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Are Americans
becoming increasingly hostile towards simple nudity ? David
Steinberg reflects on some recent examples...
Silencing the Body Electric
By David Steinberg
"The more things change, the more they stay the same." -- French
adage
You'd think we were back in the stagnant 50's, the way people
still get all worked up whenever a little playful nudity shows
up on the landscape of daily life. After fifty years of radical
confrontation and expanded social consciousness around a
thousand different aspects of sex, sexual orientation, and
gender, it would seem that something as harmless a little bare
skin would simply be too insignificant to show up on social
crisis radar screens, even among folks a good deal more
conservative than you and I.
Well, nice thought, but for all our real progress on these
fronts over the years, plain old nudity still seems to be as
real an issue as ever, out there in what passes for the Real
World. The shift from Clinton to Bush as icon of national leader
doesn't help, even if the shift is as much about image and style
as anything else. As the White Picket Fence reality of the new
administration seeps inevitably into the national subconscious,
it's taking less and less to ruffle the feathers of people who
want to see nothing but Pleasantville wherever they turn. Among
people who have fused fear of the body and fear of sex into one
bubbling cauldron of moralistic anxiety, it doesn't take much
for them to feel like the devil is at their door, waiting to
infect them and theirs with some rapidly mutating virus of moral
turpitude.
I'm not even talking, this time, about stories that put sexual
deviance or sexual diversity up for discussion on the current
events chopping block. Let's ignore, for the moment, the lawsuit
by Indiana state legislators to block performance of "Corpus
Christi," a play about a guy named Joshua growing up gay with
his twelve close buddies in modern-day Texas, and attempts by
The Promise Keepers and The American Family Organization to keep
a record album with the song "Jesus Christ, Homosexual" from
ever reaching retail stores. Let's also skip over the story of
how Leilani Rios had to go to court to hold onto her place on
the Cal State Fullerton track team after she refused to quit her
job as an erotic dancer. These are important stories too, but
they are about something a little more loaded than simple
nudity.
We know how tightly people can get tied in knots about sex
that's outside their personal sense of what's mainstream. But
what's been piling up in my folder of clips for possible future
columns are stories about nothing more controversial than the
reality of the naked human body, about the inclusion of the
naked human body in some rather straightforward works of art,
theater, and advertising. These are naked images that have
nothing to do with sex at all. But plenty of people are steaming
about them nonetheless.
Provincetown, Massachusetts, is not what you'd call a
conservative town. It's best known as an artist colony and as a
specifically gay-friendly resort. In the nakedness department,
it's even got its very own delightful, publicly-sanctioned,
clothing-optional beach. Nonetheless, the Crown and Anchor Inn,
which has been showing a local production of Off-Broadway's
biggest hit, "Naked Boys Singing," has been twice ordered to
"cease-and-desist" showing the play by P-town's erstwhile
building commissioner, Warren Alexander. Alexander has
classified the show as adult entertainment because it includes
full, frontal (male) nudity, and in P-town, adult entertainment
is not allowed within 500 feet of churches and municipal
buildings. Both the local Town Hall and its Unitarian Church are
closer than that to the Crown and Anchor.
Now, you should understand that "Naked Boys Singing" is no live
sex show. It describes itself as "a musical revue celebrating
the joys of male nudity in song, comedy and dance." According to
reviewer Martin Denton, "the material is, by turns, gentle,
humorous, sentimental, and--very occasionally--slightly
raunchy." Aside from New York and P-town, "Naked Boys Singing"
is being produced in London, Rome, Tokyo, Sydney, Houston,
Chicago, South Florida, and San Francisco. "Seeing eight men
with their members flinging around in all directions on stage
while they sing and dance is just funny," Australian Director
Jeremy Cumpston says of the play. "It's all about nothing more
substantial than silliness and fun."
So what's the big deal? Once upon a long, long time ago (1968),
there was big fuss over nudity in a Broadway play. The play was
"Hair," a celebratory musical about the then-new hippie
phenomenon. A year later, there was more controversy when nudity
showed up in another Broadway play, "Oh, Calcutta." Nudity in
legit theater was groundbreaking back then. It had never
happened before. Hippies, acid, free love, and the
Haight-Ashbury were sweeping all sorts of traditions out to sea.
People were struggling to catch up with the times. But that was
over thirty years ago. The world has changed from bottom to top
fourteen times since then. Have we entered some kind of time
warp? Maybe Dwight Eisenhower isn't really dead; maybe he's been
face-lifted into Dubya. Maybe the fact that Dubya can claim the
title of Leader of the Free World encourages people like
Commissioner Alexander to stand up and let their outrage at
penises bobbing around on stage be known. Unfortunately, Warren
Alexander is not the only bodyphobe feeling his oats these days.
Jim Kearns is a 25-year-old photographer and student at Glendale
(Arizona) Community College. His photo, "Self-Portrait: Desire
as Penitence," shows him standing naked with (among other
things) clothespins on his genitals. The photo was published in
GCC's literary magazine, "The Traveler". As a result, state
legislators are threatening to cut funding to the college unless
GCC President Teresa Martinez Pollack, who has defended both
Kearns and "The Traveler," either resigns or redefines her
position on freedom of speech.
As it turns out, state legislators can't fire Pollack outright,
but they do hold the college's purse strings. "If [GCC] is
misappropriating taxpayer dollars and rewarding questionable
art," proclaims Republican State Senator Scott Bundegaard, "I
believe we should take some sort of action."
