Nudity
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Well... Well...

We have to go... Oh my god. That was the most uncomfortable experience I've ever had. I've never been so excited to put my clothes back on. This is a story about nudity. Okay, wait, wait. So, what did we just do? What just happened? Just to recap.

We just went to a naked comedy show and you tricked me into getting naked. I did not trick you. I did not. I maintain that I did not trick producer Will Coley into getting naked at this clothing optional comedy show, but I definitely bullied him. This is the news section? Yeah. I thought this was optional. But it means we're doing it. I didn't know that this was going to happen when I pitched this idea to you.

Will had pitched me this story about why we wear clothes at all. And so I was like, "Oh, let's go method. Let's see what it's like to do a fairly normal thing just without clothes on." And at this naked comedy event, all the comedians are naked. Nightmare.

And all the audience members sitting in the first two rows have the option to be naked. Why do naked comedy? We tried doing it clothed and charging less and y'all didn't show up. That was the organizer, Billy. We charged more and took our clothes off and we have two sold out shows tonight. It's an expensive thing.

It's true, people were lining up around the block to pay $45 to go to this thing. Okay, okay. And even though I talked a big game to Will, when it was actually time to take off my underwear in this crowded, mostly clothed room, I kept chickening out. Okay, okay, okay. I'm so scared. It's like so scary. I'm like, I'm going to take it off now. Dear listener, I did not. Are you waiting on me? Or what are you waiting on? I'm scared. Oh, see, I thought you were getting...

No, no. I'm scared. Yeah. Let me reiterate that no one was forcing me to do this. I was imposing this on myself and on Will. And when we finally summoned the courage to get naked, it was like not a liberating experience. When does the show start? I know, it feels like forever. Why didn't we bring dreams? We should have brought... I didn't. I really needed dreams. This is like a bad dream. I'm living in like a circle of hell. Love seeing some awesome nudie in the first two rows. Give it up for them, huh?

- The whole body is blushing. - Okay, it's hard to hear that, but Will hit the nail on the head. He said, "I feel like my whole body is blushing," which is exactly how I felt. Like, I felt warm all over. - I feel physically ill. No, no.

I felt my personal space rapidly expand. Like, I did not want my knee to brush against Will's knee. In fact, as soon as we both got naked, we, like, shimmied away from each other and only stared straight ahead. I know that was really funny because we were, like, we were sitting there, like, right next to each other, like, talking to each other. And as soon as we took our clothes off, we were just, like, straight ahead. It was just so uncomfortable.

Okay, so may I just say, this is not my first rodeo. Like, I've been in naked situations. I even worked as a figure model in college. Like, I've been naked in front of strangers before. Nudity is not new to me. And it's not new for Will. I've been in nude situations, you know, socially nude, whatever. Yeah, so can you tell me a little bit about how this began for you? Well, friends of ours were hosting like a weekly...

yoga class, mainly for gay men, naked. And then it's like a group of friends. They've gotten to know each other. You know, it's non-sexual, so it's kind of not quite a Bible study, but it's sort of like a thing to see people, you know? But it must matter that it's naked. Like, you could do...

Anything with a group of friends, does it make you feel more bonded or something? Welcome everybody. If you will just take a comfortable seat. I view it just as community building, honestly. A community of mostly gay men who wish to have some social time together when they can be in the nude. I have a clip from one of the teachers who says that he sees a level of connection that doesn't happen in other classes.

Lift up through the top of your head. There's something about the clothes being gone that also sheds a whole bunch of other mental, emotional walls. Guys who really started out as shyer or more nervous once the clothes came off and we just did a class and they realized that they were not the only person sweating and huffing and puffing and were just kind of all...

humans in this together doing this wacky, weird thing. They really just blossom. You know, it's also a social thing too, like people bring food and afterwards... Naked? Yeah, and talk. I mean, I have to ask because the only time that I see people naked in life, like walking around, is in the Castro. Like, why is this a gay thing?

You know, it's funny. I was thinking about that. I don't know. It's something about self-acceptance, I think, because it's like you're willing to be that vulnerable or uncomfortable in front of other guys who have had that similar experience kind of thing. I don't know.

And I also do think it's important context for the naked comedy show and why we felt uncomfortable because you're not like, oh my God, naked people. Like, you spend time around naked people. Yeah, I guess in some ways I thought I wouldn't be weirded out by it, but I was in a way. I don't know why. It was this, I'm still not sure why that was. We're not prudes. Right.

