Nudity
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Nudity is the state of being in which a human is without clothing or specifically not covering the genitals. Partial nudity may be defined as not covering other parts of the body deemed sexual. Nudity is culturally complex due to meanings given various states of undress in differing social situations. In any particular society, these meanings are defined in relation to being properly dressed, not in relation to the specific body parts being exposed. Nakedness and clothing are connected to many cultural categories such as identity, privacy, social status and moral behavior. Although often used interchangeably, "naked" and "nude" are also used in English to distinguish between the various meanings of being unclothed.
Quotes
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- Any excuse is good to... get naked.
- I'm so comfortable with nudity, it's difficult for me to keep my clothes on in just my own everyday life. As soon as I walk in the door when I come home, off go the clothes.
- Marliece Andrada, Marliece Andrada Interview 1998
- The streaking syndrome started a new feeling about freeing the body.
- Suzy Chaffee, Suzy Chaffee: The liberated beauty, The Beaver County Times (17 March 1975)
- Do you wish to honor the Body of the Savior? Do not despise it when it is naked. Do not honor it in church with silk vestments while outside it is naked and numb with cold. He who said, “This is my body,” and made it so by his word, is the same that said, “You saw me hungry and you gave me no food. As you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.” Honor him then by sharing your property with the poor. For what God needs is not golden chalices but golden souls.
- To me the the coolest thing about having a boyfriend is that you can just stare at his naked body and not have to look away out of politeness. I find the male form so fascinating. I have a few [favorite body parts]. I like that kind of dent [pelvic bone], that V. And I love [men's] butts. There's nothing better than a good butt.
- Dana Delany, as quoted in movieline.com Movieline (1 August 1994)
- I think male nudity is wonderful.
- Sandra Dee, The Palm Beach Post (5 October 1972)
- Nudity on television is nothing new. I don’t find myself spitting out my tea and clutching my pearls at the sight of *GASP* A NIPPLE while watching something on Netflix. However, when someone mentions that a show contains nudity, most of the time, I assume it’s going to be female, not male.
Frontal male nudity has never been as common as female nudity on screen. A Google search of “Male Nudity On-Screen” will show article after article about an increase in male nudity, as well as article saying things along the line of “OMG So-And-So was NAKED in last night’s episode!” and actors like Chris Pratt and Kevin Bacon have gone on the record saying there should be equal representation when it comes to nude scenes.
It’s no secret that we live in a hyper-sexualized world. Sex sells, and today it’s all about the money. But does nudity have to always be related to sex? Can nudity be portrayed in normal, non-sexual ways? Can someone be shown taking an ordinary, non-sexual shower? Is the purpose of nudity always to inspire sexual feelings in the audience?- Nelson Ellis, "The Imbalance of Nudity", Link, 10 February 2021
- I’m not trying to say that male nudity should be shown only in non-sexual matters. If eye-candy like Chris Hemsworth wants to bare it all in front of the camera, then, by all means, he should be able to do that. I am saying that this new conversation and increasing acknowledgement of nudity on screen and the growing calls for equality should also include discussions about what nudity on the screen means and why. A rising amount of nudity, male and female, could help remove the taboo around it.
Male nudity has also been used in the past for comedy. Judd Apatow once said that people “fear the penis” and vowed to include one in every film he makes. This had me thinking; when I do see male nudity on screen, when is it usually used? I think of the infamous hotel fight scene in Borat or the running joke in Arrested Development about David Cross’ Tobias being a “never-nude.” Media has tended to have a slant in showing nude male bodies in the context of some sort of punchline.
By the time a child reaches elementary school, they will have seen as many 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on television (According to the Council on Communications and Media). Killings, murder, and violence are commonplace in media. Most people aren’t leaving the house to murder and maim, but everyone possesses a body (sometimes they even get naked!), so why is one so heavily censored while the other is constantly shown?- Nelson Ellis, "The Imbalance of Nudity", Link, 10 February 2021
- I’ll give an example using my favourite show, Breaking Bad. In the pilot, a topless woman is seen for less than a second. It’s uncensored on Netflix, but AMC had the scene blurred. It seems like a lot of fuss for something that takes up less than 1% of the episode’s screen time. That same episode features the main character, Walter White, attempting to kill two men with poisonous gas. One of them survives, which leads to White locking him up by his neck by a bike lock in a basement before strangling him to death (all of that is on screen, and for much longer than a second). Breaking Bad would go on to feature multiple characters being run over, shot, having their necks slit open and bleed out (all on-screen), and included the killing of a child, whose body was then put into a barrel full of acid and melted down.