Far from anything pornographic, Kearns sees his photo as a
commentary on Jesuits who practice self-flagellation and the
Buddhist notion that desire is the root of all suffering. "The
clothespins are attacking the most notorious organ of desire,"
he explains. Hardly a proclamation of free love, but the
legislators are not interested in the philosophical nuances of
life, suffering, or the nature of desire. They just want the
picture that shows Kearns's genitals to disappear.
There's more. The University of Southern Florida recently
coughed up $25,000 to settle a lawsuit by one of the school's
art students, Nicole Ferry. Ferry claims she was sexually
harassed by a photo that was shown by graduate assistant Derek
Washington in one of her classes. The subject of the class was
controversial art. The photo was a shadowy image of two torsos,
male and female, embracing. I guess you could say that sex is
part of the story here, but if this is sex it's neither graphic
nor outside the mainstream. (You can check the photo out for
yourself at http://electronic.arts.usf.edu/derek/index.html.
It is, believe me, both tasteful and tame.)
The 250 students in instructor Diane Elmeer's class were warned
that some images to be shown in class that day might offend some
people. They were given the option of skipping the class without
penalty. Nicole Ferry chose to stay, then sued. Her father felt
she had been "exposed to crude and disgusting pornography." USF,
while denying that either Washington or Elmeer had done anything
wrong, decided to settle with Ferry rather than take the issue
to court. As the president of the faculty Senate explained,
after a recent overhaul of the state university system, "I'm not
entirely sure where we stand in terms of academic freedom." USF
thought it best to just make the whole issue go away as quickly
and quietly as possible.
And then there's the whole brouhaha about the Summer 2001
Abercrombie & Fitch clothing catalog, which shows fun-loving,
college-age men and women cavorting in the nude -- playing touch
football, splashing in the pool, laughing, flirting, kissing,
showering, generally having a good time -- boys, girls, alone,
together. Rather lovely, really.
Illinois Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood (Republican) is not
amused. She has mounted a "Stop A&F" boycott campaign to protest
the nudity. Never mind that A&F only sells the catalog to people
over 18 and has it shrink-wrapped so it can't be flipped through
by impressionable children. Wood claims that the A&F catalog has
"35% more nudity" than its previous edition. (One has to wonder
whether this supposedly precise calculation is based on number,
size, or graphic impact of the photos in question.) Her website
(www.stopAandF.com) offers no fewer than 22 (discreetly
censored) pictures from the catalog ("click on photos below to
enlarge") to make her point, allowing her to both capitalize on
the visual appeal of A&F's nude young bodies and condemn it at
the same time.
"Abercrombie and Fitch is glamorizing indiscriminate sexual
behavior that unsophisticated teenagers are not equipped to
weigh against the dangers of date rape, unplanned pregnancies
and sexually transmitted diseases," Wood declares. She has
rallied not only the Council on Islamic Relations, the Illinois
Catholic Conference, Concerned Christian Americans, and the
Chicago Rabbinical Council to her cause, but also (I'm
embarrassed to say) the Chicago and Illinois chapters of NOW.
A&F spokesman Hampton Carney seems to be taking Wood's campaign
in stride, perhaps even welcoming the publicity her campaign is
bringing to A&F. Appreciation of nudity, says Carney, is simply
a part of college experience, pointing to both UC Berkeley's
famous nude activist, Andrew Martinez, and the "overwhelmingly
positive" response he says the catalog has generated from A&F
customers.
All of which is nothing new, but the flash point at which
controversy rears its head seems to be moving backward all of a
sudden. It's no longer questions of breaking obscenity laws that
are at issue. Rather, people who are offended by speech and
images that are clearly legal are feeling that they have the
right, even the duty, to speak up and have those images and
ideas beaten down by the force of public pressure. It's not
coincidental that many of these people are politicians looking
to make political hay from other people's biases and fears. I
think it's also not coincidental that Image of Propriety George
W. Bush demonstrated last November that his version of gee-gosh
old-fashioned propriety could be parlayed into occupying the
White House.
For a bit of cross-cultural perspective, try this on for size:
New Zealand's Auckland Museum recently rejected an opportunity
to exhibit the original Dead Sea Scrolls, deciding instead to go
with an exhibit of body art that includes nude paintings,
photographs of genital piercings, and mannequins wearing bondage
equipment. The museum board decided that the Dead Sea Scrolls
were "too esoteric" and that the body art exhibit would be more
of a popular and commercial success. As the Australian director
of "Naked Boys Singing" noted wryly, we are "much more open to
[nudity] than the Americans, more laissez-faire that way, a bit
more relaxed, you know."
Indeed.
[If you would like to receive Comes Naturally and other writing
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Past columns are available at the Society for Human Sexuality's
"David Steinberg Archives": www.sexuality.org/davids.html.
Two
books edited by David -- "Erotic by Nature: A Celebration of
Life, of Love, and of Our Wonderful Bodies," and "The Erotic
Impulse: Honoring the Sensual Self" -- are available from him by
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www.sexuality.org/l/davids/ei.html.]
David Steinberg P.O. Box 2992 Santa Cruz, CA 95063 (831)
426-7082 (831) 425-8825 (FAX) eronat@aol.com
About the author:
Dvid Steinberg writes frequently about the culture and politics
of sex
Copyright © 2001 David
Steinberg
This article may not be published, copied, printed
transmitted or otherwise used without the written consent
of the author.)
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