March 4, 2022 • 26 mins
Why aren’t you naked?
Unless you’re reading this in the shower, sunbathing on a progressive beach, or as a fresh born babe, you’re probably wearing clothing - even if it’s hot out. Some people would rather risk death than stand totally naked in front of their peers.
Dessa tracks the topic from fig leaves to fur coats, colonialism to app user agreements, to find out why our sense of modesty is so pervasive.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello, I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human. Unless you
are listening to this program in the shower, sunbathing on
a progressive beach, or as a fresh born babe, you
are probably wearing clothing even if it's hot out, which
is strange when you think about it. No other animals
fashion garments to conceal their private parts. And that sentence
probably doesn't make much sense because I doubt other animals
(00:26):
bother sorting public parts from private ones. So why do
we like, listener? Why aren't you naked? When my little
(00:46):
brother was small, maybe six or seven, he hit a
sleep walking stage, well like sleep running really. It usually
happened shortly after his bedtime. When my mom and I
would be chatting on her big bed. We hear rapid
footfalls coming from down the hall, and we'd make way
because we knew that in a moment my brother would
be rounding the corner sand's pajamas and would leap like
(01:07):
a little naked starfish onto her bed. Then we would
take great care not to wake him up and embarrass
him before guiding him back to bed. We were more
concerned about this kid being ashamed of his nakedness than
we were of him, like launching himself out the window.
Let's talk to a naked grown up. Now, can you
introduce yourself like the way that you would at a party.
(01:30):
I can give it a go. Hi, I'm Mark, I'm
a party. I get nervous for a dude with some
self professed social anxiety in Mark went on national television
in the UK and got totally naked. So Naked Attraction
is a Channel four TV show where the dating happens
(01:53):
in reverse. They say, basically as six naked people in
the studio and the pick he gets to choose a
person to go on a date with by it gradually
seeing their nude body. I cannot emphasize enough how insane
this TV show is. I first stumbled across it a
(02:14):
couple of years ago channel surfing in a London hotel room,
and I spent the next hour in sustained shock. The
format itself was like pretty pedestrian, one person fix a
date out of a panel of contestants, but all the
guests get completely naked. And when I say completely, I'm
not talking about like demure poses with crossed legs or
(02:35):
topless women peeking coyly over a bare shoulder. I am
talking like close ups of genitals in studio lighting on
Network TV and Light ten PM. If I own curls,
I'd have to be typing these scripts one handed because
I would still be clutching them. But to Mark, who
was gearing up to re enter the dating pool, this
(02:57):
sort of terrifying challenge. It was kind of like cross
training for taking the Plunge. In many ways, it's more
scary to go out on a date and meet someone
new and get naked with them for the first time
than it is to go on an actual TV shot.
Our unclothed bodies do seem sort of fragile, such a
(03:20):
vast expanse of bear skin to a braid or chill
or burn or bruise. Naked people are just so naked humans,
you might recall from a bio class of your are
sometimes called the naked ape. We lost our fur about
a million years ago, and there are a few theories
as to why. The most popular asserts that our bear
(03:42):
skin helps us sweat to stop us from overheating. Anthropologist
nenigibal on Ski I study human skin, including the evolution
of nakedness and what it means to have naked skin.
What is not intuitive to me is if we evolved
(04:03):
over a fi fillion generations to be furless, then why
did we turn around and start wearing fur stolen from
other animals. Probably one of the first things we did
was cover ourselves up at night. Humans, like other primates,
would have been good at huddling with one another to
keep warm, and certainly we also used furs and animal hides.
(04:30):
As humans began to move outside of the tropics, we
get cold at night and invent blankets. Okay, that tracks,
But when does shame enter the picture? Because it seems
like and even the hottest of climbs, humans usually cover
themselves up, even with only a tiny little scrap of fabric,
and those genital coverings don't seem to serve any meaningful
(04:52):
purpose for thermal regulation. It's not like, man, I'm freezing,
can I borrow your fig leaf? So what's going on there?
What's with the whole modesty business? People were living, you know,
cheek by jowl, and one can imagine that there would
be certain situations in which the condition of the genitals
(05:17):
would cause some kind of social disruption. Let's just say gently,
let's try to get this past the censors together. Nina
what are you talking about? If you're in a close
social group, sometimes those interactions between individuals that cause visible
(05:39):
excitation would be considered anti social. It's like we're concealing
sensitive information as much as we're concealing the anatomy itself.
Who's roused or who's on their period. And sometimes modesty
isn't only about clothes. Modesty isn't necessarily about of rain up,
(06:01):
but it's about removing yourself from the greater social group
under particular situations. For instance, women removing themselves when they're menstruating,
or a couple going off when they're having sex together.