I’m not saying that we need to censor violence heavily; I love a good beat ‘em up scene as much as the next guy. I am merely asking the question of, “why is one OK, and the other isn’t?”
Nudity, sexual or not, being portrayed on screen can help remove the “taboo” of it. After all, everyone has bodies, and most of us have some degree of sexual feeling; why not work towards having a media that reflects that in a healthier way?- Nelson Ellis, "The Imbalance of Nudity", Link, 10 February 2021
- And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
- Genesis 2:25, King James Version of the Bible, Genesis 2:25
- My parents were free about nudity, and we are too. I’d like our children to feel unashamed of whatever shape they are. People should worry about other things
- Heidi Klum, InStyle (September 2007)
- I thoroughly enjoy seeing a beautifully proportioned nude male. So did Michelangelo and Rodin. But if the male is blubbery, he should keep his beer barrel to himself and not be a portly polluter.
- June Lockhart, The Palm Beach Post (5 October 1972)
- If people were meant to run around naked, they wouldn't have been born wearing clothes.
- Reverend Loveshade as quoted in Ek-sen-trik-kuh Discordia: The Tales of Shamlicht edited by Reverend Loveshade
- The more a society requires its respectable women to keep their bodies covered, the more likely those women are to be oppressed.
- Eristotle in Ek-sen-trik-kuh Discordia: The Tales of Shamlicht
- A man who can't eat dinner naked on a leather couch is little better than a slave.
- Josh Ozersky, Eat Like a Man (29 April 2013)
- In fact, research suggests that children who have seen their parents nude do not grow up to be emotionally scarred, but instead are more likely to be accepting of their own bodies and comfortable with their own sexuality.
- Holly Robinson, parents.com
- Perhaps the dissenters believe that 'offense to others' ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally. [...] The purpose of Indiana's nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.
- Antonin Scalia, in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (1991)
- As one Tatler critic recognised when praising Henry Scott Tuke as 'par excellence the painter of youth', the depiction of naked youths bathing or sitting on Cornish beaches looking contemplatively out to sea played an important part in Tuke's artistic success. However, these paintings elicted a range of different readings and conflicting interpretations from Tuke's viewers, some of which detected a sexualized approach on the artist's part to the unclothed adolescent male body, while many others did not.
- Andrew Stephenson (contributing author), Henry Scott Tuke (New Haven: Yale University Press) by Cicely Robinson (editor), p. 75
- By examining the physical attributes, poses and symbolisms of the naked youths that modelled for Tuke and were depicted in his key works, I argue that certain iconographic differences and pictoral correspondences were familiar to some of Tuke's viewers. This would have been due to their knowledge of classical precedents for representing the youthful male nude and through their exposure to erotic photographic images of naked youths in the open air that encouraged them to infer sexual intent. Yet for other audience, these sexualised associations remained elusive, as they approached the subject of youthful male nudes in landscape settings differently through the conventions of English pastoralism or by seeing the work as making reference to an updated visual language of neoclassicism gaining currency and critical support in British art from the 1860s onwards.
- Andrew Stephenson (contributing author), Henry Scott Tuke (New Haven: Yale University Press) by Cicely Robinson (editor), p. 75
- However, other audiences encountering these works at the Royal Academy or in artists' shows, museums and commercial galleries saw Tuke's paintings with their sensually appealing surfaces, heightened chromatism and delicate handling as suggestive and evocative, but not illicit or sexually provocative. Consequently, they did not question Tuke's reasons for painting naked male adolescents bathing or sitting on the Cornish seashore or at sea. Nor did they see the manner in which male nudes were painted and the fascination with the sensual effects of sunlight on youthful pale flesh as anything other than a licit engagement on the artist's part with a legitimate modern subject. Moreover, as audiences for modern art expanded in the latter part of the nineteenth century, making the most of the greater opportunities in exhibitions, art galleries and museums to see it first hand, so the volume of biographical literature and critical writing on artists' lives exploded and press interviews with living artists offered new ways of evaluating not only their approaches and intentions, but their lifestyles and public images.
