The Naked Eye
I want to begin with the binoculars, because the binoculars are the most honest thing in either letter.
In 1855, a Lady wrote to her sister about a man who had been swimming in the sea without his clothes. The local vicar had conveyed to the swimmer the distress of certain maiden ladies whose house faced the water. The swimmer, a foreigner and therefore already suspect, promised to go further out. The next day, the vicar returned to report that the ladies could still see him plainly. By means, the letter notes with a precision that seems to have escaped its author, of excellent binoculars.
The writer draws the obvious conclusion. She does not draw it as a joke, or if she does, the joke has arrived without her quite intending it. “The greatest danger,” she writes to her sister, “is not the naked man in the water but the naked eyes of the ladies ashore.” The naked eye. The phrase performs a small reversal—it is the eye, not the body, that is unclothed—and in that reversal the letter contains more than it may have intended. The maiden ladies with the excellent binoculars are not the victims of the swimmer’s exposure. They are the audience, equipped for better viewing, monitoring the situation with what the letter presents as distress and what the binoculars suggest was something else.
The sister who is being addressed, the Duchess of Mallard, has in her own letter already established her position. She thanks God that “we are not to be embarrassed by the sight of such works as those that display the male form in its natural state.” The male form in its natural state. The phrase positions the undressed body as a problem for the viewer—specifically, as a source of potential embarrassment. The embarrassment is hers, attributed to a general “we.” And the solution she endorses is removal: the paintings and sculptures should be kept in private galleries, away from the uneducated public whose passions might be inflamed. The educated, presumably, could be trusted not to be inflamed. Or could be trusted to manage whatever was inflamed. Taste and decorum and decency were the instruments of management.
The Duchess invokes the Proclamation Society’s opposition to Sunday gallery opening. She mentions the “appalling sin of goosing” in a way that suggests she knows what it is, and that the knowledge itself requires the same management she is proposing for the art. The term goosing, which in one usage of the period referred to the practice of sexual contact between men, appears in a letter whose stated purpose is to argue that the unclothed male form should be kept away from people who might be inflamed by it. The letter is performing the management it advocates. The knowledge is there—the word is there—and it is immediately covered by the advocacy for covering.
What I notice in both letters is the structure I have been tracing throughout these essays: the body’s visibility managed through the language of protection. The Duchess is not protecting herself, or not primarily. She is protecting the uneducated, whose passions are the problem. She is protecting public decency, which the Proclamation Society is heroically defending. She is protecting the nation from the disservice of allowing its people to see what art contains. The protection is always from something else, and in the gap between the stated danger and the actual response—in the gap between the concern about the uneducated public and the personal knowledge of “goosing,” in the gap between the distress of the maiden ladies and the excellent binoculars—the actual situation is legible to anyone who wants to read it.
The sister’s letter is smarter, and the smartness consists in naming the actual situation with a precision that the Duchess’s letter carefully avoids. The greatest danger is not the naked man in the water but the naked eyes of the ladies ashore. She is observing that the concern is not about the body that is visible but about the viewer who is looking. The regulation is protecting the viewer from their own response to what they see, not the viewer from the body. This is the thing I have been circling across many of these essays. The management of the male body in public space was never quite about the body. It was about the response to the body, and the anxiety about what that response revealed.
In an earlier essay I wrote about Parsons’ Pleasure, the stretch of the Cherwell at Oxford where, for many years, men bathed without clothes. The sister mentions it in her letter as “that odious place known here in Oxford as ‘Parsons Pleasure’” where the younger dons “disrobe and plash about in the all-together.” She has forbidden her daughters their ordinary walks for fear of being perverted by the spectacle. The word perverted is interesting here. Not aroused, not disturbed, not distressed—perverted. The spectacle of the male body would corrupt the daughters, turning them from their proper development into something else, something deflected from the course they should have followed. The body’s visibility as an agent of corruption, bending the young female mind from its proper direction.
