Do you enjoy a good frolic in the nude within the confines of your home? Do you like to get naked in the outdoors? Or do you think that nudity should be confined to solitary bathing? One this is certain, nudity has meaning of some kind for everyone, so let’s mentally disrobe and engage in some naked truths.
The naked human body evokes powerful and often contradictory emotions. Nakedness can excite or repulse. It can signal sexiness orinnocence, peace or aggression, and unity or separation. The point is that human nudity always means something, but that meaning depends very much on the culture and timeframe of the viewer.
Hair Today
Humans are the only primates that have shed their hair. Every other member of our extended evolutionary family has a covering of dense fur. We are the sole naked ape.
Hair provides insulation, protects against abrasion and allows for impressive displays. The reasons for humanity’s evolutionary decision to embrace nudity go back 3 million years when the Earth entered a phase of global cooling that reduced rainfall, changing the habitat of human ancestors in East and Central Africa from woodland to dry savannah. As a result, early hominids had to travel farther to fi nd their recommended dietary intake of fruits, roots and leaves. Around this time, our forebears also started incorporating meat into their diet, meaning they had to chase their evening meal. All this increased wandering about and sprints in search of supper meant that overheating was a big risk. Survival pressures favoured those with less body hair and a greater ability to cool via sweat, and so the evolution of sweaty, hairless humans began.
As of 1.2 million years ago, it is safe to say that humans were going about naked, although not completely hairless. Hair in the armpits and around the genitals serves to keep these areas lubricated during movement and spread pheromones. Hair on the head creates a barrier layer of air, and sweat from the scalp evaporates into that layer, keeping the head and brain cooler.
Aside from these paltry hair patches, for more than a million years, we have been naked. So when did we start thinking about nakedness as nudity?
Yesterday’s Nudes
A genetic analysis of human head and body lice suggests that humans began wearing clothes between 170,000 and 83,000 years ago. The wrinkle here, though, is that Homo sapiens (modern humans) were not the first hominids to wear clothes. Archaeologists have found stone tools resembling hide scrapers in caves inhabited by Homo erectus that date back 800,000 years. Whether these hominids used these hides for clothing, we can’t say for sure, but it’s unlikely they used them as tablecloths or curtains.
By late Neolithic times (around 3000-2000 BCE), removing clothes while working or bathing was common, but nakedness in everyday life came to symbolise being at the bottom of the social scale. While this may have been true in the civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Greeks had other ideas about nudity.
For more than a millennium in Greek antiquity, from around 1100 BCE to 500 CE, nudity was a badge of honour for men. For Greek male athletes of this period, nakedness was their Lycra. Fullbody tans and fit physiques came to represent high socioeconomic status. There was even a derogatory word, “leukocytes”, which meant “white-rumped” and referred to people who did not have the right full-body tan that resulted from spending their time athletically naked in the sun.
The Romans did not admire nudity quite as much as the Greeks, although their art depicted the ideal human form, as exemplified by the gods, as an athletic nude. A high-ranking citizen of Rome, however, wore a toga, and public nudity was frowned upon except at certain religious festivals or when bathing.
A full history of attitudes to nudity around the world is beyond our scope here, so we will confine ourselves to a few key points in the Western relationship with nakedness. The fall of the Roman Empire led to many social changes in Europe, among them the rise of Christianity. The Middle Ages (500-1500 CE) saw the development of an increasingly hierarchical society. For many centuries, nakedness indicated low socioeconomic status and came to be associated with shame and anxiety until the Renaissance came along.
Between the 13th and 17th centuries, there was a “rebirth” or “rediscovery” of the philosophy and traditions of antiquity, which meant the nude body came back into fashion as a symbol of purity. The works of Donatello and Michelangelo show how the naked body was embraced by art during the Renaissance and the naked female body also became prominent.
During “The Enlightenment”, or Age of Reason, which took place in the 17th and 18th centuries, taboos grew again around nudity and by the time of the Victorian era, the naked human was regarded as obscene. The 20th and 21st centuries continued the roller-coaster ride of nudity and saw a loosening of restrictions around nudity in the hippy and nudism movements, while in certain areas, a return to fundamentalist theologies have seen prohibitions around nudity reassert themselves.
Nudity as commodity
Perhaps the defi ning characteristic of our attitude to nudity in the 21st century is that it is used to sell. A study published in the journal Psychology and Marketing (2021) set out to see whether nude images in advertising had a positive eff ect on consumer behaviour. The results showed that men had a positive response to both male and female semi-nudity, a “positive response” referring to “attitude change” and “intention to purchase”. For women, the response was also positive, but strongly for semi-nude women and only to a non-significant level for semi-nude men.
If you want to canvas 21st-century attitudes, however, especially for Millennials and Gen Y, you need to look at what is happening on social media. In November 2023, a study conducted by Erasmus University of Rotterdam was published in the journal KYKLOS: International Review of Social Sciences. This paper looked at how nudity was related to the income of influencers on Instagram and found that influencer accounts with high levels of body exposure achieve higher prices and more advertising revenue than accounts with less nudity. This was true regardless of gender, although while male influencers did charge higher prices for their naked material, females tended to produce more branded content and so made a higher income overall.
Given that we see so much nudity or semi-nudity these days, either on social media, the internet, streaming services and potentially via direct messaging, it begs the question as to what eff ect that nudity might have on how we perceive each other.
Nude Psychology
The general conclusion of the psychological literature is that when we see someone nude or semi-nude, we perceive them as having reduced “agency” or less ability to act autonomously and freely. On the other hand, seeing people in some degree of nakedness makes us believe that they are more capable of experiencing life. This is not “true” in any sense, it is just how we see nudity through our current cultural lens.
Oscar Wilde said, “If we were meant to be nude, we would have been born that way.” In his typically absurdist way, Wilde is nudging us to consider that nudity is part of our inherent nature. Wilde, of course, was writing more than 120 years ago so let’s come a little more up to date. Here, we go back 40 years for a closing thought from John Lennon, who said, “The main hang-up in the world today is hypocrisy and insecurity. If people don’t face up to the fact of other people being naked, or whatever they want to do, then we are never going to get anywhere.”
