Nudity

Antonella Nappi

This text was previously published in Lea Melandri (author and editor), Una visceralità indicibile (Milan: F. Angeli, 2000), 141 – 144. It originally appeared in Italian in the Journal Sottosopra. Esperienze dei gruppi femministi in Italia (Milan: Gruppo del giornale, 1973).

In June I was at a European conference promoted by the French feminist movement in Vendée: the plan was to spend a week at the seaside, among women, to escape the “everyday” contradiction of relating to men.

The organizing group didn’t want to take control of the week’s planning; on the other hand, a collective planning had never been experimented and we productively faced its challenges: seven days of “conference” are too many: they become, more realistically, seven days of collective life, and something like that is hardly improvised among women who have never seen each other before, who speak different languages and are confined on the premises of a rented orphanage. We got to know each other in groups, or individually; a lot of voluntary work was required. Future conferences will require an improved collective organization: the actual conference should be allocated specific moments, thus being more orderly, and the collective life should have more instruments of knowledge and entertainment.

The fundamental experience for me, in this congress, was nudity.

Over that same month of June I had been at the “Re Nudo” (Naked King) festival in Zerbo sul Ticino.

The sexual freedom discourse implicit in the behavior of such “hippy” groups had always elicited a fair amount of diffidence on my part: the crisis of institutions, and of masculine roles, which they express, does lead men and women to more permissive attitudes towards sex, but indeed what might seem liberating to men appears to women in a different light. The path of free love, of group love, of drugs, isn’t mirrored by any change in the social relations within the population: it is an individual solution, and in no way interferes with the dominant relation of oppression of women by men. It is but a variation of it.

A young man sees the refusal of the family only a temporary stance: it allows him to avoid the effort required of a deep and contradictory human relationship as the one he should then have with a woman; it just means cheaper fucks. This attitude, besides being intrinsically elitist, does nothing to alter family situations, nor does it harm the myth of monogamy (historically imposed only on women, for men could resort to consuming prostitution without incurring any social reproach): these are not simply cultural models, they are coercive structures imposed on the population’s life.

The path of questioning inter-personal relationships, and as such men-women relationships, the path of looking for oneself and fighting sexual repression cannot be univocally followed by men, as it always has been, without the political presence of women, because men are the makers of the society that both they and us want to destroy, while women are the subjects of the current social organization, of the current sexual repression, and as such they are the interested party, they are those who can provide tools to grow a different social organization, one devoid of sexism. (Speaking of sexual repression, of an inhuman and alienated society, without analyzing their specific forms or the element they both lay their foundations on, is still sexist, for that element is the subordination of women to men.)

Only women can thus claim the social, interpersonal and sexual field which is the one of their struggles, of their analyses and of their experimentations, since in those fields they are the oppressed, the unexpressed; they know oppression and they liberate themselves from it and destroy this very oppression forever for all sexes.

Young women dropping out of political groups—or refusing to enter them altogether, following men down the easy, decadent path of passivity and easy socialization—are confusing their needs as women with the cultural and countercultural myths imposed by the male society as the objective of social, racial or sexual promotion: they experience the death of an oppressor instead of the revolt of the oppressed.

These Re Nudo people, these counterculture people proclaiming universal love, I never hated them as much as I did at their conference.

I went to Zerbo to overcome what might be my a priori judgments, to understand the relational improvements in a younger generation than mine, and also to spend a day in the open air, collectively. The humanity these young people want to “allow the birth of” could indeed have appeared, and I would have enjoyed it just as much as them.

I remember, however, that my first thought as I read “beach” and “river” on the conference flyer was: sure, girls will get undressed there. If this thought was prompted by my oppressed and repressed perspective, surely many others could have had the same one (and indeed, such a thought had brought many people to Zerbo). As I went up the country road leading to the conference,
I was deeply afraid of being hurt by a sexual freedom in which women were still nothing more than erotic objects. I was afraid of finding half-naked young women who could hurt my modesty (which I understood to be based solely on my hatred for men’s gazes, on my refusal to compete with other women for those gazes). I was afraid those women’s behavior could minimize sexual oppression—to me, to my feminist comrades, to the same men I had spent so long underlining it to. I was afraid it could hint at an illusory liberation “above” sexes; I was afraid I would be humiliated by these women’s nudity before the men by whom I too wanted to be liked. (Feminist awareness doesn’t allow anything to escape my attention, I am aware of every minor attack on my gender, and this has made me very fragile in every gender-polarized situation, contrary to the nonchalant arrogance with which I used to feel above every other woman some time ago).

