Paul Graves and Joe Fish for Sleek Magazine
Why does the Book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition use nakedness as the badge of shame?
Could some other aspect of our being have been designated as the stigma that would remind us of our fall from grace?
God: From now on, there will be sneezing!
Adam & Eve: Oh noes!1!! Atchoo!
God: Bless you.
Instead, it was nakedness. No slimming jeans, no flattering dresses, no baggy sweatshirts. Just big ol – or little ol – you. Warts and all. Exposed as you are for all the world to see – yourself included.
You can hide from anything except your own hide.
Which, of course, is the great gift and curse of the human condition: our ability to comprehend just who we really are, whether we like it or not. Self-knowledge, radical transparency is the price we pay for wanting to eat the fruit of knowledge. You can’t stop at just one bite.
So it follows that in our culture, performing naked is an act of courage just as being stripped is an act of oppression. One may choose to “bare” one’s self and one may be “exposed!”
This joining of fact and physique leads to some interesting cultural practices.
Consider fashion, with its broad array of options for concealing and revealing one’s body, from burkas and bondage suits to necklines and hemlines, from moustaches, beards and Brazilian waxes to posing nude for fashion magazines (or merely fashionable ones).
But if the truth is always naked, is being naked always telling the truth?
Pornography tells us otherwise which may be one of the reasons why it’s considered obscene.**
While nudity has always been associated with art, where we lie on purpose to sneak up on the truth, the subset of art that is intentionally erotic is perhaps the most deceitful.
To inspire fear when there is really nothing at bay (Jaws!) is a nice trick. But to arouse – to quicken the pulse, to drive blood to the very means of reproduction – is, perhaps, an even more impressive skill. Someone who can arouse an audience at will has considerable power. (cf. “she’s a knock out”, bombshells, the gay bomb, etc.)
Which brings us back to our old friends Adam and his cohort Eve. We can’t infer much about Adam’s appearance but we can assume that Eve must have been quite the hottie as she is described as having the power to seduce. And thus, we’re told, the power to deceive.
But was Eve’s original sin an act of deception? Quite the contrary. She is remembered for having the audacity – the daring – to not only want the truth for herself but to then want to share it.
Despite having been born in a world where everything was as it seemed, Eve yearned for more. The bliss of ignorance no longer filled her. So she reached up, standing on her tip toes, and stretched her whole being towards the heavens until she grasped not the “low hanging fruit”, but that which grows only on the highest branch of the tallest tree.
And then she spoke of it.
*If reverence for history and tradition mean anything, it means we should not underestimate the wisdom of our ancient forebears. We moderns didn’t invent metaphor nor symbolism. Assuming the Bible is literal is about as irreverent a gesture as a would-be conservative can make.
**It’s one thing to acknowledge that nudity and fashion are inherently instruments of power, but it does not follow that such instruments have just one use or one category of user.