So like me wearing jeans right now might be the
(06:23):
equivalent of me sneaking off behind a tree or over
a ridge in times of yore. Like it's just me
keeping the intimate bits intimate, which I no longer need
to do geographically, because Levi's yeah, it's like clothing is
a little privacy shed that you take with you everywhere
(06:46):
you go, and it's a shed you are not allowed
to leave. Try walking down the street without your clothes
on in New York. Actually you can't do it. That
buzz kill was provided by Philip Levine, Professor of History
at the University of Texas. I think some people would
be offended and suggest that you're obscene. Other people would
(07:07):
think that you're, you know, what we used to call
a sex maniac, whatever on earth that means. Others would
think that perhaps you were psychologically unbalanced. Some would think
that you were making a political statement, because we do
know that nakedness has been used a lot as a
form of political resistance in many different cultures. Clothes may
have started with warmth and privacy, but they certainly didn't
(07:28):
end there. Clothing has become a crucial part of culture.
It announces social affiliations and economic status, and class and ethnicity,
and over the course of human history it's become almost
like a wearable flag sidebar. We have an episode about
dress and dress codes. Philippa herself specializes in colonial history,
(07:52):
when British and other European powers were traveling far beyond
their own shores, encountering varied customs across the planet, misunderstanding
much of what they saw and citing those differences to
rationalized programs of world domination. There is this notion that
bodies of color, black bodies in particular, are somehow naturally naked,
(08:12):
and that this makes those people inferior to civilized white
people who know to wear clothes. This is a narrative
over and over again in colonial texts that one of
the reasons we need to civilize these people is because
they don't understand that they need to wear clothes and
be modest, and they need to learn shame. We see
it with the missionaries in the eighteenth century when they
first get to places like the Pacific Islands. We see
(08:35):
it in Africa, we see it all over the world.
Philippin notes that while clothing traditions vary hugely across the world,
not every culture ties up their notions of modesty and
shame with the naked body. But many colonialists depicted bear
skin and some sort of moral failing evidence of an
animal nature ignorance. Charities organized fundraisers to clothe the natives
(08:58):
to fulfill a moral imperative, But a prominent naturalist named
Thomas Henry Huxley was eager to document the naked bodies
of people around the world, and a letter written by
Huxley was actually what inspired Philippa herself to embark on
a career studying nakedness. So in eighteen sixty nine. He
writes a letter to the man who runs the British
(09:20):
Empire and he says, and these are his words, not mine.
He says, please, could you arrange to have photographs of
naked natives sent to me for scientific research purposes? Well,
where i am reading this letter and my jaw drops,
I'm thinking eighteen sixty nine, height of the Victorian period.
And here he is having the goal to ask this,
you know, grand politician, to send him pictures of you know,
(09:43):
men and women without their kit on. Granville writes back,
and he says, sure, no problem, I'll be right on it.
And indeed he sends to what they call a circular,
which is basically a letter that goes to every single
colonial governor, saying, Professor Huxley needs pictures of your natives
without their clothes on, Please send eighteens sixty nine. This, dude,
rights send nudes to the whole world. You got it.
(10:05):
Huxley wanted the people of the empire to strip naked
for photos so he could classify them the way a
collector pins butterflies to a board. He was interested in
figuring out how humans evolved, but he was also working
on sorting people into a hierarchy of races. A lot
of people took similar photos, missionaries, anthropologists, even game hunters.
(10:28):
It got me thinking about how even as a child
growing up in Britain myself, we had had school textbooks
that talked about the naked native and what an incredibly
familiar troope this was to me, and that trope has
been pervasive. Our sense of propriety and shame can be
leveraged for power, social and political. Naked people's historically weren't
(10:50):
considered deserving of the same respect and more regard as
clothed ones. The most sensational and complicated and heart sinking
story that Philippa told me took place in an Australian
mission school called Rnabella. The Mission and Annabella is a
really interesting example of how messy this stuff becomes. I
(11:12):
think it failed, but it tried, I think, to understand
and to respect what it understood as the local indigenous customs.
So we're talking about in what was known as the
out back. You know, we're in the desert here. It's
the nineteen for days in rural Australia, one of the
last regions on the continent to be settled by white people,
and By the standards of the time, this mission school
(11:34):
was considered progressive, promoting the culture and the language of
the indigenous Aboriginal people. Some of the students there were
children of two Aboriginal parents full blood would have been
the term used then, and some were halfway. The kids
who are full bloot are being encouraged by Annabella to
embrace what they see as their indigenous culture, and as
(11:56):
a result, they're not allowed to wear clothes because they
understood as a naked and primitive people's the kids who
had white fathering, those kids were not allowed to go naked.
I don't think I am ever going to forget that
these kids strand in on either side of adults imaginary lines.
(12:23):
The mandate for modesty is pretty universal, even if modesty
looks different in practice around the world. Some places don't
like bare breasts or legs, or shoulders or hair. But
whatever the rules are, most cultures are passionate about compliance.
Some taboos on nakedness, however, don't seem to vary all
(12:43):
that much across culture. Philippa says there is one adult
body part that almost every society covers up. The biggest
taboo over time, without question, is the penis. There's always
(13:04):
a big hoho harp when we start to have any
hint that we might see a penis. Somehow women's bodies
are okay to commercialize, to use, to sell things, to
make pretty pictures from meaning you know, poshed off. It
goes on gallery walls. Fast forward. A woman sits for
(13:27):
her portrait with her eyes closed and her arms crossed
over her bare breasts in front of a studio backdrop.
