What The Body Knows
A man came to me once who had spent several years working in southern India—an engineer, mid-fifties, returned to England for a decade by the time I met him. He mentioned it only in passing, but what he said lodged itself somewhere and has stayed.
He said that when he first arrived, the sight of men bathing at a public ghat, or walking half-clothed through a market, had produced in him the particular low-grade alarm of the Englishman abroad confronted with what his upbringing told him should not be visible.
And then, within a few months, it had stopped producing anything at all. The bodies were simply there. He had stopped seeing them as exposure and started seeing them as bodies. The alarm, he said, had not been about the bodies. It had been about his own looking.
He was describing a process of calibration—the eye adjusting to a different set of conventions until the thing that had seemed transgressive became unremarkable. What interests me is what he implied in passing but did not quite say: that the original alarm was not a response to the bodies themselves but to the permission the bodies seemed to be granting. If men can be seen like this here, without disturbance, without ceremony, then what does that say about the convention that makes them hidden at home? The alarm was at the convention being revealed as arbitrary.
I came across a letter, written in 1880, from a woman in Bombay to her cousin in London. Both were, by her own description, courtesans, and she wrote with the lucidity that comes from occupying a position outside polite convention while being intimately familiar with its operations. She had noticed the same thing my engineer noticed, but she had reached it from a different direction and drawn from it sharper conclusions. “Here in India,” she writes, “nudity is common to such a degree that it becomes almost invisible—the bare bodies of women or men, whether by the riverside or in market lanes, form part of the everyday scene.” Then, with what I imagine was a particular pleasure: “If ladies do not fancy the sight of naked men, pray, why do they not simply keep away from it? The very notion is so absurd as to border on the comical, yet the unwritten rules of society demand otherwise.”
What I notice in that sentence is the move from observation to mechanism. She is not merely noting that naked men exist in Indian public space. She is noting that the English convention—the production of offence at the sight of them—is a performance. “It is far easier to feign offence,” she continues, “than to confront one’s own desires openly.” The feigned offence is doing something. It is maintaining a position. And the position is maintained because the alternative—acknowledging openly what is actually being felt—would require a kind of honesty the social arrangement cannot accommodate.
She was writing about women’s desire, primarily. But the mechanism she describes is not gender-specific, and the men who came to me over thirty years were living inside a version of it. The performance of not-desiring, or not-being-desirable, or not-acknowledging-the-desire-of-others: these were things I watched men manage with varying degrees of success and discomfort.
The discomfort was not always about sex in any specific sense. It was more diffuse than that—a general unease with the fact of being wanted, or of wanting, or of being in a room where both were present and acknowledged. Several men told me they had never in their lives been in a situation where their body was simply attended to. The sentence was always offered as an explanation for awkwardness. What it seemed to describe was the experience of a convention lifting—the same calibration my engineer described, compressed into an hour.
The 1880 letter writer understood this convention structurally. She was a professional reader of male desire—not its object in the passive sense, but its student. What she had observed, moving between London and Bombay, was that the convention shaping male behaviour around the body was not a fixed property of men but a social arrangement that varied with latitude and could be suspended under the right conditions. “Prudery is but a cloak for unacknowledged appetite,” she writes, and the appetite she is describing includes the appetite to see, which is a different thing from the appetite to do, though the two are related in ways the convention is specifically designed to prevent being examined.
She has a line about the rise of prostitution in both cities—she notes it as evidence that men clearly want what the convention says they should not—which interests me less than the observation around it. What she is cataloguing is a gap between the official position and the actual one, and she is doing so from a position that exists precisely in that gap. Her profession, she argues, is “a token of a secret honesty in a world that prefers illusion.”
Secret honesty. The work is honest because it acknowledges what the convention denies—that appetite exists, that the body has desires that do not disappear when they are not spoken. The honesty is secret because the social arrangement requires it to remain so.