What I notice about Parsons’ Pleasure is that it continued to exist, as a place for nude male bathing, until 1991. The dons were plashing about there for well over a century after the sister wrote her letter. The odious place persisted through the reign of the sister’s anxiety, and through several subsequent reigns of anxiety, and was finally closed not because of moral pressure but because the university decided the site had other uses. The body plashing in the Cherwell managed to outlast a very great deal of institutional concern about its doing so.
The swimmer in the sister’s letter, the unnamed foreigner who promised to go further out and then did not go far enough, is the essay’s most interesting figure. He has been told, through the mediating agency of the vicar, that his visible presence in the sea is causing distress. He responds by moving. He moves to a distance that he presumably considers sufficient. The maiden ladies, with their excellent binoculars, disagree. The situation produces the sentence: the greatest danger is not the naked man in the water but the naked eyes of the ladies ashore.
I have been thinking about that sentence in relation to what I observed over thirty years of working with men. The anxiety about the male body’s visibility was never, in my experience, primarily produced by the body. It was produced by the anticipated response of the viewer—and specifically, by the anxiety about what that response would reveal about the viewer. The Duchess’s letter manages this by insisting on the uneducated public’s susceptibility to inflamed passions, implying that the educated are immune. The sister’s letter, rather more honestly, notes that the viewer’s own desire is the thing requiring management, not the body that provokes it.
I have been asked, occasionally, whether I thought about how what I was doing appeared to the culture around me. I did, and what I thought about was exactly this: that the anxiety about my work was rarely articulated as anxiety about what happened in the room, which was a private matter between adults who had decided to be in the room together. The articulated anxiety was always about something else—about what the existence of such work implied, about what it said about the men who came, about what it might encourage. The protection was always for someone else, always from an effect on a third party who was never quite identified. The maiden ladies were always distressed. The excellent binoculars were never mentioned.
I notice that both letters use the word “distress” or its variants to describe the response of the women who are troubled by the male body’s visibility. The maiden ladies are “much distressed in their minds.” The Duchess gives thanks that we are not to be “embarrassed.” The distress and the embarrassment are real, I think—I do not want to dismiss them as pure performance. But the binoculars are also real, and the binoculars were purchased, and the binoculars were kept at a position from which the swimmer could be observed, and the binoculars were used daily enough that the swimmer’s change of distance was noticed and found insufficient.
The management of the male body and the desire for the male body coexist in both letters, as they coexisted throughout the tradition I have been examining. The tradition was not simply repressive. It was also constitutive—it generated, around the bodies it managed, a specific quality of charged interest that simpler visibility would not have produced. The Duchess knew about goosing. The sister knew about Parsons’ Pleasure. The maiden ladies had excellent binoculars. The knowledge was present in the system, managed by the same system that claimed to be protecting people from the knowledge.
Men who came to me arrived from inside this system. Not the system as these two women experienced it in 1855, which had its own specific textures that I cannot access from outside. But the system as it had been transmitted and modified across the subsequent century and a half—arriving as residue, as habit, as the particular quality of not-quite-acknowledged awareness that I noticed in men who carried both the desire and the management of the desire in the same body, sometimes in adjacent sentences.
The man who came, who undressed with a quality of casual decisiveness that suggested he had long since resolved the relevant question—and who then, getting dressed to leave, said something like “I shouldn’t enjoy this as much as I do”—was carrying both the binoculars and the distress. Not consecutively. Simultaneously.
The sister’s sentence is more accurate than she perhaps intended: it is always the naked eye that is the danger, not the naked body it is trained on. The body is simply there. The eye is the one doing the looking, with whatever instruments it has equipped itself with, at whatever distance the vicar recommends it maintain, persisting beyond the distance when the distance proves insufficient.
The swimmer in the sea. The maiden ladies ashore. The binoculars. The excellent binoculars. I return to the fact of their excellence. Someone chose those particular binoculars. Someone thought it worth choosing well.
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