Here are the results of my survey of modern naked behaviour. This is not a scientific poll – it is a sounding.
Half of us sleep naked, to the despair of pajama manufacturers. Half of us walk naked around our own houses. Of those who have their own private swimming pools, 90 per cent swim in them naked. Half the British population has stripped for a charity calendar.
Men and women are equally interested in nakedness – being naked and seeing other people naked. Half those studying bare breasts in The Sun every day are female.
There are some national differences: Britons are more repressed than Germans. There are no nude mixed saunas in UK health clubs or big London hotels, as far as I know, as there are in Germany.
But there is still plenty of nudity even in chilly Britain where we have naked bike rides (sounds uncomfortable), nude days at theme parks, lots of nude beaches, and mediatised nudity on a heroic scale. Nude is no longer especially rude although exposure does not limit the potential for embarrassment. Perhaps this is the point.
Nudity is a subject of endless fascination for everybody – moral philosophers, psychologists, artists, editors – but it is a complicated subject. There is a place where nudity segues to perversity and becomes in itself a symptom of madness. What are we to make of all this flesh?
It is timely that Philip Carr-Gomm. a writer in Lewes, Sussex who specialises normally in the mystical and Druidic, should have authored A Brief History of Nudity (Reaktion Books, London, 2010).
Carr-Gomm believes that there has been a fundamental shift in attitudes towards nudity that began in the sixties – a shifting of the idea of nakedness from something perverted to something socially responsible and even heroic.
Even before the body scanners are rolled out to strip us all naked at the airport, this is the age of bare, he proposes. Perhaps. I’d propose that the Internet has had something to do with demystifying the human body of which there is no nook or cranny that is not a click away. Yet is this really new?
The counter-argument, and Carr-Gomm makes it himself, is that human fascination with the nude is eternal. So technology has really changed nothing other than to make the nude prosaic and maybe slightly less interesting.
I am not certain whether nakedness is a serious subject to be lightly treated, or the opposite. Philip Carr-Gomm obviously isn’t completely sure, either because this is a serious and funny book that is amusing, informative, and naughty, even if it begs for a more comprehensive sequal. Read it naked.
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