- Andrew Stephenson (contributing author), Henry Scott Tuke (New Haven: Yale University Press) by Cicely Robinson (editor), p. 76
- Tuke's interview [in 1895 with The Studio magazine] weaves together many strands of his artistic and aesthetic credo: a commitment to working en plein air in front of the model posed in nature, his dedication to painting by the seaside away from the confinement of the studio, and his resolve to retain 'the outdoor impression' even when working afterwards in the studio. Since Tuke specialised in depicting male nudes, most often adolescents alone or in groups outdoors, The Studio interviewer, like its readers, was particularly interested in the exact nature of Tuke's fascination with naked young boys depicted swimming, sailing or on Cornish beaches, and his attraction to the sensual effect of light on young flesh- questions that Tuke tactfully avoided.
- Andrew Stephenson (contributing author), Henry Scott Tuke (New Haven: Yale University Press) by Cicely Robinson (editor), p. 76
- The fear that seeing naked people in some way harms children is not supported, however, by academic research. The small handful of studies on this topic in psychology and sociology have shown, instead, that children reared in an atmosphere containing family social nudity may benefit from the practice. If this is true, then proposed laws outlawing either social nudity in the home or children's participation at naturist (or nudist) settings are unjustified.
- Yet, the truth is that nudity in the home, when handled in a respectful, matter-of-fact way, is perfectly natural and certainly not harmful.
- Dennis Sugrue, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School in Sex Matters for Women (2002)
- I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?
- Sharon Tate as quoted in Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders (2000) by Greg King
- Going to have you naked, by the end of this song!
- Justin Timberlake, "Rock Your Body" (2002), Justified
- Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array’d;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew
Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man.- John Donne, "To His Mistress Going to Bed"
- Crawford: One day my girlfriend, her boyfriend and I were sunbathing topless because that's Barabados - you can wear nothing if you want. And the Pepsi guy walks up and with my agent to meet us for lunch. I wondered if I should put on my top because I have a business relationship with him. I didn't want him to get offended because the rest of the beach had seen me with my top off. Meanwhile as he's walking towards me, he's saying to my agent "I hope she puts on her top." He wasn't even being a schmuck, like wanting to see. He wanted to keep our relationship professional.
- Playboy: Did you or didn't you?
- Crawford: I left it off and it was fine with everyone.
- Cindy Crawford, Playboy Interview: Cindy Crawford Playboy (September 1995)
- For me, nudity in any film is a matter of what is realistic and authentic, not exploitative or unnecessary. These are the questions that I always ask myself when there is a love scene or a meditation scene on a ship [like in the film Adrift]. What I love about this film is that we explore sensuality in so many moments without needing any sexuality at all. The more we're able to capture sensual moments on screen the more we can start changing our view when it comes to our personal sexualities and sensualities. In a personal way, I find less to be more in most cases and I think leaving things up to the imagination leaves a little mystery when it comes to nudity or sex. It only intrigues the audience more.
- Shailene Woodley, Harper’s Bazaar (2018 Jun 29)
- It was so much fun. Everyone was freaked out because I’m nude, but in real life, when I have sex, I’m naked. I don’t have a bra on, and I don’t usually have panties on. So let’s make a real movie! Let’s bring truth to the scene! I didn’t want to be exploited, but this girl—like most girls when they first have sex—doesn’t know what she’s doing. I wanted their first kiss to be sloppy, teenagerish making out. When you’re younger, you think you know what to do, but you really don’t.
- Shailene Woodley, Vulture (2014 Jun 1)
Dialogue
[edit]- Police Inspector: So your daddy takes his clothes off in front of you, does he?
- Nathan: When he's rehearsing.
- Anna: What is it about men and nudity? Particularly breasts? How can you be so interested in them?
- William: Well...
- Anna: I mean seriously: they're just breasts. Every second person has them. They're odd looking, they're for milk from your mother. What's all the fuss about?
- Judy: Oh, thank you so much, I'd appreciate that more than you can imagine, it'd be such a- OHHHHH! You are naked!
- Yax: Huh? Oh, for sure! We're a naturalist club!
- Nick: Yeah. "In Zootopia, anyone can be anything." And these guys? They be naked.