I don't know why. Clearly there was something else happening. The discomfort is not just about clothes or lack of clothes. And that's the thing that we should say is like, I thought the comedy was quite good. It was like a good night of comedy. Yeah, yeah. If I wasn't so uncomfortable. Yeah, no, it's true. So we made a whole show about it to get to the root of why we wear clothes at all and what makes us so frightened to take them off.

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So why were Will Coley and I, two people who are more or less comfortable with nudity, suddenly so shy? Well, you know what, I even said it that night. I think it was something about that we didn't really understand the rules. I mean, they kind of told us. I just have a few general ground rules for the night. Re-listening to the tape, they do say the rules, and the rules are... First of all, absolutely no phone.

No phones. Yeah, no phones, no heckling. And don't spill your drinks. You're going to be mindful of your drinks. Oh, okay. But there were no codes of conduct stated for us, the audience, about how to interact with each other, which I suddenly...

Badly needed. Like, I didn't know how to comport myself or how to interpret anybody else's actions because what was appropriate and what wasn't was suddenly totally different without clothes on. You know, like there was those guys, those single guys who came in and sat down with their beer. Multiple men made comments to me that probably

that probably wouldn't have offended me if I were wearing clothes. They would have been relatively innocuous. But without clothes on, suddenly it felt like invasive. Same with another couple's PDA. The couple in front of us started getting all touchy-feely kind of thing. And then there was that guy that came in late. He made this whole production of taking his clothes off, you know, to make sure we all witnessed. And it was this kind of just, not antisocial, but just this kind of being weird. When the clothes came off,

It felt like the social contract was shattered. Or maybe that a different social contract was being made. It was a new, closed-list society. Which I think still needs rules, even if they like to insist that they don't have a lot of rules. Even though they say, there's no rules, because they're supposed to be so easy-peasy about everything, because this is all natural. I found many rules. Yeah.

My name is Barbara Gornicka, or Gornicka as they call me here. I'm a sociologist in University College Dublin. Barbara was also talking about like she had this experience about wanting to explore nudity and what it meant. I was a young sociologist who wanted to go out there and do proper fieldwork like it used to be done.

immersive, all in. And boy, did I immerse. She joined a nude swimming club, which was co-ed. They had like lots of rules, like no single man could come and all this kind of stuff. And then she talked about going to that party where everyone had their own personal towel. If you're visiting somebody else's house, you don't want to

put your bum on somebody else's sofa. It was actually an interesting dance because even when you were getting up people would like without forgetting they would just immediately grab their towel and move move away. So it became quite it was like a habit that they did. I didn't question that. It's something you do that clearly they had to learn. A culture without clothes is still a culture. One that has its own silently agreed upon codes of conduct.

And that's what Elias called habitus, which is that innate part of our behaviors and that we do not question. She was talking about Norbert Elias. I guess he came up with the first nature, right? So Norbert Elias was a Jewish German sociologist who actually just by chance happened to hail from the same part of Germany.

of Poland where I'm from, which was German at the time. Norbert Elias had to flee from Nazi Germany to the UK, and so he became fascinated by the little changes that occur from one culture to another. He looked at importance of micro sociology instead of looking just as kind of large processes, our laws, our governments and markets and stuff like that. He said, OK, what about interactions between human beings?

what is impacting how we behave. Elias spent a lot of time studying manners, customs, little forms of interaction. He looked at the most mundane and everyday things about our human social lives, whether it's using fork or the setup of our houses. And he used those to actually create this massive complex theory.

to help us understand how we developed. Developed, not necessarily improved. He uses the word social development. He never uses social evolution. And Elias called this development process, how a group of people learns to interact with each other, the civilizing process, which is a terrible name for what Elias was trying to describe.

There's a lot of misunderstanding surrounding civilizing process. Civilization, civilizing someone, it already comes with this very negative connotation of we are superior to someone and we are going to teach you our ways or it's about progress. Elias never meant it that way. Because he's not really saying civilizing like in this sort of like

Eurocentric civilization thing, but civilizing in the sense of almost like socializing into a human society. Like it's like this process of turning a child into a member of the human community. Yeah. It's like creating a culture like that. Even the idea that the nudists carry a little bit of a

little towel with them is part of the civilizing culture for them. Yeah, there's no one civilizing process. That's another thing. Okay, so he says that each society has its own civilizing process. He focused on the Western Europe because that's all he had access to. And so Elias coined the idea of first nature. The first nature being like your animalistic part of being a mammal, all the urges and

bodily processes that come from being an animal. In Elias's observation, Western Europe saw the body as something that must be tamed, something that is first nature and therefore embarrassing. And so one must cultivate second nature.

