h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Flashers don't always (in fact, I think possibly not that often) have erections. The nature of the flash is that one is being forced to look at something that the flasher wants you to see against your will. It's state is relatively irrelevant.

This is another thing that would not work if nakedness wasn't still so damned taboo. I have a friend who wears a bikini in the bath with her baby daughter. Taking the sex out of nakedness (in general) would do everybody a lot of good. When it isn't illicit, it loses many aspects that make it exciting in and of itself. A bare rump is nothing to be excited about *except in appropriate situations*. (well, unless you're a teenager, but then carpet is something to get excited about, isn't it?) unless you are not allowed to see a bare rump.

There is a reason why a lady who wants to dress provocatively should wear more than she thinks she should, just very carefully placed to hide what she wants seen...

Quote "There is a reason why a lady who wants to dress provocatively should wear more than she thinks she should, just very carefully placed to hide what she wants seen..."

That reminds me of the perceptive comment of a pupil (female) on a Nazi pseudo-scientific justification for the 3K's policy re girls and women in the Third Reich that said that in Nature birds make themselves attractive for their mates.

As she pointed out, amongst birds especially, it is the males that males by Nature respendently beautiful, while females are rather dowdy. And sexual arousal seems to be largely a matter of responding to the breeding season with the chemistry of being "in heat" rather than any particular physical charms triggering sexual advances.

There is of course a long history of "Peacock Dressing" for males in various cultures: and this continued amongst the Early Victorians. The death of Prince Albert was perhaps the key element in turning male fashions towards sobriety and seriousness, while the "trophy wife" and "daughters" could still be "enhanced" with extravagant dress, jewellry etc- all powerful testimonies to the "virility" of the male.

Last tuesday pm I listened to much of the Proms performance of "My Fair Lady" which is based on the Bernard Shaw play in which Professor Higgins sets out to "prove himself" in a version of this tradition.

Cass

"The death of Prince Albert was perhaps the key element in turning male fashions towards sobriety and seriousness"

Two words: Beau. Brummel. Died 20 years before Albert and was the innovator of understated, sober clothing for men in the 19th Century.

Nevertheless the Early Victorians have been compared to the Elizabethans in terms of their dress code. See for example R.J.White's "Peterloo to the Great Exhibition" or Dr. Dodds "Age of Paradox". Benjamin Disraeli was perhaps an extreme in keeping this "Young England" look going. We had largely forgotten until the recent "Blunt movie" that Queen Victoria was initially a young and quite fiesty Queen . Dr Dodds observed of Victoria and Albert that it was quite unusual in any age for a Royal Court to be told at 10.30 pm every evening that the Queen and her Consort dimissed them for it was bedtime- and they had the pregnancies to prove that it was not just for daily prayers and sleep.

As for "Beau Brummel" the nomenclature itself pays tribute to the fact that he was an acclaimed "looker", and probably marked the change from the Augustan formality of the Georgian Age to an Age of Romance rather than to the late Victorian sobriety and stiffness. The Romantic [and Revolutionary] Age went for a more natural elegance that still charms people in the screen portrayals of the world of Jane Austen.

Cass

The transition from Georgian pomp and ostentation to stereotypical Victorian sobriety may not have been possible without Beau Brummel's clean, understated style of dress. Remember that for all the myths we have today about the Victorian men being universally stuffy and sober there was still a great style and elegance to their dress... even the famously straight-laced Ruskin wore velvet collars and other embellishments that stereotypes would have us believe all good Victorians rejected.

Yes I'm with you Mr. D. I like the top hats. There were quite a variety. One of the characters in the film of Dickens' Little Dorrit, wears a very tall one; he's quite short.

The upper middle and upper classes males wore some cool gear. And I find really sexy some of the stuff the women wore..though it must have been hellish uncomfortable.

Interesting. I offer this observation - people do get used to different levels of temperature. My grandparents house was always absolutely freezing - no central heating, fire only in the living room, even in minus temps in winter, and according to my mother it was ever thus. They used to walk around not naked but not wearing nearly as many clothes as I, the woman whose house is warmly central heatingised, felt was necessary under the circs, and I was still jolly cold.

On the other hand, in my student days, when we didn't turn the heating on for anything other than minus ten, my parents central heated house was always horribly overheated in the holidays.

That sort of thing.

