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| 127 Marginal or Mainstream? Nudity, Touch, and Sex 4 Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress. john berger If all you see is the hole . . . you look like the ass. anonymous dancer “Sinful Nudity” Is American The exposure of flesh, bodily touch, and sexuality—what CR-Activists assail as sinful in exotic dance clubs—has a long history in mainstream society . However, the concept of modesty has changed over time for most people. For example, the amount of flesh that could be displayed has increased from the feet upward until bathing suits in public reveal all but the genitalia, buttocks cleft, and areola. In the media, underwear went public, then bodies, with frontal nudity, the flaunting of body parts, and simulated sex. Of course, the meaning of nudity has a historical context. In the 1820s, public debates over nudity focused on the length of ballet dancers’ costumes . At that time, a leg was called a “limb,” and it was covered, even for sunbathing and swimming. In 1827, citizens reviled a French ballet dancer, Madame Francisque Hutin, for the “public exposure of a naked female.” She wore a long silk skirt covering loose trousers fastened at the ankle. A glimpse of a loose trouser-clad thigh when the dancer pirouetted and her skirt flew up was conflated with total nudity—yet not an inch of flesh beneath the waist showed; nor was the costume translucent.1 Public nudity appeared in the 1840s theatrical tableaux vivants: female performers posed as “classical nudes” on revolving turntable stages to allow “more revealing” views. The “living statues” only slightly changed positions . The twentieth century saw the fully nude moving body in all kinds of performing arts. The emphasis on physical fitness contributed to a body culture orientation. naked truth 128 | Moving nude dancers in popular art appeared from 1912–1929 in Florenz Ziegfeld’s revues in New York City. Flirting with naughtiness, the revues at first presented feminine nudity veiled. In 1923, Carrie Finnell, a vaudeville tap dancer, took off articles of clothing to keep the audience’s attention. Unembellished nudity was still taboo at this time, so dancers used gimmicks to give the illusion of nudity, such as anal cleft-concealing G-strings with glued pubic hair. Dancers also wore wraps that enabled them to flash nudity, delivering quick intimate glimpses. In the 1930s, Sally Rand covered and fleetingly exposed her nudity with two huge ostrich fans. A consequence of her influence was the transformation of burlesque in the late 1940s from a focus on slapstick and satiric comedy to a preoccupation with bare female flesh and the strip club, which evolved into the exotic dance gentlemen’s club. Famous strippers from that time included Lili St. Cyr, who had studied ballet; Tempest Storm (I saw her still dancing at the 2002 Miss Exotic World Pageant); and Gypsy Rose Lee, the first star performer at Minsky’s Republic Theater in 1931. Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, burlesque dancers—forerunners of exotic dancers—were pacesetters in bodily disclosure in mainstream society, and they challenged the preservation of the bourgeois, patriarchal social order. Indeed, the credit for some of women’s gains in sexual freedom over the past hundred years must go to entertainers, for it is impossible to make this kind of gain without women who are willing to work on the marginal cutting edge of society. Topless dancing, showing the full bare breast, evolved from burlesque and was prevalent by 1932. This semi-nudity has persisted as a precursor to the contemporary full nude dancing that became popular after World War II and has come to define adult entertainment exotic dance for more than fifty years. To place exotic dance in context, nudity is now an embedded tradition in theater (plays and musicals), opera, and theater dance (for example, ballet , modern, jazz). A form of costume, nudity communicates a variety of messages that comes from people’s traditional and changing ideas, behavior , and tolerance in mainstream everyday and theatrical life, as well as an individual’s experience and perception. Many non–Christian Right and other religious and non-religious groups do not consider nudity on any stage to be sinful or degrading. After all, nude bodies are part and parcel of nudist camps, many beaches, and some college antics. The amicus briefs in support of free expression in the Supreme Court case, City of Erie v...

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