In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
(Cole Porter, 1934)
Over the years, as hemlines rise and fall--some say with the stock market--everyone has an opinion. Two prominent ones are: displaying more of the body means more sexual freedom and that is good; and displaying more of the body means more sexual freedom and that is bad. Another possibility is that there is no necessary relationship between the amount of skin open to view and sexual behavior.
Clearly there are cultural differences in display of the body, both around the world and within a given society over time-witness changes in the United States from the 1950s to the 1960s.
One evening in the 1970s while I was living in Brazil, I knocked on the door of the wrong house, and the man who opened it was wearing only his underpants. He directed me to the correct address in a matter-of-fact manner, and as far as I could tell he viewed our interaction as unremarkable.
Another time in New York, I was seated near an elderly Irish Catholic nun at a luncheon for a prominent Brazilian businessman. Someone asked him about Carnival, and the nun grumbled, "I've heard about Carnival." The honoree answered her. "It's true, Sister, that during Carnival some women dance in the streets without any clothes on. But you have to understand-in February it is very hot in Brazil."
In the United States today, there are some places where a woman can nurse her infant in public and others where she would be arrested for indecent exposure. There is similar disagreement over whether parents' photos of giving their baby a bath are harmless or constitute child pornography. Or whether anthropologists' pictures of tropical peoples in their normal topless or naked state are scientific documents or pornography.
Most Americans seem to feel that women who want to go topless in public should be forced to cover up because their breasts are too sexually provocative to be permitted. A majority of Americans also think it is wrong to force women to wear the hijab or burka because their hair or arms or legs or face are not provocative enough to warrant government interference. Many small tropical cultures on the one hand and large Muslim governments on the other would beg to differ.
I heard of a male American anthropologist a couple of decades ago who was doing field work with a tribe in the interior of Brazil-probably the Mehinaku. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and was at the side of a river with a group of men whose only clothing was a kind of string belt made from palm fronds. They jumped in the river to swim, and he stripped and jumped in to join them. They were shocked! Shocked! He was naked! He wasn't wearing his string!
Image source: Nitin Madhav
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Group_of_Women_Wearing_Bur...