Actually the Dickens' observation is a reminder that we now tend to see Dickens' characters as somewhat "over-the-top": but what R.J. White's widow wrote about her husband's study of 1819-1851 that was published posthumously was that those years were a story a great recovery from the loss of nerve within English Society which had been the story of his previous work "Waterloo to Peterloo". And works like those of Samuel Smiles informed an age when individuals and groups could genuinely transform their world.

The story that Dr Dodds wrote about the 1840's, written in c1951 with all the admiration of a "Yank" who could not really grasp just how the British had held their nerve when they stood alone against Nazi- Germany, was a story of a decade of increasing confidence in the ability of people to work their way up out of the abyss individually and collectively. And mention of Ruskin brings one to his crucial role in championing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ,some of whose work quite consciously celebrates the "Gospel of Work" of the original "Yes we can!" age.

I seem to be coming back frequently to the closing remark of Donald Read in his 1967 study of Cobden and Bright. He wrote of Cobden that he "stood out as an inspiration not only for his own time but for future time, including our own. The era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism, which began after his death, and which culminated in two global wars, is now seen as a disastrous interlude. In an important sense the world of the 1960's is continuing from the point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860's a century ago".

The Sixties were another New Dawn with promises that were not fulfilled: but at least there was light and hope and promise and for a while, the feeling that a better world was possible because of the vitality of people at the grass roots and popular level. And many have "Kept the Faith".

Cass

I really must go to a nude beach one of these days.

Or, in France, there's a whole naturist seaside resort: Cap d'Agde.

TRiG.

I'd like to get back to the first post and the mention of shame and such. What nobody mentioned yet is that although some 'natives' may wear almost nothing they are also still subject to shame. Maybe they 'feel naked' when a certain piece of jewellery is gone, or paintings, or a little piece of cloth that is almost not big enough to mention for one of the western cultures. Feeling naked and ashamed is something we learn and that connects humans to a culture or group of people. Wveryone who does not know how to 'dress' properly, paint their face correctly or whatever is certainly a foreigner or someone who stands outside of the society in question. I do agree that being naked should not be seen as something bad, but it is not only a thing of the western culture. It's a very human thing.

>>I really must go to a nude beach one of these days.

It's strange that society has such varying standards regarding clothing according to where people are. On a beach, sometimes you can be nude, usually women can be topless, and bikinis are always acceptable. But wear a bikini in the high street and heads will turn, and special laws had to be made to allow blouses to be opened, for breastfeeding.

Taking up that theme of the social pressures towards conforming to established ideas and traditions:

I have always been rather bemused by the striking amount of mutilation of what is "Natural" and "normal" within societies that are living apparently "savage" lives "as Nature intended".

Credo Mutwa in "Confessions of a Zulu Witch Doctor" ascribes much of the widespread forms of mutilation and deformity that seem to spread right down the Indian Ocean shore of Eastern Africa to the thousands of years of slave-raiding to which the continent had been subjected. In particular this often seems to involve girls/women: and Mutwa suggests that the mutilations were deliberately intended to make the African women unattractive or useless- as in the female circumcision practiced in parts of East Africa that presumably made the girls "damaged goods" as far as the sex trade in virgins was concerned. [All those nubile Nubians that were prized in Ancient Egypt]


The same may have applied to West Africa and the transaharan slave-trade, so that many of my pupils in the Seventies who came from West Africa, particularly Ghana, had tribal scars. As tribes fought and raided against each other to trade north to the Islamic world and then later south to the Atlantic trade, tribal scars were one way to identify women and children who were more likely to taken off into slavery than men.


My own thinking had rather tended to the view that "The Devil makes work for idle hands": and that the pressure/desire to create and do something original in places where the possibilities are so limited [not least because populations do not put down permanent roots] forces people to use the human body as the raw material to be shaped, sculpted, moulded..

It is a thesis that I see justified to some extent in these difficult times when the frustrated and denied impulse to "do something" is forcing especially tatooing on all kinds of people who seem to have nothing better to do with their time, money etc.

Gold teeth used to be a West African thing. One day a pupil fell over in my classroom and to my horror got up with one of his front teeth smashed in half. His face lit up with joy- though surely it must have hurt like Hell, and he immediately saw that his parents would now have to pay for him to have a gold tooth there.

Cass

In reference to both TRiG's and Tav's posts...I can recommend Brighton nudist beach.

