Yeah, so there you go
a little insight into the links between nudity and shame,
nudity and strength, nudity and pair. Uh. Certainly think about
(38:16):
that as you watch some of the films we mentioned here,
or any of the other films out there that have
scenes that feature male and or female nudity and scenes
of ror or suspense. What role is the nudity playing,
How are they how are they tweaking the message of
the film by using that nudity, or are they just
using it gratuitously? Yeah, let us know. And I have
(38:37):
to say, us doing the podcast nude, it's not as
weird as I thought it was. Me No, what do
you know? Yeah, our producer he's fine with it too.
So yeah, well there, Yeah it worked out. Now would
you do would you go through a haunted house naked? Though?
I would not? Yeah? You. I mean, first of all,
it takes a lot to get me into a haunted house,
(38:58):
So to ask me to to drop trout that would
be sort of problematic. Yeah, I guess I would. I
would be up for it if it were if it
were a good haunted house and not just like some
sort of a gimmicky thing, because there were there have been.
There have been some haunted houses that have come through
or popped up in the Atlanta area that have featured
nudity on the part of the performers. And it just
(39:19):
sounds a little yeah, like I don't really want anything again.
I just I'm so pragmatically towards the liability thing. You know,
stuff hanging out, you know, you don't have much light
going through, Something's going to happen to someone's parts. Well,
I feel the same way when my son is running
around naked, like my thought is he's going to fall
and skin his winger on the concrete, and I and
I just like, let's let's get some pants on him
(39:41):
just so when he falls that he's not gonna hurt
his wir You're good dad. Alright, guys, let us know,
would you go through Haunted House naked? Yes? And scenes
from films, comics, literature that have featured nude fights that
were really that it actually worked and actually had had
(40:02):
some sort of effect on you as a viewer a reader.
Let us know about those as well. You can find
us in all the normal places, of course. Our mothership
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(40:28):
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