The photos crapped at the waist, but you can see
like the dark band of leggings at the bottom of
the frame. It's a kind of image you might see
a lot of while scrolling on social media. But when
this particular image was posted to Instagram, the platform removed
(13:52):
it for violating community guidelines. The woman in the photo
was Naomie Nicholas Williams, a black plus sized model. She
the photographer, and a bunch of other people pointed out
that slenderer white models could post exactly these sorts of
images all day long and not get censored. Her fans
(14:14):
rallied on her behalf online. The hashtag I want to
see Naomi started gaining traction, and a lot of other
users who tried posting the image met with similar takedown notices.
Naomi wrote a public letter to the CEO of Instagram
that said, and I quote Instagram reproduces the same racial
biases that society does. Seeing fat black bodies is too
(14:37):
much or unpalatable, And actually Instagram ended up changing its
nudity policy, acknowledging that Naomi's photos shouldn't have been taken down.
One of the people who signed Naomi's letter was Shar Elise.
For those people right now who are just like meeting
you for the first time by voice only, can you
describe what you look like? Yeah, I'm skin I have
(15:01):
a shaved head. Um, I'm probably around the size well,
I'm around the size u K sixteen to eight team
and I'm like five ft five, I've got loads of tattoos,
quite a few pacings, and yeah that's me. Shar is
a content creator but sometimes model, and the founder of
(15:24):
an online platform called Girls Will Be Boys, which aims
to explore gender through personal stories. She says that a
naked body is seen through a completely different lens. If
that body is black, it goes back years and years
and years, Like, there's so many examples of our bodies
(15:44):
being seen as either like freak shows. It's not just
a body that functions that are human being lives in.
It's it's something else. It has to be something else.
It's disgusting and it's really unfair. And a lot of
forums only on naked bodies are considered artful and others
are just fundamentally indecent and shouldn't be seen at all.
(16:06):
We don't see women with saggy boobs, we don't see
women with bellies. They have the phrase of like all
shapes and sizes, We welcome all shapes and sizes, but
you don't. Okay, maybe different size, but it's always the
same shape. So Shar teamed up with Naomi in another
motel to pose for a photo project the protested online
censorship us three models of painted head to toe in
(16:29):
pink glitter all over. There literally was not expect of
us that wasn't painted, and we were kind of stood
on these podiums and it was just us in like
our natural forms, and there were close ups of like
certain body parts like back rolls, and it was just
basically a middle finger up to censorship and society and
(16:51):
making out that our bodies are something that they're not
and that basically, our bodies are exactly what we say
they are, and that we can be shown as all
as well as our slimmer or white counterparts. So it
was just like a celebration of us and our bodies.
(17:16):
The human menagerie is stocked with all sorts of bodies,
and we tend to see just a small sampling of
them represented in our media, and so we take note
when the spotlight hit someone not usually asked to center stage.
Remember that guy Mark who took off all his clothes
on that show Naked Attraction. Mark is a handsome dude,
but if you were to google clips from his appearance
(17:38):
on the show and I have, the first thing you're
likely to notice about his anatomy is, actually, well, what's
let him telling? I actually had my whole color on
removed and had a colostomy backfitted in order to collect
the waste that would ordinarily go through your color on
and out of your butt. And so yeah, that the
(18:01):
changes you the way you look because you have this
sort of medical appliance on your stomach. So at the
time I was pretty embarrassed about it. I was more reluctant,
friend want to actually see me. Mark has Crone's disease,
and after a surgery, he felt ugly hyper aware of
the bag affixed to the skin above his right hip.
(18:24):
He healed up and got back on his feet, but
dating posed a particular challenge. I was meeting new women
and had to get naked at some point, and therefore
had to really address this u shyness that I had.
So when his friends encouraged him to go on the program,
he went for it and the audience loved it, and
(18:45):
afterwards the Twitter account for Colostomy UK congratulated Mark on
his confidence and all the work he'd done raising awareness.
They also posted a shot from the episode featuring a
modesty saving eggplant emoji, but his colostomy bag in full view.
I think being naked on national TV was probably the
biggest challenge that I've done so far. I think kind
(19:07):
of stepping it up like that and gradually revealing it
to more and more people has helped me personally as
well as obviously, you know, the more people in the
general public that know about these things, the better. In
my opinion, getting naked can make a statement. It can
make us feel vulnerable or empowered or just chilly. But
when other people see you naked, it might change the
(19:29):
way they think about how you think. Okay, let's get
Kurt Gray in here already. He's based at the University
of North Carolina Chapel Hill as the director of the
Deepest Belief Slab, which let's be Frank is an amazing
name for a lab. Some years ago, a few of
his colleagues were having a debate how does seeing someone
(19:50):
undressed change the way you think about them? One team said,
we objectify naked bodies. When you observe somebody naked, they're
reduced to a mindless pile of meat. But the other
team said, you don't think less of them, you just
see them differently. Kurt decided to run a series of
trials to try to find out who is right. I
can tell you about the most interesting experiment, which involves
(20:12):
adult film stars if if you like ready, the easiest
experiment to run is just show people the same person
you know with their clothes on and close off. Same picture,
same setting, same lighting, same makeup. The only thing that
differed is nakedness. Happily, a photographer named Timothy Greenfield Sanders
(20:34):
had already published a book of portraits in which porn
stars were photographed both naked and clothed in exactly the
same poses. And we had a disclaimer that said warning,
you're gonna see You're gonna see pornography in this study.
