The Naked Truth

Here's a dangerous topic to discuss - nudity.

Dangerous because I can't really Google research on the topic without a certain expectation of getting Google Image Search results on the topic, which would certainly be a form of research (if you need a research topic with billions of primary sources, this may be the one for you), but would not exactly be what I'm trying to achieve.

That's not to say I mind naked people - quite the contrary, as a nudist I'm quite used to them.  However, the images returned from such a search are not often simply naked people, and even if they were, they would not be what we lovingly refer to as "safe for work."

And that brings up an interesting problem: What is safe for work, and why?  What is nudity, and why?  Why do we draw lines on the human body to divide up the acceptable and the profane?

From a conservative Christian perspective, of course, the answer is easy: the world is only 6000 years old, Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden, they sinned, God made them wear clothes.  The end.  Of course, this simplistic understanding leaves even the 6000 years of history that the most hardcore conservatives acknowledge skipped over - that is, it disregards several historical anomalies:

1. The common practice in much of the Roman Empire during the first century was communal bathing.  The practice is entirely unmentioned in the Bible despite discussion of other Roman practices.
2. People were commonly nude for a variety of tasks, such as fishing (Peter is described as naked in some translations of John 21:7) and gardening (Karl Kästner says that the reason the women in Jesus's posse mistook him for a gardener is that he had left his garments behind in the tomb and was therefore naked, and gardeners at the time would have worked naked.). 
3. In first liturgy of baptism, participants were naked: "Then they shall take off all their clothes," it says, and later, "after these things, the bishop passes each of them on nude to the elder who stands at the water. They shall stand in the water naked."  (source)
4. European art from throughout Catholic dominance depicts people naked, especially after Europeans began studying Roman and Greek history and art.  This art is often highly religious in nature, depicting stories directly from the Bible.  Michelangelo's David, for instance, depicts the king of ancient Israel and Judea. 

Of course, if we separate our morality from the morality of the Christian Church, and take a look at ancient history, we see that humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, about 30,000 years after we became homosapiens, and about 800,000 years after the species that would become human lost its body hair. 

So, other than comfort in mild conditions and health in extreme conditions, there's really no reason to be wearing clothes, nor any reason to be concerned about the sight of nudity in others.  The sexual desire of certain parts of the body is merely a social construction, one which we can choose to deny.

Doing so would solve a commonly-listed problem fear of some people, especially those on the Right: the fear of other people using the bathroom with them just to sneak a peek at their genitals and breasts.  The argument goes something like this: I'm a man, and I'm worried that another man who is gay might use the men's room next to me and leer at my penis while I'm peeing; or, I'm a man, and I'm worried that a woman might dress in men's clothing just to use the men's room and leer at my penis, etc.  Same argument with genders flipped for women.

There are countries in the world where they don't worry about gender with regard to the bathroom.  Even in the U.S., there's a growing trend for colleges to offer unisex bathrooms.  I recall a female friend of mine confiding in me that, while on Christian mission work in Romania, she stayed in a hostel with only one set of showers that were open and unisex - meaning that everyone who showered did so in full view of everyone else. Initially she had typical American reservations about it, but the needs of getting clean after sweating through mission work necessitated using the showers, and her fears about them subsided.  She discovered that there was nothing wrong with them.  They were simply different.