Nakedness
and Health
Author
Unknown
The clothes we wear are not part
of us – we're stark naked under them. Many taboos about our naked bodies
are well established but if the world were totally safe and always comfortably
warm, I expect most people would spend a lot of time naked. It’s the natural
state of human life. And if we could
set aside considerations such as modesty or keeping warm, most of us might
admit that being without clothes is quite comfortable. Well, physically,
anyway; it is not always emotionally comfortable. That’s because, in our
society, covering the human body has to do with morality. We suffer from a
culturally imbedded notion that clothes make us ‘moral’. In equating nakedness
with immorality, we deduce that nudity must be sexual. The logic is plausible
even if it does not reflect the true nature of things.
Interestingly enough, though, studies
of cultures living in varying degrees of undress show no clear correlation
between our definitions of immorality and the absence of clothes. If we can take venereal disease as a valid
indicator of a society's level of sexual immorality, it is noteworthy that there is no culture in history that has ever
had the incidence of venereal disease that America, despite clothes, experiences.
It is difficult to conclude, then, that clothing can be much of a positive
force for increased societal morality.
Most of us, as we approach
adolescence, are taught that nakedness is bad, a sin, if you will, although its badness is usually made conditional,
such as it's permissible to be naked
for the doctor, or expected in locker rooms. For preadolescents, nakedness may be permitted within the context of
family or even for recreational activities like play at the seashore; but as
the transition to adulthood is made, nakedness in front of others usually
becomes less and less acceptable. This is a cultural
attribute. For Americans, it is an aspect of our Judeo-Christian ethos. It is in
the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden, when sin enters in, that being naked becomes an issue. Shame after
disobeying God compels the man and woman to make clothes – aprons, actually, to
hide their genitalia.
Now, why in the world should shame
for disobedience segue into sexual shame? I really have no idea. I have been
told that Satan targeted the sexual natures of the man and woman in his
shame/sin scheme because it was through procreation that the man and woman were
the most god-like and that the ability to create was the characteristic of God
and man that Satan envied the most.
For us today, clothes cover our shame
for the sexual responses every normal person can have. But clothes really have
no significant value in that. To the contrary, we all can acknowledge that sexual
responses are often stimulated by
clothing. Moreover, nowhere in the Bible is nudity directly prohibited. What the Bible deals with is
the individual’s response to
nakedness. So, I think we should take nudity as bad or evil in itself out of
the moral equation. It could, in fact, be a force for morality.
As it is, for us in America, being
naked is associated with two basic spheres: hygienic functions and sexual
activity. But if we could be naked
for other reasons, such as sunbathing, sports, exercising, even just relaxing, wouldn’t
the singular association of nakedness with sexuality be altered?
Sociological studies of ethnic groups
in which nudity is common demonstrate that there is no inchoate cause-and-effect
relationship between being naked and being sexual. From a standpoint of
scientific psychology, the sexual connotation of nudity is a learned sexual fetish, not an innate human characteristic. For social
nudists, nudity is divorced from sexuality. In fact, studies suggest that
social nudists actually have higher moral values than the general population, that
nudist families are more stable than the average, and that children raised in
nudist lifestyles are seen to develop far fewer sexual hang-ups and aberrations
than those studied in clothed control groups. Parsing sexually deviant
behavior, it is seen to have significant components of exhibitionism and
voyeurism and, happily, these elements are largely lost among totally nude groups of people.
Being naked should downplay
concerns for our individual body appearances, but I think it can also encourage
appropriate attention to diet, exercise, and other healthy lifestyle
considerations for physical improvement. I suggest that a step toward better total
health might be to accept public non-sexual nudity in a matter-of- fact way.
Certainly no one could be harmed by it. When we realize that the coverings we
have placed on our bodies have nothing to do with desirable moral attributes,
the way is open to the idea that other psychological envelopes, attitudes, and
opinions may also be undesirable, deterring us from otherwise
attainable health and well-being.
Psychological shells, like clothing, can protect but they can also isolate. Therefore, in embracing healthy nakedness,
let us truly be naked, inwardly and outwardly.
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