by Forest, Will
“It’s embarrassing!”
“Look, I didn’t have to say anything about the hole. I just wanted to make a point. Clothes seem like our natural covering, but they aren’t. They rip and tear and get dirty and go in and out of fashion, and this is all very important for many people. Fact is: a lot of the time we don’t need clothes, we’re just conditioned to think we do.”
“Well, I’m not so sure.”
“What’s the shock? You know the basics of human anatomy, right?”
“But don’t you see? Being naked is being vulnerable. I’ve always been apprehensive about how I look, even with clothes on. Imagine being naked! I mean, I’m the kind of person who has that recurring dream about going to school naked and being laughed at! Let’s say you’re right, that maybe we can express ourselves better and understand others better in the nude. But what if you have something to hide? Everybody keeps secrets...”
“You mean like a birthmark? Or cellulite? Or that heat-of-the-moment tattoo?”
“Yeah, Professor Ross, but also psychological wounds, repressed emotions, unflattering personality quirks.”
“Ah, yes. We are all familiar with these inner afflictions. But is disrobing them worse than dressing them up, disguising them? Nobody knows what the world would be like if we could all be nude, not just physically but also emotionally.”
“I don’t know...”
“But bodily nudity is a start. And it’s a strong metaphor for spiritual nudity. We have to accept our bodies as we accept our common humanity.”
Daphne pondered this for a moment. “Do you think our bodies are just soul cages?”
Christopher swirled the rest of his drink around in the glass, watching the amber liquid catch the light. “Our bodies don’t imprison our souls. On the contrary, if it weren’t for our bodies, how could we express ourselves—our feelings, our desires, our limits and our aspirations?”
Gymnos
Angela Saucedo bent over to retrieve her notebook from her bag under the bleacher where she sat, pressing her exposed breasts against her exposed arm unaffectedly as she did so. She wanted to jot down her observations on what kinds of groups were forming in these minutes before the gymnastics class would begin, but she found it difficult to focus on her work, immersed as she was in the din of a gymnasium full of rambunctious teenagers all talking and laughing and shouting at once. There were female groups and male groups, but mostly mixed-gender groups, fluid formations of friends moving about the gym.
“Stanna!”
The command, which Angela assumed to be Swedish for ‘stop,’ had been unleashed at a group of students who stormed a trampoline without permission. The youths ignoring the shout made her recall an expression in Spanish she had learned as a child: no te hagas el sueco, don’t pretend to be a Swede, meaning don’t pretend you’re a foreigner who doesn’t understand, not even a bilingual foreigner with minimal Swedish.
Her breasts brushed lightly against the silky fabric of her favorite accessory—a rainbow-colored woven bag from her mother’s family in southern Mexico—as she pulled it onto her lap to rummage through the Swedish elementary school sex-ed videos, the pamphlets touting the country’s low rates of teen pregnancies and HIV infections, the naturist magazines with self-esteem articles, to find, finally, the notebook, and also the folder with the text of her grant-winning proposal on attitudes toward nudity in education. She read again from her summary, to remind herself of her exact research questions:
As previous studies show, open discussions of sexuality no doubt influence the Swedes’ almost complete lack of association between nudity and guilt, as do northern European traditions such as the sauna and free body culture. Do scholastic nudity policies, however, promote greater self-esteem? Especially during the pubescent years, does co-ed nudity facilitate body acceptance and self-confidence, or thwart them? And what effects are there on the students’ assimilation of the curriculum?
As she watched the groups forming near the trampolines, Angela struggled to keep her own personal bias out of her observation. She felt that it would take a highly unified program and effective teachers here at Fri Skola 5 to maintain a healthy, neutral attitude toward their changing bodies among these twelve- to fifteen-year-olds. The Fri Skola 5 experimental school in Stockholm was the first and only to initiate a clothing-free learning environment for its pupils as well as its staff, not just in physical education classes but during the entire school day.
The gym teacher ordered the students to line up in groups behind the two trampolines according to sex. After a series of instructions, the students began jumping, one at a time on each apparatus. Each student jumped three times, each time a little higher and with legs spread a little wider, trying to touch outstretched toes. Then the next student would jump. Angela assumed that strength formed the basis for the gender separation, since the boys tended to jump higher. But the distinction puzzled her. She stopped twirling her pen through her fingers long enough to write: If the boys and girls, or young men and young women, already feel accustomed to being around each other in the nude, why the sex-based lines, even right next to each other? Maybe it’s just the easiest way to make two groups of about the same size.
“Igen!,” the gym teacher barked. The students groaned, but their teacher insisted. They executed the trampoline routine again before moving on to the parallel bars. It was just a regular gym class, Angela decided, but with the essential caveat that the students and teacher and she herself were all nude, thus incarnating the original meaning of gymnos, naked.
Angela observed the rest of their rotations through the elements. The students showed interest in each other’s abilities, and cheered each other on. There did tend to be, Angela noted, greater interaction between the sexes than what she had observed at middle schools in the United States. This much was evident even though she could not discern what they were saying to each other. When the class ended, the students filed over to the open stalls in one corner of the gymnasium, showered and dried themselves, then grabbed their belongings from the benches and hurried off to their next class, still nude.