And with that disclaimer, the study filled up in a
hot minute. So we asked a thousand people to judge
(20:55):
these adult film stars. These thousand participants were then given
a questionnaire to capture their impressions of the people in
the photographs. They were asked questions like, compared to the
average person, how much is this person capable of self control,
of planning a feeling pain, a feeling rage. And we
found that when you see someone will have their clothes on,
(21:17):
so that when they're naked, you see them as less
capable of thinking, but in fact more capable of feeling,
of feeling fear and pain and pleasure. Kurt's findings implied
sort of a zero sum proposition, like the more we
perceive people as thinking, the less we perceive them as
sensitive to feelings. Kurt conducted another experiment, and this time
(21:41):
he encouraged participants to administer safe but uncomfortable electric shocks
to someone in another room. Before doing so, however, they
were shown a picture of the guy who would be
receiving the shock, Shocky as it were. Some participants were
shown photos of Shocky negat above the waist. Other participants
were on a picture of him wearing a black hoodie.
(22:02):
And as you might be starting to suspect, Shaki was
a secret agent in this thing, actually a part of
Kurt's team. And so what we found there is that
people administered more shocks when people were closed than when
people were naked. Kurt figured that's because we perceived naked
people as more sensitive to pain, more vulnerable. It didn't
(22:24):
seem as though research participants were objectifying the naked people,
reducing them to nothing more than their physical bodies. They
still regarded them as individuals with mental lives. They still
had minds, but participants assumed the minds of naked people
were doing less intellectual work, and we're more involved with
sensation and emotion. But can we really extrapolate these findings
(22:47):
from the highly controlled laboratory environment to the outside world.
Kurt admits it's hard to be sure if data collected
from Harvard undergrads holds true for the rest of the
planet look in other societies. It is certainly seems that
perhaps the more powerful the more you're seeing as a thinker,
the more clothes that you have thought. But as the scientists,
how we say more park needs to be done. Kurt
(23:09):
understood these results to suggest that maybe seeing people differently
when they're naked isn't all bad. Maybe it helps us
register their vulnerability and prompts us to want to protect them. Also,
maybe it's just like true, maybe when we're naked we
do tend to focus more unfeeling than thinking. Right, we
wear clothes to protect ourselves so we don't feel as much.
(23:32):
And so I think it's true that that when we
are closed, we are more of a thinker, and we're
naked we're more of a dealer. I guess on the
occasions where I encounter someone who is observing me naked,
like I'm not planning an invasion of Prussia, like I
am more, I am more focused on the present moment,
experience and sensation, whether it's good or bad. Yeah. Yeah,
(23:53):
although you know a little known fact Napoleon plan most
of its advance is totally naked. But that's not true.
I just made that up. God, I just I was
like this, flip the table over, Spike, Mike, you just well, listener,
our time together is almost up. And if I sound
a little different while delivering this final thought, it's because
(24:16):
I am now sitting completely naked on the floor of
a hotel closet, and I would describe the sensation as
mostly humbling, kind of hard to put down my own
standard issue insecurities and focus on the task at hand.
It also feels like I am maybe doing something low
key illegal, which is probably just a product of my
(24:40):
own looming fear that housekeeping is going to enter un
announced and discover me in a very difficult to explain
audio project. I once read an article in the Seattle
Times about just how seriously we dig modesty. There were
these disaster planners and they were really struggling to create
(25:03):
viable decontamination protocols because people who were caught up in
anthrax scares were so reluctant to undress, even to save
themselves from a potentially lethal biotoxin. Some people, and I quote,
would rather be dead than strip in public. But you
know who just does not care at all about modesty
(25:23):
or nakedness. Tiny kids. They suck at getting into clothes
and they suck at wearing them. We've got to persuade
every new arrival to the planet one by one to
get dressed and get on board. We teach them to
put on a hat. On the winner, we explain which
parts must be covered to merge into the flow of
social traffic and to protect their furthest little bodies from
(25:46):
the elements would get them shoes and shirts and maybe squirts,
and by the time they're all grown up, they'll probably
be uncomfortable without clothes, feeling overexposed and vulnerable. Among the
many peculiarities of us naked apes is our ambivalence about
our own nakedness. All right, radio friends, it is time
(26:08):
to shut this party down before housekeeping discovers the creeposoid
hiding naked in the closet and room at oh six.
Deeply Human is a BBC World service in American public media,
co production with I Heart Media and as hosted by Mesa.