He said, first nature is, let's say it's an animal. You're born, you have your first nature, but it doesn't last because the minute you are born, you're socialized into your society. You're socialized by your family. What's okay, what's not okay. It starts very simple and then it gets more complex as you grow up. So you almost immediately turn into, go into the second nature. You are trained to

on a psychic level, by your parents, who do not always realize that this is just about the use of fork and knife. This is about bodily proximity, you know, whether it's not okay to take your pants off and, you know, touch your willy in public in the middle of a class. It's no, no, no.

And this is the fascinating part to me. Social behavior gets so ingrained that the body can learn how to regulate itself in society. It became innate. Blushing is a clear example of how something that we consider very physiological and biological is actually very much connected to our social rules. Because Barbara talks about how shame is a physical reaction.

You know, you blush, as you said, you felt like your whole body was blushing. But you blush, but it's from learned behavior. You know what I mean? You get a physical reaction to social rules. We blush when we transgress the social rules. I blushed when someone catches me on a lie or, I don't know, somebody pays me a compliment or something like that. This is sounding like therapy now. But anyway...

Almost every single person I talked to brought up Adam and Eve. We're talking about Adam and Eve, yes. This story tells us that shame happened and so they put on leaves. But really, you know, look at evolution. It was the other way around. Like clothes invented shame. Shame didn't invent clothes. And it's this idea that shame is a social regulator.

You know, that we are almost internally monitored now by what is considered correct and what isn't. And then the galaxy brain moment is that once you get so well behaved, so proper, so accustomed to your second nature that your body can blush when you make a faux pas...

this phenomenon happens where you are then permitted to actually transgress back to first nature. After such a long process of informalization, our societies, the Western societies, start to be more permissive because we could allow it now. This idea that you're able to

be in situations where first nature would take over but it doesn't. And you know like if we were animals, you know how like dogs they just they want to eat everything that they can. Like we're able to control that because you're civilized enough and can control yourself. It's a bit like drinking alcohol in public. We go, well we the Irish, we go to the pub and everybody really knows their limits but you will always push it. Like

If I have another one, I'll get very messy. I might throw up and that's going to be transgression. But still, you play with the idea of it and it's fun. Why we do sports, we enjoy them because it's a form of release that we used to have from violence without actually transgressing. So it's sort of like we're able to control that. And what was the other one she talked about? Strip clubs. Yeah.

Yeah. Kind of the way we look at striptease and the whole titillation because they get to almost break certain norms. Yeah, like you're right up against it, but you're able to control yourself in a way. It's interesting though, especially when you think of the example of a strip club is like how much does our animal nature need to be regulated? Yeah. You know, do we need to have laws that say don't take your clothes off?

I interviewed this burlesque performer named Fancy Feast. My name is Fancy Feast. I'm going to catch my breath for a moment. And she was telling me about how she has to change her routine in different states. In New York, we have a pretty open ability to be fairly nude on stage. But oftentimes, like at bars, you can't be fully topless or fully bottomless if there's alcohol being sold. I mean, if you remember that the comedy club was BYOB.

Because there are all these rules about like, oh, can we trust people to mix? Well, strip clubs in New York, you can't have alcohol. Or is it in California? There's some states where you can't have alcohol in a strip club. But a lot of places that have alcohol licenses also have statutes for what you can and can't show.

You know, burlesque laws didn't allow drinking with topless dancing because they just were like, people won't be able to control themselves. And so there would be police raids of burlesque houses and strip clubs in the 40s, 50s, 60s.

And performers were required to wear something that would clearly indicate that it wasn't nipples. That's where the pasty came from. So then performers started creating pasties made of the same material as their costumes. Because it's like, if we have to do this, then we may as well feature it and flatter it with faceted rhinestones or with tassels that twirl. And it now calls more attention to the breasts than ever before. What I really appreciate

is the way that strippers of yore have harnessed this thing that was enforced on them that was a symbol of shame or policing or surveillance and turned it into something that itself was salacious.