Just after the picket I meet the first bare-breasted girl, and experience a brief shock (an erotic shock) quite similar, I believe, to what men experience in such situations, since the objectification men impose on women, the mythification of some of our body parts abstracted from the whole, is a culture in which we are deeply involved. I am not happy about the indifference (voluntary repression) that the young man with me is forced to display, quite the contrary: I find it a paternalistic attempt of showing me he is less of an oppressor than other men.

Once I reach the beach I am already alert; this vacation Sunday will probably be full of emotional tension. Many people are naked, men show off their power of undressing, the few women have only dramatic reasons to do so, whose common aspect is the will to isolate themselves from other women: one wants to state her equality to men by adopting exactly their behaviors; one wants to boast about her lack of modesty in the face of those who still have it; another wants to show off her breasts since they are closer to what the male culture has decreed to be beautiful; one wants to prove to her boyfriend (to whom she clings) that she undresses in public, or to show him a body he already knows but in public, in front of dressed women: yet another way of being his; another is sincerely convinced that undressing will make her feel free, more sure of herself.

Exhibitionism offends everyone without anybody acknowledging it: it offends the mass of tourists whose oppressed lives have nothing in common with this spectacle; it offends young men who have to express indifference to the sexually aggressive instincts male culture has made spontaneous, like someone who, knowing they are in front of a free show, are afraid to miss even one line; but most of all it offends women, that carry a sense of inferiority and have to put up with this and have to swallow more offense and more atrocity.

The constant, through all this, is being naked for men: whether it be intentional or not, the mere fact of being naked in the midst of men—while our society never allows us to undress in everyday life, on the contrary, it uses our nudity as erotic exception in advertisements, in films, makes them into an erotic exception there, too: even more, it makes us all an erotic exception, since the majority of women, whether dressed or in bikinis, can undress at any moment—is those naked women’s compensation.

Among real “hippies,” among that place’s real frequenters, there is a mutual decision of not “peeping,” of respecting “privacy.” I myself feel this, and this means refusing to take possession of the other’s nudity, or of everyone’s: not studying bodies, not sating our ignorance, for this could generate a new awareness. Everything is left to intuition. This amounts to exerting a subtle repression on ourselves.

For young women, I believe, not being possessed by men’s gazes, but merely intuited, can only mean being intuited as “the nudity” which men deify, intuited as naked women, instead of as human beings made of flesh and feeling, as whole persons. This effectively amounts to not showing themselves at all, since to show yourself you must be seen; to feel wholly accepted—as a body, and as a person—you need to be seen from the perspective of one who sees to accept, understand, know, love the human being you are (see Laing).

The general atmosphere gets more and more static, you don’t approach naked people, you don’t approach strangers in such an ambiguous situation, there is a great deal of awkwardness even when encountering friends, all spontaneity is frozen, I leave.

At the Vendée beach many women undressed to sunbathe, according to the naturism often practiced by both men and women in rich bourgeois countries, or because they had discussed this matter to a further extent in feminist meetings.

As I said, undressing didn’t come spontaneously to me, I had never seen naked women in a family setting (I have no sisters, my mother used to hide from me, I had no female friends because I had always preferred to confront men); I spoke about Zerbo and raised the issue that I saw women’s nudity a bit as men faced it: what is usually covered, when uncovered prompted in me a morbid curiosity, since it has to generate revenue in movies, magazines, etc.

I said that if we wanted to undress we didn’t have to use sun as a pretext, but it should have been a way to get to know our bodies, to look at each other and to feel looked at, to understand each other wholly—not only through our discourse; it should have been a way to acquire our own perspective, a woman’s perspective, on women’s nudity, to verify what could justify the erotic myth of some of our body parts and not of others, to understand the abstraction of these parts from the rest of the body, from its reality to a stereotype.

This position was clear to all of us; actually, a pretty big group of French women had already faced these issues as a daily practice.

Getting to know a woman’s body has been, to me, much more meaningful than the whole of my liberation process, and easier than I would have imagined.

The destruction of the female stereotype was very fast: one day.

Ironically, covered (or artificially shown) parts were the least harmonic ones of our body, the parts that conformed less to our usual aesthetics.

In nudity, however, what stood out was first and foremost our face; subsequently, hands, feet and shoulders. At the same time, the butt, pubes and breasts were a deeply characterizing element to each of us: what has been unified by the deification of women is precisely the least unifiable part of all. The variety was infinite, we could have recognized each of us simply by her breasts, something which could perhaps only hold of eyes and teeth; breasts, moreover, are highly variable over the course of the years, just as the face. Nothing is further from truth than fixing them to a model.