(26:31):
Find me online at Tessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
on Twitter. Question why do you care so much about
what people wear? You know? I can hear you thinking
I don't care so much of it. But I bet
you've got more skin in this game than you might imagine.
Next time on Deeply human. We're talking dress codes,
Hello, I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human. Unless you
are listening to this program in the shower, sunbathing on
a progressive beach, or as a fresh born babe, you
are probably wearing clothing even if it's hot out, which
is strange when you think about it. No other animals
fashion garments to conceal their private parts. And that sentence
probably doesn't make much sense because I doubt other animals
(00:26):
bother sorting public parts from private ones. So why do
we like, listener? Why aren't you naked? When my little
(00:46):
brother was small, maybe six or seven, he hit a
sleep walking stage, well like sleep running really. It usually
happened shortly after his bedtime. When my mom and I
would be chatting on her big bed. We hear rapid
footfalls coming from down the hall, and we'd make way
because we knew that in a moment my brother would
be rounding the corner sand's pajamas and would leap like
(01:07):
a little naked starfish onto her bed. Then we would
take great care not to wake him up and embarrass
him before guiding him back to bed. We were more
concerned about this kid being ashamed of his nakedness than
we were of him, like launching himself out the window.
Let's talk to a naked grown up. Now, can you
introduce yourself like the way that you would at a party.
(01:30):
I can give it a go. Hi, I'm Mark, I'm
a party. I get nervous for a dude with some
self professed social anxiety in Mark went on national television
in the UK and got totally naked. So Naked Attraction
is a Channel four TV show where the dating happens
(01:53):
in reverse. They say, basically as six naked people in
the studio and the pick he gets to choose a
person to go on a date with by it gradually
seeing their nude body. I cannot emphasize enough how insane
this TV show is. I first stumbled across it a
(02:14):
couple of years ago channel surfing in a London hotel room,
and I spent the next hour in sustained shock. The
format itself was like pretty pedestrian, one person fix a
date out of a panel of contestants, but all the
guests get completely naked. And when I say completely, I'm
not talking about like demure poses with crossed legs or
(02:35):
topless women peeking coyly over a bare shoulder. I am
talking like close ups of genitals in studio lighting on
Network TV and Light ten PM. If I own curls,
I'd have to be typing these scripts one handed because
I would still be clutching them. But to Mark, who
was gearing up to re enter the dating pool, this
(02:57):
sort of terrifying challenge. It was kind of like cross
training for taking the Plunge. In many ways, it's more
scary to go out on a date and meet someone
new and get naked with them for the first time
than it is to go on an actual TV shot.
Our unclothed bodies do seem sort of fragile, such a
(03:20):
vast expanse of bear skin to a braid or chill
or burn or bruise. Naked people are just so naked humans,
you might recall from a bio class of your are
sometimes called the naked ape. We lost our fur about
a million years ago, and there are a few theories
as to why. The most popular asserts that our bear
(03:42):
skin helps us sweat to stop us from overheating. Anthropologist
nenigibal on Ski I study human skin, including the evolution
of nakedness and what it means to have naked skin.
What is not intuitive to me is if we evolved
(04:03):
over a fi fillion generations to be furless, then why
did we turn around and start wearing fur stolen from
other animals. Probably one of the first things we did
was cover ourselves up at night. Humans, like other primates,
would have been good at huddling with one another to
keep warm, and certainly we also used furs and animal hides.
(04:30):
As humans began to move outside of the tropics, we
get cold at night and invent blankets. Okay, that tracks,
But when does shame enter the picture? Because it seems
like and even the hottest of climbs, humans usually cover
themselves up, even with only a tiny little scrap of fabric,
and those genital coverings don't seem to serve any meaningful
(04:52):
purpose for thermal regulation. It's not like, man, I'm freezing,
can I borrow your fig leaf? So what's going on there?
What's with the whole modesty business? People were living, you know,
cheek by jowl, and one can imagine that there would
be certain situations in which the condition of the genitals
(05:17):
would cause some kind of social disruption. Let's just say gently,
let's try to get this past the censors together. Nina
what are you talking about? If you're in a close
social group, sometimes those interactions between individuals that cause visible
(05:39):
excitation would be considered anti social. It's like we're concealing
sensitive information as much as we're concealing the anatomy itself.
Who's roused or who's on their period. And sometimes modesty
isn't only about clothes. Modesty isn't necessarily about of rain up,
(06:01):
but it's about removing yourself from the greater social group
under particular situations. For instance, women removing themselves when they're menstruating,
or a couple going off when they're having sex together.
So like me wearing jeans right now might be the
(06:23):
equivalent of me sneaking off behind a tree or over
a ridge in times of yore. Like it's just me
keeping the intimate bits intimate, which I no longer need
to do geographically, because Levi's yeah, it's like clothing is
a little privacy shed that you take with you everywhere
(06:46):
you go, and it's a shed you are not allowed
to leave. Try walking down the street without your clothes
on in New York. Actually you can't do it. That
buzz kill was provided by Philip Levine, Professor of History
at the University of Texas. I think some people would
be offended and suggest that you're obscene. Other people would
(07:07):
think that you're, you know, what we used to call
a sex maniac, whatever on earth that means. Others would
think that perhaps you were psychologically unbalanced. Some would think
that you were making a political statement, because we do
know that nakedness has been used a lot as a
form of political resistance in many different cultures. Clothes may
have started with warmth and privacy, but they certainly didn't
(07:28):
end there. Clothing has become a crucial part of culture.