But avoiding nudity laws can sometimes go way beyond pasties. Like regulations can change from state to state and county to county. And as Fancy Feast has found out, these laws can sometimes more or less design your outfit for you. Yes. So I performed in Tennessee and Tennessee has rules that that whole under boob area has to be covered as well as an inch and a half on either side of your butt crack and then an inch and a half

underneath, like on top of the cleft of the buttock. What? You can't see any folds of the body. Fancy was telling me if she performs in Tennessee and her pasty falls off, she gets fined like $1,000. And so the onus is on this tiny piece of fabric to hold the weight of all of this cultural expectation.

Oh, and then the interesting thing was when I met up with Fancy later, I'd just seen her multiple times on stage. And then we were alone and she taught me how to make pasties. And she was like putting them on under her shirt, like suddenly so shy. May I just ask? Yes. Why did you bashfully put it on under a shirt?

I don't know. You go to the tit show and then tits are out and that's fine. Right. But we're just chilling in my living room having tea. So I think I'm being a little more coy about it. It's so interesting. And it made me think of you. I was like, what is this? Like, what makes it totally okay in some context? And then...

Totally weird and in others. I don't know Is it the sort of thing because I was trying to make the connection to when we went to the comedy night? You know like I appreciated the fact that the audience could be naked But I think the fact that there wasn't a requirement that everyone be naked that kind of made it just like voyeuristic or just I don't know odd to me which in a funny way is like how Alan Alan Raken say how do you say he's raking racking? My name's Alan rations

I'm an actor. He was in L.A. Law. Did you know that? Oh, no, I didn't. Yeah, he was like one of the lawyers in L.A. Law. But today, we're talking about O Calcutta. That one thing. What is O Calcutta? The opening song has a nice dark feeling to it, but it's a quiet O Calcutta.

I always thought it was a weird title. It's supposed to be a play on a French word saying you have a nice ass. Really? Yeah, because that whole Broadway show is predicated on the idea that the performers are naked and the audience is clothed. We were all about ooh, the nudity. That was what I was interested in hearing from him because you're putting yourself on display. My, this was just like the first time

kind of thing. We can put something nude and sexual on the stage. It was like one of these plays from back in the 70s where people were completely naked on stage. One of? Yeah, because there was hair, but there was, apparently that was like one scene. But this show was, people were naked throughout the entire thing. I hear all the guys in this show are gay.

It's a lot of crap just to see everybody take their clothes off.

You know, as one of the women in the cast said, you know, Alan, you're not the most likely person for doing something like this. Because I'm from Boston. I'm kind of on the conservative side. It was uncomfortable for me. But the thing that really stood out was we asked him, would it have been easier if the audience was naked? And he was like, no.

Not at all. Oh, that would have been such a breach. It wouldn't have felt like solidarity. It wouldn't have made you more comfortable if everyone was not. Are you kidding? He talked about how the cast had really spent a lot of time getting to know each other and this whole process. Exercises, group exercises. How do you free people and create a group so that they are bonded? The cast of O Calcutta over the weeks and weeks of rehearsal said,

basically went through their own civilizing process. They built up their own distinct culture of nudity. I mean, first we started with the clothes, like normal people, and then we worked toward putting these robes on

And so that was a lot of the rehearsal. Just being silly and horsing around with robes on. Making bizarre sounds or anything you want to, moving any way you want to. And the idea is just to free you up so that you're not embarrassed. And then there was the big day where one,

two, three. And like they in college, they throw their hats in the air. Well, we took the robes off and threw them in the air. And there we were finally. So they had kind of bonded as a group. So there was this familiarity that they were doing this and

It didn't matter what the people out there were thinking kind of thing. I mean, the first night or maybe two, the police were in the back of the theater because if there was any kind of genital to genital touching, they were going to shut us down. But they didn't shut them down. And Alan was in the show for a year and a half. There was a lot of good things about it, but there was a certain discomfort level about it as well. Both things can exist simultaneously, you know.

But there is that fact that you're going to work, you're taking your clothes off, it's the everyday thing. And you didn't get the best reviews for this whole production. You're naked, you're vulnerable, you're with these people a long time, but you don't necessarily have...

a satisfying, intimate, personal relationship with them. You have a professional relationship with them, and it's not like you're best friends. So there's a certain block of not being able to express yourself fully as you do in some other arenas. You remember Alan was talking about this, about how there was that like wall, even in this tight-knit group, that they like couldn't

really get that close because they had no clothes on. Yeah. You can only go so far. There's also a certain amount of loneliness

For me. And so you think if you were all wearing clothes, you'd be able to... It would be different. But I have no idea how it would be different. Because you wouldn't have had that deep bond if that wasn't the case, you know? No, that's really interesting, though. Because you also, you know, when everyone's not wearing clothes, you can't interact in the same way. Like, it's harder to actually just touch each other. Like, I feel more free to touch you because we're both wearing clothes. Right. And do you think that's also part of the distance? I do. I do. There's a different kind of...