The most important thing by far, however, was our bodies’ wholeness, and their being one with our personality. Breasts, in our body, acquired a distinctly justificatory value, they became mammary glands, the ones used to feed your offspring; besides this function, they are nothing but a permanence, a burden that the body has to carry and that could very well be unwelcome. You can love them only if you love the whole of your body as something real, and as such all of it becomes lovable.

The same holds of the other parts male culture usually retails, and were nonetheless subjected to a minor propaganda (or objectification, or manipulation). The butt, per se, is something whose reality is already acquired, since it is the same for men, women, children, elderly; the surprise that it arises within male culture has to do with the certainty it belongs to a woman. Once a vision makes this uncertain, it has to be understood in a different way; if the butt belongs to a child, men usually don’t allow themselves emotional reactions. If it belongs to a man, this usually causes hilarity or rage (Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales elicited the male public’s rage against the director).

What I then understood is that it is indeed pleasing (I obviously use as a paradigm traditional aesthetics as it has been generated by culture in general, since I know no other) but obviously it is far less smooth, muscular, neat and uniformly hued that what they tell us; its every movement and position betrays its tremulousness, and as such its being as perishable as human flesh, and highly mobile, so that its best shape is impossible to grasp among all the shapes it adopts.

The pubes is something harder to accept, since it is very far from the doll-like representations we are sometimes shown. The sexual organ is very visible (this is why breasts are usually shown, and the pubes isn’t); quite contrary to what happens with men, it is truly undefended: what it exposes is something whose matter, color and shape reminds more of the body’s inside that of its outside, it seems like everything external to the body might penetrate it (none of us, I remember, has ever sat on the sand or on the grass without protecting her vagina). Since they have no love for humanity, I easily understand why men had to make the female sexual organ erotic, to make it acceptable.

Over the course of a few days our bodies and personalities had become inseparable, since there had been no separate knowledge of the one without the other; their unity had made our ability of getting to know each other much stronger, and very sincere. It is impossible to disguise yourself when you are naked; all attitudes you adopt when in public—your way of dressing, of wearing make-up, your unquestionable private life—are something you no longer have: you’re all there, not only for a moment, but while you move, you live and you are wanting to express yourself. The ways you express yourself, the ways you are seen, allow you to wholly and fully take place within yourself and what you say.

To me, being seen and known was a joy, my body was a fact that I couldn’t disguise, I couldn’t hide parts of it, I couldn’t ignore it excusing its nudity in the few moments I found myself alone in the bathroom or in a dressing room: it was all there, it didn’t matter whether I had dieted or I had epilated myself; I drew a lot of strength from the awareness not only that this body of mine was accepted, but that the process of getting to know me was both physical and intellectual, and that as a whole I was loved and treated with sympathy.

Before this experience, I had only been naked in front of men; I was sure I attracted them, and hence that my body would have been passable (I have a normal body), but this was because it wasn’t me who was to be accepted, not my body, but simply what I represented as a woman: it was smoke in the eyes, covering my real body. This is what gave me the courage to show myself.

Moreover, I only undressed in a specific situation which diverted all “objective” curiosity to know towards an emotional tension, a sexual possession: it was clear that I would escape the glance, since there was the blackmail of sex and emotions. What I experienced when I showed myself in that way, and to that sex, was the creation of an exclusive intimacy with the man to whom I was, on that occasion, emotionally tied, because he was the only one getting to know me through my body, and to accept me in front of the other people, the other women.

This intimacy was a very powerful device to create a cohesion with the man and a void between myself and the other women; it was also, as I already said, an illusion, since I was never truly seen (tenderness will justify your body’s defects, but the body men abstractly desired by men will always be different; this tenderness, this indulgence depends on the relationship of possession that you submit to, but it is something which gives you more strength within the physical competition with other women: whatever you are, you are his): and so I had a distorted knowledge of my body, just as I had a distorted intimacy with it.

In Vendée I was seen without blackmail, without conditions, I gave my body the right to exist for what it was, I got to know it.

Nudity is a great practice! If all of us women could experience it, if we could get men to do the same, they would obviously be involved in an awareness-raising process, they would obviously understand something new; but how could we do it?

If there had been men in Vendée our women’s tenderness would undoubtedly have been shattered, and the same would have happened to our perspectives on our bodies, to our attitudes, because we are still so weak.

Even if we had managed to make them have a positive experience, since besides this limited experience mass relations, reality and culture are still unchanged, these men would have momentarily been reabsorbed by them.
I myself start to feel Vendée as something quite far away.

We need to raise our awareness, our possibility of affecting every woman’s life: a long as there isn’t a correspondence between what men and women experience in our whole society, or we can hardly hope to obtain a better relationship with the other sex.

Nudity must be a women’s experience before it can become a mass reality.

Translated from Italian by Vincenzo Latronico