In common with other sexual perversions, exhibitionism is taking on every characteristic of an ideological crusade. And in common with everything rotten about modernity, the crusade has an accelerator built in.
Things have got much worse than they were four years ago, when I wrote this:
“First a disclaimer: I love naked women’s bodies. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent in their presence, and I cherish every one, especially those I can remember.
“Moreover, at the risk of enraging my more devout friends, I even enjoy female nudity vicariously, by looking without touching.
“Photographs of naked women don’t upset me, quite the opposite. And I even like explicit sex scenes in films, provided they’re gratuitous and pursue no artistic ends whatsoever.
“Having thus established my dissipated, tasteless and probably misogynistic credentials in three paragraphs of self-lacerating disclaimers, I now feel it’s safe to say what it is I dislike, nay despise.
“That’s nudity practised for a cause and thus pretending to be something it isn’t (virtue), while concealing what it actually is: exhibitionism covering itself with an ideological fig leaf.
“What the cause is doesn’t really matter: no good one can be promoted by parading flesh in the buff. And even if the cause starts out as good, it’ll be compromised by the striptease.
“Actually, the original Calendar Girls dropped their kit in 1999 allegedly to support a worthy cause, Leukaemia Research. Yet, even though a film was made about them, with Helen Mirren starring, they only succeeded in trivialising that deadly disease.
“Miss Mirren, incidentally, has struggled to keep her clothes on throughout her distinguished career. Even now, in her dotage, she likes to parade her superannuated flesh at every opportunity, making one suspect that such exposure is an aim in itself.
“Anyway, the idea caught on, and exhibitionism for commercial or ideological causes became a standard technique. Actually, Pirelli tyres have always been promoted that way, which is tasteless but otherwise unobjectionable.
“Famous actresses stripping for the anti-fur campaign, on the other hand, was not only tasteless but also actively revolting.
“Various naked celebrities would drag their fur coats behind them, each leaving trails of blood. ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur,’ was the line.
“Ladies, this side of puerile, onanistic fantasies, there’s usually something worn between one’s skin and an overcoat. Hence the choice didn’t have to be as stark as that, as it were. It’s possible to shed a fur coat and still sport, say, a jumper and a skirt for decorum’s sake.
“Yet the ‘celebs’ jumped at the chance to parade what the Americans call T & A. Exhibitionism is as much of a compulsion as is drug addiction.”
However, as the recent Mori poll confirms, exhibitionism doesn’t just have to function in support of various ideological causes. It can act as an ideological cause all on its own.
The poll shows that almost half of young adults in the UK now identify as naturists. Some merely like skinny-dipping and nude sunbathing, others frequent nudist beaches, clubs and resorts.
Talking to The Guardian, Dr Mark Bass, President of British Naturism, said: “It turns out there’s a huge, hidden enthusiasm for nude recreation. Attitudes to nudity are changing with the taboos and stigma being eroded.
“Modern society is weighed down by a body confidence crisis and more and more people are discovering the benefits that nudity brings to mental, emotional and physical health by allowing us to reclaim ownership of our identities.”
This shows what a tiny step separates starkers from barkers. For, rather than being healthy, the desire to parade one’s nudity in public is well-documented in medical books on sexual pathology.
The stigma and taboos that Dr Bass finds objectionable go back rather a long time, as documented in a formerly popular book: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”
Since Adam and Eve rebelled against God, people who belong to the civilisation based in part on that story cover their bodies to keep them away from prying eyes.
Conversely, people who belong to other civilisations, especially those enjoying sunnier climes, ignore such conventions. They happily pose nude for National Geographic, while wisely refraining from talking to The Guardian.
Those unsophisticated tribesmen are sufficiently secure in their identity not to feel they have to assert it by parading their genitalia. They go naked simply because that’s how they are. Actually, I doubt they bother about identity politics at all.
Not so Dr Bass, along with Guardian readers and writers. But I am confused.
Surely, by exposing their primary sex characteristics, people reinforce binary identification, thereby upholding those same taboos and stigmas that Dr Bass finds oh-so-yesterday. If nudity is tantamount to “reclaiming ownership of our identities”, we have a conflict.
Normal, civilised people don’t have a problem that can be solved by dropping their underwear. Modern Western savages may have such problems, but then they also pray at the altar of 70-odd sexes, which they eccentrically call genders.
Yet every time I’ve seen naked people, they displayed the characteristics of only one of two sexes, or genders if you’d rather. Wouldn’t the cause of modernity be better served then by them preserving what for millennia has been regarded as decency? Just to keep us guessing?
I rejoice every time I see a clash of modern pieties. Yet this time my triumphant joy is marred by sadness and fear. If nearly half of young Britons are eager to “erode” the “stigmas and taboos” of our civilisation and revert to times prehistoric, where will they stop?
Incest? Human sacrifice? Culling every first-born male child? More important, why would they ever stop at anything, if they get their marching orders from the likes of Dr Bass?
The cult of LGBT+ requires us to support everything the “+” could possibly stand for, with the obvious exception of anything that might have been approved of in the bad old days before Year Zero. Anything goes, as long as people like you and me disapprove of it. It’s like the “Counter-Culture” of San Francisco in the 1960s, except that the police nowadays enforce it instead of shooting at it.
I expect consensual incest, consensual human sacrifice and consensual cannibalism to be legalised in “civilised” countries within twenty years, and disapproval of such practices to be criminalised within forty. (The culling of children whose only fault is that they’re not born yet is already legal, and legalised infanticide is sure to follow.)
I have no children. If I did, I’d probably be so furious thinking about the world they’d have to live in that I’d be unable to type.
I find it interesting that Western Whites in general are at the forefront of this distasteful trend to go naked- as they are with all the most perverted modern fashions. Even when they’re not disrobing completely, one finds the amount of exposed flesh to be far greater in white men and women, weather permitting, than among other races in the West. I wonder at times if in addition to expressing their savagery, this is not an unconscious ‘white skin’ exhibitionism and pride introduced through the back door.
As with most polls , this one is probably inaccurate. Young people today are narcissistic attention seekers. I would suspect that vast numbers of those responding that they are naturists and attend nude resorts are lying and just want to show the pollster they are cool. I believe such responses are called “social desirability bias”. In addition to the respondents answering somewhat untruthfully, there are many ways for the pollster to purposely skew poll results, short of outright lying about them (which does happen). The wording of the questions, the order they are asked, and the setting can all affect responses. If half of all “young adults” (here I wonder if that term was defined in the poll results) are true naturists, surely it would be obvious to the general public. Certainly fewer and fewer of them have any taste or sense of decorum, and young ladies wear ever smaller shirts and skirts, but few of them are walking the streets naked.
And I do find hilarious the idea of the naked body dispelling the idiotic idea that there are 70 sexes. Line up now, and allow me to catalog the differences!
I don’t know which is worse: them actually being naturists, or lying they are because they think that’s cool. I think the age group in question was 16 to 24.
I just remembered the scenes at the nudist colony (is that the right phrase – or nature camp?) in “A Shot in the Dark.” The problem with such venues is that none of the patrons look like Miss Elke Sommer – most look more like me or my grandmother. No thank you!
Elke Sommer? You are aging yourself — and me, for knowing exactly whom you mean.
I was just 49 days old when “A Shot in the Dark” hit theaters. My parents refused to take me. I saw it on television when I was young – but old enough to appreciate Miss Sommer.