Yes. Like do people hug? Like do people touch? Like at yoga and stuff? Yeah, people hug, yeah. But it's also kind of like that hug which is like your shoulders, you know, where you kind of like bend like that, you know? Like that's a very particular kind of naked hug. And maybe that's what it is too because the yoga classes and things like that, there's like a...

a familiarity and you get to know people in a way. But when we went to the comedy night, we just had no connection to anybody there. Although, but then that doesn't explain why spas feel okay. Yeah, that's true. And I was not like a nudie. It was funny because I talked to this friend of mine, Manona, who's Taiwanese American, and she didn't grow up going to spas, but she went to one of the Korean spas in LA and then here in New York. That was my first experience of seeing a lot of naked Asian women.

which I realized was like the first time in my life I'd ever seen naked women who looked like my family members at all different ages. And I would recognize, oh, there's my tummy, or that's my mom's tummy, or that's what my grandmother looked like when she was naked. Oh, my God. And my mind was really blown, but it also was really...

Sort of comforting imagining all my foremothers being the ones in the pools that were naked and they were totally unselfconscious. But you hadn't grown up going to like spas or anything like that? No, never. Never. So how did you know what to do when you got there? Did people tell you what the rules were? Or you just kind of observed or what? Yeah, it's not complicated to figure out. Because I was like asking them questions about rules. Like how do you know where you're supposed to be naked and where you're not?

And they're like, well, we just kind of know, you know, and you could observe what people were doing, but you had this sense of where you were supposed to be. You know, like the only thing they said, what the rules were, where you were supposed to be naked, you had to be naked kind of thing.

But it's interesting because I feel like it goes back to the idea of the civilizing process, you know? Like there's the culture, there's spa culture and people are like learning how to be in the spa. And then even with Oh Calcutta, they developed a cast culture, you know? They figured out their rules together. And perhaps the comedy night was just too brief for us to like understand how to be. I don't know.

I mean, it was disappointing that we were so weirded out by it. So why were we so weirded out by it? Like, how did Will and I in our civilizations get so accustomed to wearing clothes that we developed all of these hangups? I mean, that's been a little bit of my worry about this whole project is sort of like some people be like, duh. Yeah, you wear clothes to stay warm. And then, of course, we're going to feel embarrassed when we take our clothes kind of thing. I mean, it's true and it's not true.

You're right. The answer is like for warmth. But that's just the beginning of it. Can you explain, like, how do clothes work? That's something we take for granted, Avery, is that clothes keep us warm. But the key to clothing is not the material itself. So I talked to this

Australian author, Dr. Ian Gilligan, who wrote this book about clothing and keeping warm. That book is published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. It's entitled Climate, Clothing and Agriculture in Prehistory.

So the way clothes work is that they trap body heat. The material traps air close to the surface of the skin. And what it does is slow down the loss of heat from the body's surface. When we're naked, the body heat is just lost from the skin's surface. So the interesting thing to really think about is the question of, like, well, we need it to keep warm. But then it's like, well, why do we need to keep warm? Like, why don't we have fur? So in that sense...

As far as mammals go, there's like, okay, elephants don't have fur.

But they're huge. You know, they have enough body mass to stay warm. We are very poorly adapted to cold environments, even as a mammal, because shivering is a desperate attempt to generate more body heat, literally by movement. Whereas animals that are species that are better adapted to the cold don't shiver. It's a sign of failure. And the question is, why don't we heat?

have hair. There's various theories as to why. One of them is because we're bipedal. Our backs don't face the sun and so we don't need as much protection from it and we have only retained hair where the sun hits. We're standing upright

which is why we still have head hair. So that's why we have head hair, even though we are generally denuded or naked. But my favorite answer, and Dr. Gilligan's favorite answer also, is that we are basically babies. We have developed over time something called neoteny, where we have extended our lives, like we live longer together.

by slowing our own growth. By slowing down brain development, our period where we're most open to learning is extended. And part of that is so we live longer, but also part of that is because we keep learning. Like...

our brain stays plastic for longer. So we're able to actually become more social because our brains remain more childlike. We're more able to learn as the brain ages. And if you look at the way we actually look like, if you look at a baby monkey, we look like baby monkeys. So hominins tend to retain more childlike features, even as adults. We have like bigger eyes. We're naked. We've basically like baby-ized babies.

