The Daily Campus

Issue date: 10/24/07 Section: Commentary

Modern cultures have forgotten that the invention of clothing arose from the necessity for humans to protect themselves from harsh environmental conditions. It is not clear when - or why - clothing began to be perceived as a means of hiding one's body, rather than a source of protection. In some cultures the prejudice against nudity may have arisen by way of religion, in which case reversing it would be extremely difficult. All that can be said with absolute certainty is that modern cultures have made the naked body into something shameful and provocative.

It is this prejudice that gives nude photography such a forbidden allure. The profitability of the entire pornographic industry rests upon the common modern belief that the naked body is something to hide. Humans want what they are told they cannot have. Humans want to do what they are told they cannot do. They want to see what they are told we cannot see. But this is not the case with nude photos in a National Geographic magazine, which society is taught to perceive as an exploration of world culture. People are taught to see them as educational, and they learn to see these depictions as an exception to the rule because they are set apart from ourselves, because the beings in the pictures do not live in our modern world. To modern humans, these people are relics of our past. These native people allegedly show modern people what they have "evolved" from, and they live with minimal or no clothing because they do not know any better. The Western ideology is that it is modern man's duty to aid these natives in their evolution, and it is a dangerous ideology at best. It reinforces in our youth the conception that Western culture is somehow better than that of the native peoples viewed in an anthropological magazine. Somewhere in translation, clothing as protection is lost, and Westerners adopt the fallacy that because modern humans wear clothing, clothing must be better than nudity. This common belief is an example of the ethnocentrism that has always been, and continues to be, the cause of countless problems faced by humanity. Furthermore, it is strong evidence that humans have only scratched the surface in our ongoing evolution.







Josh Blodgett is a 5th-semester English and business double major. He can be reached at Joshua.Blodgett@UConn.edu.

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