quotations about nudity
Women who use public nudity for social commentary, art and protest are myth-busting along many dimensions: active, not passive; strong not vulnerable; together, not isolated; public, not private; and, usually, angry, not alluring. The threat that female toplessness and self-articulated nudity poses is culturally defined and can be culturally redefined so that people recognize that the offense to morality is misogyny, not nudity.
SORAYA CHEMALY
"Why Female Nudity Isn't Obscene, But Is Threatening to a Sexist Status Quo", Huffington Post, June 22, 2014
In the contemplation of nudes, we congratulate ourselves upon the beauty of which human beings are capable. They reassure us about ourselves, about Being. We are a little lower than the angels, true, but notice that we can get along without that suspect radiance, equal parts paint and literature, on which the angels lean so heavily. The human body is, or can be, a sufficiency.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Nudes: An Introduction to Exquisite Creatures"
I find people better looking without clothes than with clothes. You can go to a gym and go to a steam room and you see someone and think, He's really handsome. Then he puts on his clothes. Some weird pants. A thumb ring. Some weird socks. And it's gone!
TOM FORD
Vanity Fair, March 2006
Religious strictures are often the source of attitudes toward nudity. Society urges the wearing of clothing partially as a means of controlling the powerful sexual urges that are feared will be released by nudity, causing chaotic behavior.
PATRICIA GARFIELD
The Universal Dream Key
Many displayed in their nudity traces of their past: scars of knife thrusts in the belly, starbursts of guns hot wounds, ridges of the razor cuts of love, Caesarean sections sewn up by butchers. Some of them had their young children with them during the day, those unfortunate fruits of youthful defiance or carelessness, and they took off their children's clothes as soon as they were brought in so they would not feel different in that paradise of nudity.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Love in the Time of Cholera
Halfway measures, such as loincloths or fig leaves, remain more titillating than complete nudity.
PAUL LUDWIG
Eros and Polis
Nudity is the costume of lovers and corpses.
MASON COOLEY
City Aphorisms
The experience of nudity does not refer to a hidden existent but to that which does not belong to the register of possible, present existents: Erotic profanation is a nocturnal event. What manifests in the erotic night is nothing less than that which, because it remains secret, beyond any presence, real or possible, unfolds itself in the mode of that which is not yet. Erotic nudity uncovers the clandestine, which refuses to give itself, and it is in this way that nudity is profanation, that is, the paradoxical coincidence of the hidden and the discovered, of the secret that remains hidden despite being discovered.
RAOUL MOATI
Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity
Sometimes we sit and wonder in our idle way what in the mischief Eve did when the cold weather came.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs