Robert Rowling Smith on Being Naked

When I lived in Los Angeles ten years ago, the slogan of the gym I went to was ‘Look good naked’. For LA, a culture obsessed with the superficial, the strapline was interestingly complex. On the one hand, it was saying that you need to look good at all times, regardless of your moral worth. So far, so Californian. On the other hand, nakedness means you’re not hiding behind anything, and that the naked you is the real you.

So nakedness enjoys a relationship with truth and authenticity. The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, points out that the truth is always that which is unadorned. We use the phrase ‘the unvarnished truth’ to get at this fact that the truth is always bare. Once you add clothes, you add disguise, and where you add disguise, you add deceit. Truth is unclothed, and where it isn’t, it’s our task to strip it.

But human beings can’t just go around naked, no matter how much authenticity it might express. True, there are nudist colonies that extol the virtues of going unclothed, and that claim vestments to be an artificial distortion of our state of nature. But overwhelmingly, society dictates that cladding must be adopted, if only to cover up the private parts. Why? Because the private parts allude to our animal selves, the selves that we humans are supposed to have surpassed. To be naked is to admit our links with the beasts of the field. And so we wear clothes. In fact, we wear clothes so automatically that a reversal has taken place. Where being naked was natural, and being clothed the opposite, now it’s weird to walk about without a stitch, and wearing clothes is considered the normal behaviour. Clothes become a second skin.

At least, this is the case in public. In private, the rules reverse again. Perhaps the greatest symbol of privacy is precisely being able to wander about your home with nothing on. This is nakedness as freedom, different from being ‘nude’ with its erotic or aesthetic connotations. Although being naked might be the condition in which people prefer to have sex, it’s not a sexual state per se - and anyone who’s visited one of those nudist colonies knows they’re far from being the sexiest places on earth. Besides, being naked alone is different. In a world that’s increasingly ‘transparent’, it’s one of privacy’s last bastions.

Robert Rowland Smith’s Breakfast with Socrates is now out in paperback (Profile Books, £8.99).

 

Image: Lucas Cranach, Adam and Eve, 1526.

 

 

Comments

[Casey Black]

Doesn't that just make the home in which you prance around naked a third skin? Or is it the fourth? Because even in our bodies we often retreat into our minds. And people wish to 'be seen' and 'be loved for who they are' in a way that's more often about sharing thoughts and feelings, rather than exteriors. Sex is just a metaphorical extension of a meeting of the minds. It's 'seeing God' and 'being one' (or at the very least makes the mind subservient to the body at which point, the mind is made into the body, and revealed/exposed).
Perhaps the body is just another vestment that we have a harder time wearing neatly, and purposefully, so we dress it, and hide it to diminish what would otherwise, yes, reveal our animal selves, but to the overlooking of our internal, mental selves that beg to be seen. So really, where is the 'naked' truth, the simple truth, then? Is it not in the mind which can never be exposed except through external presentations: movement and thought and purposeful expression?

[Desiree]

I live in LA. I doubt we've cornered the market on superficiality, we're just a bit more upfront about it.
Now, whether or not we look good naked, isn't that in the eyes of our beholder?