The men who came to me were, in this sense, also practising a form of secret honesty. They had made a decision that acknowledged something about themselves which the convention asked them to keep undisclosed. Some of them found this straightforwardly manageable—they arrived, they were present, they left, with no more ceremony than a man making any other appointment.
Others carried the acknowledgement differently, as if it had required considerable negotiation with themselves to arrive. A few, over the years, described the experience of telling no one—not a partner, not a friend, not anyone in their ordinary lives—not because what they were doing was harmful but because the available language made it impossible to describe without it immediately becoming something it was not.
I think about what the convention costs in precisely this respect: not the appetite it denies, which finds its way regardless, but the language it prevents. The letter writer from Bombay had language for desire—her own and other people’s—because her position outside polite society had given it to her. The men who came to me often did not. They had arrived at a clear desire and a clear decision to act on it, and no way to describe either that did not require more explanation than they wanted to give. So they said nothing, or they said almost nothing, and the unsaid sat in the room with them.
Alongside the letter, is the question she opens without quite naming: what the body is, in the traditions that shaped the men I worked with. She contrasts Bombay’s visibility with London’s concealment, and the contrast implies two different understandings of what the body means when it is seen. In Bombay, by her account, the body in public space is simply the body—neither shamed nor sacralised, present in the way trees are present or water is present.
In London, the body is managed, dressed, hidden, revealed only on specific terms in specific contexts. What this management implies is that the body is not neutral. It carries something. Whether what it carries is sacred or shameful—those being, historically, the two available elevated categories—seems to depend on the tradition doing the carrying.
The sacred and the shameful have had a complicated co-existence in the Western account of the male body. Michelangelo’s David is a sacred object—the human form at its highest expression of civic and spiritual possibility. The penises in The Last Judgement were painted over on the orders of a Pope. The same tradition that produced the David found the genitalia in the Sistine Chapel too much to leave uncovered.
Sacred and shameful, in the same building, managed by the same institution, simultaneously. The men who came to me sometimes seemed to be holding both positions at once, about their own bodies—a sense that the body was, or had once been, something of significance, and a sense that it was also something requiring apology. Several men said things that sounded like pride and embarrassment in the same sentence, about the same thing.
The letter writer does not use the words sacred or shameful. She uses honest and illusion, appetite and cloak. Her vocabulary is commercial and theatrical—she is describing a market and a performance, not a theology. What I find in that vocabulary is a clarity that the theological terms tend to obscure. The body is not, for her, a site of spiritual meaning. It is a site of appetite. The appetite is real. The conventions around it are constructed. The construction has costs—it produces hypocrisy, it produces the vice she mentions thriving in shadows, it produces women who cannot acknowledge desire and men who cannot acknowledge being desired.
I do not know whether the men who came to me had thought about any of this. Most of them, I would guess, had not—not in these terms, not in terms of the sacred and the shameful, not in terms of the conventions and their costs. They had simply arrived at a decision, in a life shaped by all of this, and acted on it. But occasionally a man would say something that suggested the territory was not entirely unexamined.
One man, lying on the table late in an afternoon that had turned quiet, said: “I’ve been thinking about whether this is allowed.” He meant something personal—whether it was allowed for him specifically, in the life he had built—and not a legal or institutional question. But the word allowed hung there in a way that seemed to carry more than its immediate meaning. Allowed by whom, he did not say. I did not ask.
The letter writer from Bombay would have had a brisk answer, I think. She had watched men decide what was allowed for themselves, in both cities, from a position that gave her a clear view of the gap between what the convention permitted and what actually happened. Her conclusion was unsentimental: the convention obscures appetite, appetite persists regardless, and the honesty that acknowledges this directly is kept secret because disclosure would require the convention to account for itself. She does not moralise about this. She observes it, with what reads as a kind of professional equanimity.
What was allowed, for the man on my table, was something he was still working out. He left without having resolved it, as far as I could tell.
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