Nakedness

we like, listener? Why aren't you naked? When my little 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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,