It's weird how 'naked' people look wearing clothes, when accidentally stumbling upon it.

This thread reminds me of an experience I had one summer afternoon in the mid-1970s.

I was at one of Sydney's least accessible nudist beaches, when a light rain began to fall. I was alone, although there were several other people scattered around the beach. It was getting late, and the unspoken consensus was that it was time to leave.

As I gathered my bits and pieces, a couple called out an invitation to go back to their place for a cup of tea. Having nothing better to do, I accepted along with three or four others. No doubt, I had sex on my mind...

Back at the flat, we were made comfortable, given our choice of tea, and our host rose to put an album on the stereo. I didn't recognise the cover and was fascinated to know what kind of sound he thought appropriate for the occasion.

He played this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGFlACG6qvI

It's *so warm* in the UK right now that I just spent 10 minutes naked in my garden, looking at the stars. And I saw a meteorite

But generally around here it's only warm enough for a handful of nights a year to do that.

I don't know, is my answer to the OP. I don't have a problem with nakedness per se. But clothes are practical in this climate, when cooking, and, frankly, with my figure. If my front isn't properly harnassed I run a real risk of dangling into something or taking somebody's eye out. Even fully clothed I recently managed to lock my keyboard *without using my hands* (entirely unintentionally) - the consequences of naked cooking really don't bear thinking about.

Mol

Further to practicalities, why on earth are proper pockets not really standard equipment in female atire?

[And we can discount 'Andy Murray pockets' that will not contain balls in moments of action and excitement]

I dare say that most societies in which people live next to naked have no locks on their doors. Probably no doors come to that.

Cass

"Further to practicalities, why on earth are proper pockets not really standard equipment in female atire?"

Because it is expected that women will be carrying handbags.

Yes agreed. But things that people "carry" rather than wear they tend to put down. Perhaps it could be argued that women need [needed] to habitually carry more things than men, but not everything has a 'key significance', and my wife frequently panics because she has changed handbags and suddenly realises that her keys are not where she expected.

Our most recent key-drama started a couple of months ago when she could not find her car key, and we had to share one. We discovered that a replacement car key these days costs about £170.

Happily she eventually came upon her key under some undergrowth on a garden path where she had gone to take advantage of a bit more gardening time because I was late cooking the lunch.

Cass

>>..because I was late cooking the lunch. <<

So it's all your fault then.

Yeah, how do women do that - they can turn
cause and effect on its head and somehow
blame you for everything that goes wrong.


~jwf~

jwf

That of course opens a whole "can of worms"..

I wonder to what degree the whole question of shame, blame, fault etc is related to the way that the female contribution to Human Life has often sought to arm society with such imponderables that can defy the "might is right" tendency of the virile and 'macho' masculine world. Samson shorn of his locks etc.

Eve got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and they discovered that they were naked.

I was pondering last night (not for the first time) the fact that the French word for menstrual periods is "regles"- regulators, laws, rules, things that bind women to "the system"- possibly the Lunar Cycles that impact on all fluid movements on Earth.

I recall the very strong reaction of female colleagues in my last all girls school when I observed that I felt it quite problematic when an adolescent girl asked if she could be excused in the middle of a lesson, contrary to school rules. As a husband and father of a daughter I knew that these things are not always easily predictable. Rubbish came the answer from my colleagues. You just have to learn how to cope with the facts of life was very much the theme: even when things like headaches and PMT came up. All females should carry aspirins in their bags.

In terms of this thread I am not sure that there are too many "savage societies" with people living according to Nature in which women walk around naked at that time of the month. It seems fairly common for the women to go away and hide for a few days.

But menstruation is inextricably connected with the fact that the real pulse of life flows through women like a great stream that men can dive into and out again at will.

To some extent this changed with "The Pill", but only to some extent. The traditional female roles of nurturing and nursing life do seem to promote an awareness that there are things that do have to be done every day regardless of the monotony or boredom involved. I have seen it assumed (based upon the practices observed by travellers and anthropologists) that it was probably women who unlocked the secrets of cultivating plants to guarantee the future, while the men folk hunted and killed for the present thrill and feast.

But "eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die" is the male legacy that hangs over us all. "Men must work and women must weep though the harbour bar be moaning." For Nature makes us relatively expendable and it is the females who are the best guarantee of the survival of the species. The meek shall inherit the Earth.

Cass