There have been some glorious celebrations of human flesh in the newspapers this week – who could resist poring over the pictures from the Victoria’s Secret catwalk show, or taking a few minutes to study Madonna’s page three shoot? Of course they’ve also spawned an awful lot of articles containing words like empowerment and objectify, so it’s refreshing to see how reasonable The Spectator has always been when it comes to nudity. Take this article from 1932, when local courts were occasionally fining people for walking to the beach in mackintoshes with nothing on underneath but their bathing suits.
“It is time some general working philosophy was evolved…there is more prurience than principle in most of the annual outcry about the inadequacy of the costumes at this or that popular resort.
A generation ago unfortunate feminine bathers disported themselves in serge skirts and stockings. Half a generation ago mixed bathing was something between a scandal and a revolution. Today it is gradually being realised that there is nothing indecent about the human body or any part of it, however adequate the reasons may be for not exposing it promiscuously to public view.
It is true that semi-nakedness can often be more disturbingly provocative than complete nakedness. It may be true that a minority of women of the sillier type deliberately don exiguous costumes for undesirable reasons and wear them in obviously inappropriate places. But the busybodies on sea-fronts who compute the total area of bare back revealed by the modern swimming costume and write to the papers about it agitate themselves without a cause, and the district councillors intent on devising vexatious restrictions in the supposed interests of a morality which bathing customs in this country do nothing to threaten are misdirecting their diverse talents deplorably.
In the baking hot summer of 1947, Harold Nicolson was grateful that British people had relaxed a bit since the last really hot summer in 1911, when everyone went round in starched collars, heavy jackets and bowler hats. Now across the country, necks and even chests were on display, and it was a great relief.
“We have learnt that it is not either immodest or effeminate to rejoice in sunlight or to strip our torsos when we cart the harvest from the fields. I have no regrets whatsoever for the foetid fusty luxury of 1911; I prefer to see our politicians in their shirt-sleeves and the grocer's boy upon his bicycle with no shirt at all. And if England is to become merry again she can best become merry out of doors.
But he did add a word of caution.
“Whatever may be the hygienic value of such exposure, I do not feel that aesthetic considerations should be wholly disregarded. The human form is not in every circumstance divine, and I should not recommend elderly men, or women who are far from slim, to indulge too overtly in shorts. … Even Homer observed that, although modesty should not be affronted by the spectacle of youthful nakedness, it was a shameful thing to witness nakedness in the old.
I do not share the theory of the nudists that complete exposure offers a relief from inhibitions. Some twenty years ago I visited a nudist colony in Thuringia; it was the only occasion on which I have consciously regretted my enquiring mind; the memory of that visit remains as a scar upon my soul. Never in my life have I witnessed such ugliness, such a divestment of human dignity, such deliberately restrained self-consciousness, such stark and affected matiness, such smirking ungainliness. The whole system, so far from releasing inhibitions, was calculated to induce a physical trauma. I regretted my visit very much indeed.
By the late 1960s, Bill Grundy felt that the weekend papers were indulging in the same kind of smirking sadism.
“We've had the Sunday Mirror going on about the Sexual Wilderness and offering no guide to the way out, nor even to the way in…The Sunday Times Colour Supplement runs a piece called 'The Evolution of the Female Form.' The cover, which I presume was designed to sell as many as Playboy or Penthouse, while remaining pure as the driven snow, shows a picture of unparalleled hideousness. It is of what I think (no one could be sure) is a young woman's torso wrapped up in a body stocking. Where her navel should be the title is superimposed. Where her nipples should be there is nothing. Nothing at all. It is as though a particularly nauseating mutilation has been carried out…But inside all is different. The account runs to twenty-nine pages and is full of what the trade calls 'floods.' Think of it (within reason) and it's there. I am sure it is a scholarly study. I can be sure because I haven't read it. I am not sure why it goes on for so long and is so fully illustrated.
…What they are going to do next? For, as a young actress said in an interview on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph last weekend, explaining why she wouldn't take her clothes off in a play directed by. Mr Charles Marowitz, 'There is now such a spate of nudity . . . it is going to become boring.' Not going to become, darling. Is.
Naked bodies may have become commonplace but that didn’t make it any easier for editors to decide which pictures to print, Paul Johnson pointed out in 1988.
“The Permissive Society has introduced not so much freedom as confusion. Take nudity, for instance. Once there were clear, if unofficial rules. No general publication could show a woman's nipples except in the case of 'natives' doing tribal dances. In the soft porn trade, complete nudity was allowable but if pubic hair was displayed the police would prosecute. What is the position now? Nobody seems to know. I understand that, for the porn mags, the police will act only if an erect male penis is shown. But for general publications all depends on the whim of the proprietor.
At the time Clare Short had brought a private bill proposing a ban of page three nudity, but even if it passed, things wouldn’t be any clearer for editors.
“The motives behind the Bill are not dislike of obscenity but opposition to female exploitation. Many of the 163 who voted for it support the Permissive Society. They have no objection to obscenity as such. They are anti-Clause 29 types who are happy to see local councils spending ratepayers' money to promote homosexuality. They would regard attempts to stop the BBC showing sex-scenes, provided they were 'artistic', as unacceptable censorship. To them, Mr Whitehouse is the enemy. They certainly hold no brief for traditional morality as such. Clare Short herself is strongly in favour of the right of women to have their unborn babies aborted. Her supporters object not so much to the nudes as to the notion of men enjoying looking at them. In effect, the Bill would ban not nude ladies as such, merely popular ones. That does not make much sense, except to a certain well-defined, left-wing puritan who objects to people enjoying anything.
Whatever your feelings about stripping off to cool down or to get in the papers, it might come in handy if you want to get treatment for a hernia or any other irritating but non life-threatening condition. Anthony Daniels encountered a naked lady in Hackney, who had used this principle to good effect.
“Not only was she mad, but she suffered also from a skin complaint which, while not dangerous, was disfiguring. Her madness, I am glad to say, remitted quickly; and while in hospital she was referred directly to a consultant dermatologist who otherwise would not have been able to see her for at least six months, such was the pressure of work.
I come now to my recommendations to all those suffering from a chronic disease amenable to treatment who do not wish to pay for it but are unwilling also to wait months or years. Go to Hackney, where the police are familiar with and even sympathetic to such behaviour, strip naked in a frequented street while screaming some absurd slogan like 'I am the Angel of the Lord' or 'Sir Geoffrey Howe for Prime Minister'. You will at once be taken to a lunatic asylum where, of course, you must immediately recover your sanity. Mention to the admitting doctor your chronic but amenable condition, and within a day or two you will have seen the appropriate specialist.
Of course, like all enterprising courses of action, this one entails risks. You may be taken for a real lunatic and subjected to various unpleasant treatments; or you may be charged with indecent exposure. But do not lose heart: after a second or third offence you will probably be sent to prison and even there, I understand, it doesn't take long for a hernia to be operated on.