While the new hour’s gym students began filtering in, Angela wrote: The obvious range of the students’ physical development, even among students in the same class, means that some have already developed their secondary sex characteristics while others have reached only the threshold of puberty. Do these differences make them self-conscious about their bodies? I need to conduct some student interviews. Their spoken answers can supplement the results from the written surveys they’ve already completed. Then she set her things on the bleacher and stood up to stretch into a few yoga poses, pondering all the while how to scrape together some funds from her grant account to pay for twenty hours of Swedish to English oral interpretation during her final week in Stockholm.
Mind-Body Problem
On a particularly dull day at the office, while preparing his class on Descartes for the Introduction to Philosophy course, Christopher became fed up with all that storied business about the separation of mind and body, which seemed to him more like nonsense each time he taught it. He thought: When I feel a deep creative idea, for example, or true artistic expression, it surges in me as a whole-body experience, such as the feeling that possesses me, in my moments of greatest creativity, that I’ve been slung toward the sky, spiraling nude through a spectrum of colors that I feel coursing like a river all around me.
The recollection of this feeling only deepened his frustration with clothes, so he conceived then and there the irrepressible urge to design and pin onto the back of his pants, over his buttocks, a sign something like a bumper sticker reading I’D RATHER BE NAKED. The suit jacket he was wearing hung just low enough to cover the sign, so that he could choose to display the motto by removing his jacket.
He planned on taking the jacket off during his next class, but he got nervous. What a paradox, he thought, standing in front of his students in their rows of desks: I want to take these clothes off, and the easiest
thing to remove would be this jacket. In fact, I’m starting to get uncomfortably warm. But because I pinned on that sign about nudity, which I now regret doing, I can’t even remove the jacket. The rear end motto escaped him as he continued to lead the students in discussion of Descartes’ main ideas, and he didn’t take his jacket off until he had strolled back down the hall from the classroom to the office suite.
Roberta Williams, the philosophy department’s administrative assistant, looked up as he walked past her desk. She raised an eyebrow, but not high enough to betray her long cultivation of the tolerance needed for dealing with the eccentricities of university professors. “Christopher, why is that on your pants?”
“What? Oh, I forgot it was still there! I had it on for class…to illustrate a philosophical point.”
“Ouch,” said Roberta, her eyes smarting. “I hope it wasn’t a sharp one.”
“Well, no…I guess it wasn’t,” Christopher laughed. “The point was…that half-assed attempts at communication are no good.”
“Of course not. It’s gotta be the whole ass or nothing,” Roberta said with a wink. Her deep brown face aglow with the satisfaction of sparring successfully with Dr. Ross, she busied herself with the office supplies catalog in front of her.
Stunned, Christopher managed to mumble, “Penetrating wisdom, Roberta!” before entering his office, repeating in his mind “the whole ass or nothing.” And his epiphany lit up the air around him like the sun on the sand at La Rioja: The whole ass is what those blurry bits are covering up on TV. Talk about a mind-body problem: it would be better to show the whole ass, or nothing, but not this intermediate censorship that does more to titillate than to satisfy people’s genuine interest in the body. Better to have bottom cheeks burning in the sun than top cheeks burning in shame.
Something More Comfortable
Terrence took his clothes off in front of the mirror and flexed, solemnly assessing the diminished payoff of those years of varsity football. He watched his chest expand as he breathed, his scrotum rise with the change in temperature, his toes as he wiggled them, remembering then the tagged toes of the cadavers in anatomy lab. He felt uncomfortable naked. Am I beginning to associate nudity with cadavers? But, Renee…How had she braved standing still so long, naked in front of a group of strangers? He mulled over these incongruities as he adjusted the lighting and set up his drawing equipment. But the mere act of bending over to raise the easel, as he felt his genitals joggling, made him aware of the nudity of his body in a pleasantly unsuspected way.
Before he began to draw, he practiced a standing pose, left foot out and left leg slightly bent. He had planned to draw his right arm up, biceps flexed (easy to cheat a little there, he thought) with his right hand hidden behind his head, but he got tired of holding his arm like that. Besides, he thought, maybe Renee would judge him a show-off. So he kept the arm down at his side, making sure as he drew that the shading rendered it appropriately muscular. He defied the temptation to exaggerate some of his other features, including the size of his penis. Renee had shown herself as she is, no shame, so he could do no less.
He enjoyed the clinical challenge of rendering an objective image as self-portrait, remembering and confirming on himself the approximate proportions he had learned in class: the distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin is the same as the distance from the chin to an imaginary line between the nipples, and also the same distance as from the shoulder to the elbow... With nothing to distract him except the DJ’s voice on the radio every once in a while, and the knowledge that his roommate had already left town for the weekend, he spent about an hour and a half on the drawing, lavishing special attention on the shading around his eyes and mouth, and the texture and shape of his close-cropped hair.
