Notes on the Nude

1. 1. Body as sight. Regular corporal interactions with the mirror yield criticism, depression, more resolutions. Never a moment of full consciousness without a tinge. Never naked without thought, without care. The closest unconscious moment of nakedness pre-memory; everything that follows a result of the bitten apple.

   I am three and standing on the stool brushing my teeth, sporting Mickey Mouse briefs and nothing else, the photograph my only reference since I cannot remember. Deliberately cloaked underneath my towel, I am ten, my bruised knees surreptitiously evaluated against the dips and folds of the women in the YMCA locker room. I am fifteen, Alicia Silverstone in Clueless enlightening me to the power of shruggingly naked shoulders on the adolescent male, that gap, that sliver of skin the bait. I am seventeen, Catholic girls’ school skin prohibition duly assumed; good student and bored girl. It gets worse with age.

2. 2. “Breaking the Rules,” a conference exploring Gender, Power, and Politics in the Films of Lars von Trier. Panel I: Witches, Nymphs, and Mothers. A misleadingly mystical title for the PowerPoint visuals to follow. Three women present (mid-thirties, mid-forties, mid-fifties), casually dropping buzz-worthy “vulva,” “sadomasochism,” and prohibited, politically incorrect “cunt.” Film stills make these words larger-than-life: nudity in visceral flesh and hairy excess. Von Trier is held up against Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Smith, and Judith Butler. Archetypes of nymphs, bad mothers, and sexual outlaws evaluated through theories of political nymphomania, pathological melancholy, and the sexual id. The films show sexuality and skin—sin—as conflated, confused, made out to be the same. Consensus is von Trier as a polarizing yet visionary director who could—depending on interpretation—fall on either side of misogynist readings. He—he—is always reliable for cinematic porn and female bodies as sites of conflict.

3. 3. Venus bathes accompanied by nymphs, cherubs, attendants; rosy and freshly scrubbed, surprised and sometimes alone. Roman goddess of love, originally Greek, masquerading by other names, she looks down and inward, solitary and disinterested to those looking. Interactions ritualized, others cleanse her, anoint her, observe her. Embodied sex. Inspiration for every woman’s interactions with the mirror and camera, Venus captured in a moment of perfect surprise with leg extended, hip cocked, arm raised: spectacular.

   Born pale pink and lightly warmed in the French and Italian tradition, Venus tempts. Love Goddess flushes. Botticelli’s Venus rises from the sea for Lorenzo de’Medici, a fully formed woman atop conch-colored shell, self-absorbed and blissfully naked. Direct contrast to marble Modest Venus, the slightly different Venus de’Medici, a figure starkly single, hands held at breast and apex from unseen observer. She emits loneliness, unspeakable, unknown amidst constant observation: sex evoked standing atop a seashell, lying in a conch, iteration upon iteration.

   The artistic canon puts women on display. Bodies for consumption. Flesh precedent set and normalized by Eve—pre-clothing, pre-hair—extrapolated into goddesses, bathers. Hidden alabaster skin, curves of breasts not porn if art.

4. 4. The hide-and-reveal of half-clothed bodies is exemplified in any lingerie commercial. Barbies® smooth and sleek, masking to accentuate. Victoria’s Secret and Agent Provocateur profit not from veiled body parts but their hiding; models tempt with allusions to nipples behind gauzy fabrics, minimally voluptuous hanger-like and therefore not-erotic women. All are clean and carefully hairless to avoid animalistic visuals. Publicity normalizes almost-exposed skin, pseudo-nudity to sell the possibility of consummation. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show annual guilt—women jealously wishing to reveal as confidently, men reproachfully interested—parades underwear as a second skin, the more natural one, nymphs with massive wings to distract and reflect body dips and curves. Newly envious, vacant eyes on a creature to be desired, toned and tanned body not substantial enough to be emulated.

   The opposite end of the spectrum, Burkhas curiously arouse. Woman reduced to peeking eyes, body an unknown wonderland beneath black billowing fabric, marked. Bodyless she indicates her womanness through total coverage, visible through invisibility. Midday heat, there could be nothing underneath, a bedouin’s aba for the breeze. Practical temptation of...