We are biologically childlike. And one of those childlike features is less body hair. So yes, I think there's some truth in that. So there are all these interesting reasons for like why we don't have fur. And then it leads to the question of why we started making clothes. It's hard to trace when people started wearing clothes because most of it obviously...

disintegrates and we don't have it. But the way they found how old clothing is, is by looking at lice. When head lice branched off into body lice. That gives us a figure.

that split genetic split of clothing lice from head lice for when clothing was first used on a regular basis. Modern clothing lice are around 80,000 years old so you could say that's how long clothing has been worn on a frequent daily basis. But Dr. Gilligan thinks that clothing was worn infrequently for even longer. It may well be the case as I think it was that over

hundreds of thousands of years and going back more than a million years, different hominin species probably did adopt clothing at different times, but it never got to the point where clothing became a social necessity. Before clothes were worn every day for reasons of shame or modesty or fashion, clothing was just a tool, you know, like we don't have fur and we needed it. There are periods where our ancestors did not need to wear clothing, but depending upon what part of the world they were living in or even what part of Africa,

They would have needed clothes at some time. And arguably, Dr. Gilligan says, I mean, this is what helped us beat out the Neanderthals, was that we could conquer...

the world and go to colder climates, especially once we developed like a needle and thread. That's what's allowed Homo sapiens to remain in Eurasia during the coldest part of the last age, around 20,000 years ago. That's where we have become not biologically, but technologically adapted to living in colder environments. So Dr. Gilligan has this thesis. It's not like widely spread, but it's his thesis. And I kind of buy it.

that clothing created agriculture. If agriculture was a good idea as a way of getting food, and I don't think compared to hunting and gathering, it was a good idea in the early stages. But if it was, it should have started in many parts of the world much earlier than it did, but it didn't.

Like when you think about it, hunting and gathering was a really efficient lifestyle for what you needed. And if you did it well, it meant you only did it for like a few hours a day rather than farming, which is so laborious. Like why would you need that? That agriculture isn't just about food.

We tend to define it as food production, but it's not just about food. The other major resource produced by agriculture are textile fibers for clothing. And he basically says, like, look at the first domesticated animals. They were sheep. And they were producing wool. And if you want to get meat, you have to kill the animal. Whereas the point about domesticating animals is that

humans are investing in keeping animals alive. Look at the first domesticated cereals. They were grasses. Cereals are basically grass. That's what they're grasses. And what do sheep eat? It was all about maintaining animals so that you could have garments that accommodated a wider variety of climates. Because once humans moved to

colder climates and got so used to wearing clothes they wanted to wear linens, woolens for things that were not just extreme cold. So you've got this well-documented transition in clothing material from hides and furs to textiles. It's a way of being able to keep on wearing clothes in warm and generally more humid environments. They developed a farming agricultural lifestyle

which becomes the basis of, I don't want to say the civilizing process, but a civilizing process was kind of like rooted in clothing. But in other parts of the world, people didn't need to keep on wearing clothes. So they didn't need textiles. They didn't need agriculture. And also because it was so hand in hand with agriculture, there's this idea that like people who don't wear clothes, people who live as hunter gatherers, they're not using the land. Right.

They haven't cultivated it. They don't need it. And so having no clothes on became a way to represent such peoples as Native Americans, Native Canadians, and so on and so on. And that's where you start getting into what we talked about with Philippa, the idea of the naked savage. So clothing itself is important.

and I don't need to tell you that, who needs to teach their grandmother to suck eggs, right? But not having clothing also then becomes, I think, a really important kind of feature, a kind of way of distinguishing between those who are civilized and those who are not civilized. May I ask you to introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Philippa Levine. I used to teach at the University of Texas at Austin, and I very happily retired at the end of August. I mean, you said that

in trying to figure out how to process the concept of nudity that really the most viable lens is through colonialism. Yeah, for the later period certainly. Once Europeans start to travel and start to get this idea of colonizing other parts of the world,

Then I think what happens is that the lack of clothes, the absence of clothes becomes a way to make a distinction of the native, the person who isn't us. We're civilized and we dress. Which you could totally flip on its head, right? You could say that we developed clothes because we're unfit and physically weak and can't live in our environment. And people who don't have to wear clothes are like the fittest for their environment. But that's not how the Europeans interpreted it.