When he had drawn the last line, he placed the image in his portfolio with the copy of Renee’s portrait. Weary from standing still so long, he threw back his head, let out something like a roar, and stretched his arms to the ceiling, lifting himself up on his tiptoes. Then he ran his hands over his chest and down around to his buttocks, which he squeezed firmly, feeling particularly alive as he watched his penis stirring until it pointed into the mirror. His hands were drawn naturally to his penis, rolling it and coddling it, cradling his testicles as they rose exposed. It was a great-to-be-alive, panerotic kind of touching himself, separate from and yet influenced by his thoughts about Renee. He knew Renee’s candor had already affected him: she had changed him into something more comfortable.
Life Unsheathed
At the mailboxes near Roberta’s desk, Dr. Ross perused his correspondence: a few university press catalogs, Dr. Lasseter-Peebles’ memo announcing the agenda for the departmental meeting, a memo from Dean Wishinsky regarding interdisciplinary courses, and a phone message from a Mr. Bierson.
“Hi Roberta, did this guy say why he called?”
“No, but he left a message I don’t understand. Are you a spy or something?” she joked.
“Why? What’s the message?”
“Michelangelo meets Shania Twain.”
Christopher had Mr. Tucker Bierson on the phone in less than a minute.
“I just thought you’d be interested in knowing what happened to me the other day.”
“Sure, yeah. What happened?”
“I don’t know if I told you when we met that I run a landscaping business. It’s a shop I have right off route 59, eight miles from the beach just before the stoplight in Louisdale. You can’t miss it. Well, remember I told you Michelangelo is my favorite artist?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“I have a bunch of lawn ornaments on display out front of the shop. You can see them clearly from the highway, and one of them is a model of Michelangelo’s David. Well, the police called me this morning and told me to either cover up his privates or take him off the highway. I guess I’m not surprised, but honestly I didn’t mean to provoke anybody by putting him out there.”
“So...so what’d you do? Don’t tell me you took him down.”
“Well, I figured if I had to do it, I’d turn the tables on ‘em and do something that really is provocative. So I…”
“Let me suggest…”
“…a leopard-print thong. Had to cut the waistband and wrap it around him.”
“Wait a second, this is incredible, so the police called you and told you that you had to cover his privates...”
“Or take him off the highway. They told me they had a complaint from a concerned citizen.”
“A concerned citizen? Concerned about what? Now I’m concerned!”
“I’m not sure but it’s likely one of those Children of the Lord our God Fundamentalist people, remember, that came to the beach?”
“Right, with Brother Sean.”
“Oh, and the media showed up too. But they wanted me to take the thong back off so they could film it again...it’s a long story but anyway it’ll be on the “Channel 5 at 5 News” this evening, that’s what I wanted to tell you.”
“I don’t know what to say. It sounds preposterous.”
“Well I figured you’d be interested. Watch the news and then give me a call. Tell me what you think.”
Christopher put down the phone, his desire to laugh overcome by his anger. This went far beyond the aesthetics of kitsch, he told himself: this was an issue of civil liberty, and the injustice of one citizen manipulating public tastes. Michelangelo’s David, for crying out loud! There are David refrigerator magnets and cut-out dolls that you can dress as cowboys or astronauts or firemen, and Botticelli’s Venus dolls, too! But the idea of a “concerned citizen” wanting to clothe a David on public display, presumably not to offend…was offensive! Bodies are bodies. David’s not even depicted with an erection, like those ancient Greek satyr statues, thought Christopher. Why is male frontal nudity such a taboo? Are men that insecure? Do men not want it known that their penises are not always erect when unsheathed? What delicate complicity has been erected over the centuries!
An
d speaking of icons, why does Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as rendered in that mural over in the engineering building foyer, have his genitals hidden by the twin “p”s—of all letters!—in Newton’s quote “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”? What goes up, must come down. What must be hidden, must be found. Life unsheathed!
***
To their credit, the Channel 5 news team deemed the Michelangelo’s David controversy much less important than the energy crisis, peace negotiations in the Middle East and in Colombia, and the campaign to rewrite the state’s ridiculously antiquated, astronomically amended racist constitution. But that didn’t stop the broadcast’s organizers from tantalizing their viewers, just before each commercial break, with tawdry teasers like: “Risqué statues: Would YOU put Michelangelo’s David on YOUR front lawn?” and “Coming up: male sexuality on display. Why one concerned citizen said, ENOUGH is ENOUGH.” As the anchors read these lines the viewer would be treated to a ridiculous shot of David in front of Tucker’s shop, with that infamous blur covering his p#### and s######.
Only in the last two minutes of the broadcast did the David story finally appear. Standing underneath the LOUISDALE LANDSCAPING sign, and next to the blurred David, the young female reporter introduced the topic while recycling the same tawdry teasers as before. Then she interviewed the concerned citizen:
“Mr. Schillinger, can you describe the circumstances of your complaint?”
“My daughter and her friend were in the backseat of the car when I drove by here the other day on my way to Wal-Mart. They started to giggle and asked me some questions, and, you know, I found myself in a situation where I had to explain what a…you know…what a penis is. It was real embarrassing.”
The reporter interviewed Tucker:
“Mr. Bierson, had you ever had complaints like this before?”