It announces social affiliations and economic status, and class and ethnicity,
and over the course of human history it's become almost
like a wearable flag sidebar. We have an episode about
dress and dress codes. Philippa herself specializes in colonial history,
(07:52):
when British and other European powers were traveling far beyond
their own shores, encountering varied customs across the planet, misunderstanding
much of what they saw and citing those differences to
rationalized programs of world domination. There is this notion that
bodies of color, black bodies in particular, are somehow naturally naked,
(08:12):
and that this makes those people inferior to civilized white
people who know to wear clothes. This is a narrative
over and over again in colonial texts that one of
the reasons we need to civilize these people is because
they don't understand that they need to wear clothes and
be modest, and they need to learn shame. We see
it with the missionaries in the eighteenth century when they
first get to places like the Pacific Islands. We see
(08:35):
it in Africa, we see it all over the world.
Philippin notes that while clothing traditions vary hugely across the world,
not every culture ties up their notions of modesty and
shame with the naked body. But many colonialists depicted bear
skin and some sort of moral failing evidence of an
animal nature ignorance. Charities organized fundraisers to clothe the natives
(08:58):
to fulfill a moral imperative, But a prominent naturalist named
Thomas Henry Huxley was eager to document the naked bodies
of people around the world, and a letter written by
Huxley was actually what inspired Philippa herself to embark on
a career studying nakedness. So in eighteen sixty nine. He
writes a letter to the man who runs the British
(09:20):
Empire and he says, and these are his words, not mine.
He says, please, could you arrange to have photographs of
naked natives sent to me for scientific research purposes? Well,
where i am reading this letter and my jaw drops,
I'm thinking eighteen sixty nine, height of the Victorian period.
And here he is having the goal to ask this,
you know, grand politician, to send him pictures of you know,
(09:43):
men and women without their kit on. Granville writes back,
and he says, sure, no problem, I'll be right on it.
And indeed he sends to what they call a circular,
which is basically a letter that goes to every single
colonial governor, saying, Professor Huxley needs pictures of your natives
without their clothes on, Please send eighteens sixty nine. This, dude,
rights send nudes to the whole world. You got it.
(10:05):
Huxley wanted the people of the empire to strip naked
for photos so he could classify them the way a
collector pins butterflies to a board. He was interested in
figuring out how humans evolved, but he was also working
on sorting people into a hierarchy of races. A lot
of people took similar photos, missionaries, anthropologists, even game hunters.
(10:28):
It got me thinking about how even as a child
growing up in Britain myself, we had had school textbooks
that talked about the naked native and what an incredibly
familiar troope this was to me, and that trope has
been pervasive. Our sense of propriety and shame can be
leveraged for power, social and political. Naked people's historically weren't
(10:50):
considered deserving of the same respect and more regard as
clothed ones. The most sensational and complicated and heart sinking
story that Philippa told me took place in an Australian
mission school called Rnabella. The Mission and Annabella is a
really interesting example of how messy this stuff becomes. I
(11:12):
think it failed, but it tried, I think, to understand
and to respect what it understood as the local indigenous customs.
So we're talking about in what was known as the
out back. You know, we're in the desert here. It's
the nineteen for days in rural Australia, one of the
last regions on the continent to be settled by white people,
and By the standards of the time, this mission school
(11:34):
was considered progressive, promoting the culture and the language of
the indigenous Aboriginal people. Some of the students there were
children of two Aboriginal parents full blood would have been
the term used then, and some were halfway. The kids
who are full bloot are being encouraged by Annabella to
embrace what they see as their indigenous culture, and as
(11:56):
a result, they're not allowed to wear clothes because they
understood as a naked and primitive people's the kids who
had white fathering, those kids were not allowed to go naked.
I don't think I am ever going to forget that
these kids strand in on either side of adults imaginary lines.
(12:23):
The mandate for modesty is pretty universal, even if modesty
looks different in practice around the world. Some places don't
like bare breasts or legs, or shoulders or hair. But
whatever the rules are, most cultures are passionate about compliance.
Some taboos on nakedness, however, don't seem to vary all
(12:43):
that much across culture. Philippa says there is one adult
body part that almost every society covers up. The biggest
taboo over time, without question, is the penis. There's always
(13:04):
a big hoho harp when we start to have any
hint that we might see a penis. Somehow women's bodies
are okay to commercialize, to use, to sell things, to
make pretty pictures from meaning you know, poshed off. It
goes on gallery walls. Fast forward. A woman sits for
(13:27):
her portrait with her eyes closed and her arms crossed
over her bare breasts in front of a studio backdrop.