Essentially, white people wear clothes, but that person walks around naked. And of course, in fact, most people don't, anywhere. It should be said, it's not that people didn't wear clothes. I mean, they wore clothes. It just wasn't, you know, wovens. It wasn't cotton. When the British arrive in New Zealand, the Maori would not have seen themselves as naked in the way that the Europeans define it. They would have seen themselves as fully realized because their tattoos were there.

The British saw them without cloth and thus saw them as naked. So there's different definitions of what constitutes the naked, right? And for the Europeans, cloth was important and not just any old cloth. So when missionaries get to the Pacific, they're not happy with a bark cloth, which is the local cloth that is used. Nope, they have to bring in cotton. They're like, oh, grass skirts don't count. Right.

It's like, yeah, these people were suited to where they were and they were living their lives, but they weren't part of a global capitalistic system. And they weren't Christian. If you then adopt the Christian position, fundamentally, it's about shame, right? Adam and Eve, what happens to Adam and Eve? They learn shame after they bite the apple, right? If you're within that Christian tradition, then to be without shame means you're going to hell.

You're going to hell, you're a heathen. That simple. So the missionaries are looking to save souls. And so there is this forcing of people into clothing. That changes how people behave. It changes how people feel about themselves. It changes how they look at other people, right? If suddenly everybody is in a different kind of clothing. Not because they want to be, but because they have been forced to be by a colonizing presence.

And shaking off that colonizing presence proved exceedingly hard. It's almost like the European civilizing process was this disease that once people were brought in contact with, they could never get rid of it. The shame and propriety persisted. And the lingering symptom was the clothing. I grew up in Sierra Leone, and in our house there was a painting, a picture of my great-grandmother, Anna Erskine. And so you could see what she's wearing.

So it's a long Victorian dress, which, you know, this notion of civilization, respectability, right? That's how my grandmother dressed. So we talked to Dr. Nimata Blyden, who's a professor at the University of Virginia. She's written a lot of books about African-Americans and Africa and their relationship. I do.

have kind of a convoluted history. So I did grow up in Sierra Leone and I have a father who was born in Sierra Leone. But anybody who's read my book can see it's more complicated than that because he has ancestors from Tennessee, from Virginia, from the Virgin Islands, because he's descended from people who had been enslaved, brought to the diaspora. And then later on, their descendants made their way back to Africa, Liberia. Interestingly enough, her

great-grandfather was one of the original settlers in Liberia. So this is a picture of him from, I think, 1851 when he was, you know, quite a young man. But he went to Liberia. He was born in the Virgin Islands, was denied admission to Rutgers, the seminary school at Rutgers. He was denied admission, and it was the 1850s.

where, if you know your history, the Fugitive Slave Act had just been passed and, you know, blacks from the North were being snatched and taken down South. And so he took the opportunity offered by the American Colonization Society, this sort of rather controversial organization, to settle in Liberia. I knew about the history of Liberia, but I always kind of thought it was sort of like, you know, freed slaves were like, "Screw this, we're starting over, we're doing our own thing."

but in many ways they weren't. It's not like they were making Wakanda. So Liberia is this initiative that comes from a white New Jersey pastor who was the founder of the American Colonization Society, who makes this argument that, well, Blacks in the United States will not ever be allowed to achieve equality. So he proposes this idea of colonizing or sending them away.

Right. So there's a mix of people who ended up in Liberia, formerly enslaved people just out of slavery, and then a lot of free Black people. Because of that, they were a threat to slave owners. So this was a way to

get them out kind of thing. You know, they would have been provided for by the American Colonization Society, which probably have given them provisions and clothes, and the men would be wearing suits and the women long dresses. And so in some way, they, the settlers of Liberia weren't starting over.

They were still part of this global system. Because in many ways, they were kind of colonizers. You know, they were, even though I don't think that they would have constructed themselves as such. They would have really seen themselves as civilizers because they were children, sons and daughters of Africa, right? Who were going to, you know, help to uplift and build this continent of their ancestors, right? This uplift, this, you know, civilizing mission, which many of the settlers went with.

