The Surprisingly Serious Side Of Stripping In Public

Being naked in public can be fun, or naughty, or provocative, or health-giving, or political. It is almost always illegal. And, as anyone who has visited a nudist resort can testify, it is rarely, if ever, sexy. But, as Philip Carr-Gomm reveals in his academic romp through two millenniums of public exhibitionism from the ancient Greeks to animal-rights activists, you can be naked anywhere. You are only nude if someone is watching. Nakedness on its own is straightforward — it’s the context and the audience of nudity that make it interesting.

In religion, for example, there have been examples of ritualistic nakedness in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Jainism. Each faith uses the naked body in a different way. As Carr-Gomm says: “Contradictions and paradoxes abound. In religion nakedness can signify shamefulness?or it can symbolise innocence, a lack of shame, and even a denial of the body.” And, while the meaning of nudity has fluctuated, the image has never lost its power.

Carr-Gomm is at his most interesting when discussing nudity as politics. The story of Lady Godiva — whose husband said he would amend unfair taxes if she would ride through the streets of Coventry naked — may not be historically accurate, but it seems to have been the template for much of the naked political activism of the late 20th century. Just as Lady Godiva did, the modern protester embraces the supposed shame of being unclothed in order to lay bare their basic righteousness.

Likewise, argues Carr-Gomm, Michelangelo’s statue of David, which was installed in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria at the beginning of the 16th century, was the ultimate expression of the nude as a totem of defiance. “At that time,” he writes, “Florence was threatened on every side by more powerful states, and the statue conveyed a strong message of innate power and its potential for effortless victory.”

The American presidents learnt quickly that nudity is power. Benjamin Franklin preached the “gospel of ventilation”; John Quincy Adams enjoyed skinny-dipping in the Potomac most mornings; Theodore Roosevelt encouraged his entire cabinet to follow Adams’s example; and JFK used to hold pool parties in the nude. Lyndon B Johnson seems to have been the most avid exhibitionist, frequently bullying visitors to the White House, including the evangelist Billy Graham, into a costumeless swim, during which he would refer to his own penis as “Jumbo”.

Oxford dons also used to enjoy a spot of air-bathing, at a secluded male-only spot on the river Cherwell called Parson’s Pleasure. Once, probably in the 1940s, Maurice Bowra, the distinguished classicist, was reclining with fellow academics (said to have included Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John Sparrow) when some women students floated by on a punt. Bowra covered his face with a handkerchief, while the others scrambled to cover their genitals. When asked about his reaction, Bowra said: “I don’t know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford, I, at least, am known by my face.”

Bowra’s false modesty brings to mind the famous picture of the Australian Michael O’Brien, who streaked at the 1974 England v France rugby match at Twickenham and was photographed, memorably, with a policeman’s helmet covering his own. We learn that O’Brien streaked for a bet and now heartily regrets his misdemeanour, because it gave rise to a whole generation of exhibitionists. The accompanying picture of the topless Erica Roe following in his footsteps at Twickenham eight years later seems to underline his point, although Carr-Gomm is not nearly as dour as O’Brien. He sees the exhibitionist stripper as a joyful addition to national life.

It is no surprise, says Carr-Gomm, that O’Brien and Roe became notorious in the 1970s and 1980s. Nudity as a viable, if subversive, public act began in the late 1960s, when sexual freedom “seemed not only psychologically sensible, but also one of the few antidotes available to counteract the existential despair of the nuclear age”. It’s not clear whether this particular form of gloom was on Sally Cooper’s mind when she ran across Richmond Bridge in London in 1974 dressed only in jewellery and a smile, but she knew all about the viciousness of authority when a police dog bit her on the backside.

Certainly, public nudity seemed a little more life-affirming back then than it does now. Spencer Tunick’s photographs of masses of unclothed volunteers huddling for warmth, or standing on a melting glacier, are oddly lifeless. Antony Gormley’s identikit cast-iron nude figures are, for some reason, more moving. One is struck, when watching his sculptures disappear with the tide on Crosby beach, by how powerful an image a simple, naked figure presents. And then you see that some wag has painted the sculpture’s genitals green, and you are back to the peculiarly British notion of the nude as a figure of fun.

In perhaps the most insightful passage of the book, Carr-Gomm recounts the story of 40 women who, in 2004, marched naked to the army barracks in Imphal, India, to protest about a murder and rape by soldiers of the Assam Rifles. The press carried the story, but few Indian papers used photographs. One commentator observed that the Indian press “could not stomach the thought of showing middle-class Indian women (read ‘mothers’) naked! And this in a country where almost every newspaper has a scantily dressed woman poised in a corner of the front page”.

We, of course, can see the picture in this book. Indeed, there are 143 wonderful illustrations to accompany the text. These pictures are important because Carr-Gomm is an academic. For the most part he overcomes this impediment, but naturally there are moments when his prose dries the eyes. However, even in the dustier moments — when one is reading about how “as symbols of power and vulnerability?the genitals have always represented the final frontier of nakedness” — one’s experience is lightened by the prospect that, every dozen pages or so, there will be a fresh crop of images of exhibitionists on horses, or carrying loud-hailers, or playing the guitar. Truly, this should have been a coffee-table book with captions.