The photos crapped at the waist, but you can see
like the dark band of leggings at the bottom of
the frame. It's a kind of image you might see
a lot of while scrolling on social media. But when
this particular image was posted to Instagram, the platform removed
(13:52):
it for violating community guidelines. The woman in the photo
was Naomie Nicholas Williams, a black plus sized model. She
the photographer, and a bunch of other people pointed out
that slenderer white models could post exactly these sorts of
images all day long and not get censored. Her fans
(14:14):
rallied on her behalf online. The hashtag I want to
see Naomi started gaining traction, and a lot of other
users who tried posting the image met with similar takedown notices.
Naomi wrote a public letter to the CEO of Instagram
that said, and I quote Instagram reproduces the same racial
biases that society does. Seeing fat black bodies is too
(14:37):
much or unpalatable, And actually Instagram ended up changing its
nudity policy, acknowledging that Naomi's photos shouldn't have been taken down.
One of the people who signed Naomi's letter was Shar Elise.
For those people right now who are just like meeting
you for the first time by voice only, can you
describe what you look like? Yeah, I'm skin I have
(15:01):
a shaved head. Um, I'm probably around the size well,
I'm around the size u K sixteen to eight team
and I'm like five ft five, I've got loads of tattoos,
quite a few pacings, and yeah that's me. Shar is
a content creator but sometimes model, and the founder of
(15:24):
an online platform called Girls Will Be Boys, which aims
to explore gender through personal stories. She says that a
naked body is seen through a completely different lens. If
that body is black, it goes back years and years
and years, Like, there's so many examples of our bodies
(15:44):
being seen as either like freak shows. It's not just
a body that functions that are human being lives in.
It's it's something else. It has to be something else.
It's disgusting and it's really unfair. And a lot of
forums only on naked bodies are considered artful and others
are just fundamentally indecent and shouldn't be seen at all.
(16:06):
We don't see women with saggy boobs, we don't see
women with bellies. They have the phrase of like all
shapes and sizes, We welcome all shapes and sizes, but
you don't. Okay, maybe different size, but it's always the
same shape. So Shar teamed up with Naomi in another
motel to pose for a photo project the protested online
censorship us three models of painted head to toe in
(16:29):
pink glitter all over. There literally was not expect of
us that wasn't painted, and we were kind of stood
on these podiums and it was just us in like
our natural forms, and there were close ups of like
certain body parts like back rolls, and it was just
basically a middle finger up to censorship and society and
(16:51):
making out that our bodies are something that they're not
and that basically, our bodies are exactly what we say
they are, and that we can be shown as all
as well as our slimmer or white counterparts. So it
was just like a celebration of us and our bodies.
(17:16):
The human menagerie is stocked with all sorts of bodies,
and we tend to see just a small sampling of
them represented in our media, and so we take note
when the spotlight hit someone not usually asked to center stage.
Remember that guy Mark who took off all his clothes
on that show Naked Attraction. Mark is a handsome dude,
but if you were to google clips from his appearance
(17:38):
on the show and I have, the first thing you're
likely to notice about his anatomy is, actually, well, what's
let him telling? I actually had my whole color on
removed and had a colostomy backfitted in order to collect
the waste that would ordinarily go through your color on
and out of your butt. And so yeah, that the
(18:01):
changes you the way you look because you have this
sort of medical appliance on your stomach. So at the
time I was pretty embarrassed about it. I was more reluctant,
friend want to actually see me. Mark has Crone's disease,
and after a surgery, he felt ugly hyper aware of
the bag affixed to the skin above his right hip.
(18:24):
He healed up and got back on his feet, but
dating posed a particular challenge. I was meeting new women
and had to get naked at some point, and therefore
had to really address this u shyness that I had.
So when his friends encouraged him to go on the program,
he went for it and the audience loved it, and
(18:45):
afterwards the Twitter account for Colostomy UK congratulated Mark on
his confidence and all the work he'd done raising awareness.
They also posted a shot from the episode featuring a
modesty saving eggplant emoji, but his colostomy bag in full view.
I think being naked on national TV was probably the
biggest challenge that I've done so far. I think kind
(19:07):
of stepping it up like that and gradually revealing it
to more and more people has helped me personally as
well as obviously, you know, the more people in the
general public that know about these things, the better. In
my opinion, getting naked can make a statement. It can
make us feel vulnerable or empowered or just chilly. But
when other people see you naked, it might change the
(19:29):
way they think about how you think. Okay, let's get
Kurt Gray in here already. He's based at the University
of North Carolina Chapel Hill as the director of the
Deepest Belief Slab, which let's be Frank is an amazing
name for a lab. Some years ago, a few of
his colleagues were having a debate how does seeing someone
(19:50):
undressed change the way you think about them? One team said,
we objectify naked bodies. When you observe somebody naked, they're
reduced to a mindless pile of meat. But the other
team said, you don't think less of them, you just
see them differently. Kurt decided to run a series of
trials to try to find out who is right. I
can tell you about the most interesting experiment, which involves
(20:12):
adult film stars if if you like ready, the easiest
experiment to run is just show people the same person
you know with their clothes on and close off. Same picture,
same setting, same lighting, same makeup. The only thing that
differed is nakedness. Happily, a photographer named Timothy Greenfield Sanders
(20:34):
had already published a book of portraits in which porn
stars were photographed both naked and clothed in exactly the
same poses. And we had a disclaimer that said warning,
you're gonna see You're gonna see pornography in this study.