In many colonial situations, the distinction of race was created and used to decide who's native and who's civilized. But in Liberia, clothes became the means to make that distinction. Clothes was very important because if you were civilized, you wore clothes.

And you wore particular kind of clothes. You had to wear Western clothing. You had to eat with a knife and fork, right? Those were markers of civilization. - And it's really important here to stress the Americanness of the Liberia example.

that these were American colonizers with distinctly American notions of nudity. You know how much of the world thinks that we're very puritanical in the United States about stuff? Well, as Philippa reminded us, we were literally founded by Puritans. We were founded by Puritans. There's a strong streak of Puritanism in the American psyche, a very strong streak. She probably shouldn't use streak in this context, unfortunately. Let me rephrase that.

I think the undercurrent of Puritanism that continues to define a lot of the American sensibility, a lot of American culture, complicates things here in a way that isn't necessarily the case in some other countries.

I give you as an example of relatively contemporary evidence that thing a few years ago when Janet Jackson's nipple was exposed for, what, a microsecond? But that Puritan streak, I think we see it in arguments around sex education in schools, the suitability of books for school libraries. Those are the areas, I think, where we see it really, really up close and personal.

There are so many times when the close-mindedness and the Puritanism of my culture feels suffocating. And I wish that I could get away from this all and shed my hang-ups and shed my cultural baggage and shed my lessons that I learned from my parents and shed the shame about my body and shed the shame about my history and shed the shame of the judgment of others and shed the shame of society by simply shedding my clothes. If only it were that easy. Nudist colonies...

are an absolute failure. Dr. Gilligan said this thing, nudism is a colossal failure because he said we are still clothed in the mind. One of my favorite books is published in 1982 called Anatomy of Nakedness.

And the author gives this description of visiting a nudist colony in southern France. It's quite a sophisticated colony. They had supermarkets and so on. But he was noting how even in supermarkets, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid touching each other. They couldn't accidentally bump into each other. So what he is saying is,

A nudist colony is a clothed society without clothes, but people are still mentally clothed. If we really, really shed everything we've learned, all these things we've talked about, about power, race, perfection, all of it, we would interact with each other totally different when we're naked. Like, we would touch each other, you know? Like, our skin would rub on skin.

A lot more. And we'd have to be like really okay with that? Even in a nudist colony, we're not comfortable being naked because what nakedness involves is skin contact between people. Imagine being on the subway in New York if people aren't wearing clothes. You're touching people with most of your body. You can't avoid that. And we're not comfortable doing that. And the question is, why not?

And we're just not because it's not how we're raised. That's not how we've been, quote unquote, civilized. So we can take off clothes as adults. It doesn't actually change anything because...

what Norbert earlier points out is that it's become internalized psychologically essentially we don't have any contact with another human being we're in contact with clothing we get attached to the fabricated material of clothing and I think that's one of the reasons why we become so materialistic we are in a sense attached to material rather than to

the naked skin of others. That's why I think we love material things. It also makes me realize how deep it is in me, you know? It's like, yeah, I've been raised in this and like, I like clothes. Of course you do, you have a podcast about it. Because our minds have become closed, then it doesn't matter and a certain amount of nudity can be tolerated.

Because those functions have become internalized into our psyche. We are clothed whether or not we wear clothes. I don't know if that sheds any light on why comedy felt so different for you. Does it? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was just because it was the first time and it was unfamiliar. I don't know. And you were kind of ambushed. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I really am.

No, you're not. You know it's make good tape. I'm so sorry, Will. I'm so genuinely sorry. But yeah, that's probably the answer. It's probably just because we were doing this for you, dear listener, instead of, you know, ourselves.

Excuse me, a naked comedy night? Well, I don't know why they're doing a naked comedy night because there's no reason to do it. You know, again, it was a great comedy show. Thank you to Billy Profito of Naked Comedy Night, Yogi Michael Guyoux and the Hamilton Heights Naked Yoga Class, and producer Will Coley. Thanks, Will.

As ever, you can always check out images and links at articlesofinterest.substack.com. I've also started posting stories that are just for the newsletter that are not going to be on the podcast. So sign up. I think some of them are really fascinating. And in the meantime, yeah, I'll have two more episodes out this year. And this is the next one. White people wear clothes and other people's

don't, or there were too many. The veiled woman is kind of a later phenomenon in terms of how the Europeans look at it. Your next article of interest is modesty. Radiotopia from PRX.