And with that disclaimer, the study filled up in a
hot minute. So we asked a thousand people to judge
(20:55):
these adult film stars. These thousand participants were then given
a questionnaire to capture their impressions of the people in
the photographs. They were asked questions like, compared to the
average person, how much is this person capable of self control,
of planning a feeling pain, a feeling rage. And we
found that when you see someone will have their clothes on,
(21:17):
so that when they're naked, you see them as less
capable of thinking, but in fact more capable of feeling,
of feeling fear and pain and pleasure. Kurt's findings implied
sort of a zero sum proposition, like the more we
perceive people as thinking, the less we perceive them as
sensitive to feelings. Kurt conducted another experiment, and this time
(21:41):
he encouraged participants to administer safe but uncomfortable electric shocks
to someone in another room. Before doing so, however, they
were shown a picture of the guy who would be
receiving the shock, Shocky as it were. Some participants were
shown photos of Shocky negat above the waist. Other participants
were on a picture of him wearing a black hoodie.
(22:02):
And as you might be starting to suspect, Shaki was
a secret agent in this thing, actually a part of
Kurt's team. And so what we found there is that
people administered more shocks when people were closed than when
people were naked. Kurt figured that's because we perceived naked
people as more sensitive to pain, more vulnerable. It didn't
(22:24):
seem as though research participants were objectifying the naked people,
reducing them to nothing more than their physical bodies. They
still regarded them as individuals with mental lives. They still
had minds, but participants assumed the minds of naked people
were doing less intellectual work, and we're more involved with
sensation and emotion. But can we really extrapolate these findings
(22:47):
from the highly controlled laboratory environment to the outside world.
Kurt admits it's hard to be sure if data collected
from Harvard undergrads holds true for the rest of the
planet look in other societies. It is certainly seems that
perhaps the more powerful the more you're seeing as a thinker,
the more clothes that you have thought. But as the scientists,
how we say more park needs to be done. Kurt
(23:09):
understood these results to suggest that maybe seeing people differently
when they're naked isn't all bad. Maybe it helps us
register their vulnerability and prompts us to want to protect them. Also,
maybe it's just like true, maybe when we're naked we
do tend to focus more unfeeling than thinking. Right, we
wear clothes to protect ourselves so we don't feel as much.
(23:32):
And so I think it's true that that when we
are closed, we are more of a thinker, and we're
naked we're more of a dealer. I guess on the
occasions where I encounter someone who is observing me naked,
like I'm not planning an invasion of Prussia, like I
am more, I am more focused on the present moment,
experience and sensation, whether it's good or bad. Yeah. Yeah,
(23:53):
although you know a little known fact Napoleon plan most
of its advance is totally naked. But that's not true.
I just made that up. God, I just I was
like this, flip the table over, Spike, Mike, you just well, listener,
our time together is almost up. And if I sound
a little different while delivering this final thought, it's because
(24:16):
I am now sitting completely naked on the floor of
a hotel closet, and I would describe the sensation as
mostly humbling, kind of hard to put down my own
standard issue insecurities and focus on the task at hand.
It also feels like I am maybe doing something low
key illegal, which is probably just a product of my
(24:40):
own looming fear that housekeeping is going to enter un
announced and discover me in a very difficult to explain
audio project. I once read an article in the Seattle
Times about just how seriously we dig modesty. There were
these disaster planners and they were really struggling to create
(25:03):
viable decontamination protocols because people who were caught up in
anthrax scares were so reluctant to undress, even to save
themselves from a potentially lethal biotoxin. Some people, and I quote,
would rather be dead than strip in public. But you
know who just does not care at all about modesty
(25:23):
or nakedness. Tiny kids. They suck at getting into clothes
and they suck at wearing them. We've got to persuade
every new arrival to the planet one by one to
get dressed and get on board. We teach them to
put on a hat. On the winner, we explain which
parts must be covered to merge into the flow of
social traffic and to protect their furthest little bodies from
(25:46):
the elements would get them shoes and shirts and maybe squirts,
and by the time they're all grown up, they'll probably
be uncomfortable without clothes, feeling overexposed and vulnerable. Among the
many peculiarities of us naked apes is our ambivalence about
our own nakedness. All right, radio friends, it is time
(26:08):
to shut this party down before housekeeping discovers the creeposoid
hiding naked in the closet and room at oh six.
Deeply Human is a BBC World service in American public media,
co production with I Heart Media and as hosted by Mesa.
(26:31):
Find me online at Tessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
on Twitter. Question why do you care so much about
what people wear? You know? I can hear you thinking
I don't care so much of it. But I bet
you've got more skin in this game than you might imagine.
Next time on Deeply human. We're talking dress codes,
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