From The Pit
I want to begin with the language, because it is extraordinary. In 1937, a Captain Reginald Wallis addressed the question of organised nudism and produced the following: “Nudism is from the pit—as profane as the blackest sin, as shameless as the Devil himself, and as heinous as hell. Nudism is a burning and arrogant insult to the modesty of humanity. It is the zenith of human rebellion against God. It is the corruption of the human heart at its culmination.”
He was not, as far as I can establish, writing about murder, or war, or cruelty, or the exploitation of the vulnerable. He was writing about men taking their clothes off in organised settings and lying in the sun. The disproportion between the activity and the language is itself worth attending to. When a sentence reaches for “the zenith of human rebellion against God,” something more than the stated subject is driving it.
The sentence that follows is in some ways the more revealing one: “So abased and out of perspective is the natural mind that this nefarious movement is not only defended on ethical grounds... but any attack upon it is actually looked upon as a sign of obscenity!” The Captain has noticed that from outside his position, the vehemence of his attack looks like the problem rather than the solution. He is pre-empting the response: you will think I am the one obsessed with indecency, but that is because your perspective is corrupted. What this manoeuvre reveals is that he was aware of the contradiction. He knew what his language looked like. He chose it anyway.
I find the Wallis passage genuinely interesting not as evidence of Victorian prudery—by 1937 we are post-Victorian, though the attitudes he carries are thoroughly Victorian in origin—but as evidence of something more specific. What he is protecting is not simply modesty. He is protecting a social order in which the regulated body is a sign of regulated character. The exposed body is not alarming because exposure is inherently sinful. It is alarming because exposure is the visible abandonment of the regulatory framework by which civilisation maintains itself. Nudism is rebellion against God because the body governed by Christian civilisation is a body that has submitted to governance. The body in the sun, under its own authority, is the body that has removed itself from the structure. It is not the nakedness that damns. It is the refusal.
What I have read about the Victorian and Edwardian treatment of the male body supports this reading. The male body was argued to be naturally degenerate, and cities led to further degeneration through their temptation of men on many levels, including sexuality. The middle-class ideal of manly governance—self-mastery, the will controlling the appetites, the disciplined body as evidence of disciplined character—required the body to be managed. The body that was not managed was the body that had submitted to its own nature, and the body’s nature, in this tradition, was not to be trusted. What clothing regulated was not primarily sexual display but the evidence of the body’s independence from the will. A body that chose to be unclothed had made a declaration about whose authority it recognised.
The contradiction that the brief points to—the Anglican Church that condemned the exposed body while simultaneously producing and sponsoring classical art featuring the unclothed male form—is genuine, and it is not accidental. It is a managed contradiction, a form of administration. In the eyes of the early and Victorian Church, the art of antiquity was too closely associated with the moral and social impurity of paganism. Despite the acceptance of the nude figure in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and eighteenth-century France, Victorian England could not overcome its prudish Evangelicalism and accept the nude figure in a contemporary setting.
The unclothed body in a painting from the classical tradition was, as I have described elsewhere, a body enclosed within a frame that controlled its meaning. The nude in the gallery was the body that had submitted to the gallery’s authority—to the authority of tradition, scholarship, cultivation, the educated gaze. It was not the body exercising its own authority. It was the body arranged for the assessment of people who knew how to assess it properly.
What the naturist movement of the 1920s and 1930s was doing—the movement that so alarmed Captain Wallis—was removing that frame. The body in the sun was not in the gallery. It was not submitting to tradition or scholarship or the cultivated gaze. It was simply in the sun, by its own decision, without institutional permission. This is what made it “from the pit.” Not the skin. The authority. The body that had decided for itself.
I notice that the distinction being drawn here is between what I would call management and reverence. The gallery nude was managed—admitted within a controlled context, under the authority of people who knew what they were doing with it. The naturist body was unmanaged—present on its own terms, outside the contexts that had been established to contain it. The Victorian and Edwardian tradition was remarkably comfortable with the former and extraordinarily hostile to the latter. It could accommodate the naked body in art, in medicine, in certain sporting contexts, in the literature of classical antiquity. What it could not accommodate was the naked body in ordinary social life, making its own decisions about where to be.
This is the distinction I find most useful when I try to understand what was happening to the men who came to me across three decades. They had grown up in a tradition that had absorbed Wallis’s anxiety—not in its specific form, which by the late twentieth century had become anachronistic, but in its structural logic. The body required management. The body’s appetites required governance. The body that was simply present, simply in the room, simply being attended to without any of the usual regulatory frameworks—that body was doing something the tradition had taught them to be uneasy about, even when the tradition’s specific vocabulary was no longer available to articulate the unease.
The language men used in that room was consistently the language of apology and uncertainty. “I hope you don’t mind.” “I know this isn’t much.” “I’m not sure I should be here.” These were not the words of men who had absorbed Captain Wallis explicitly. They were the words of men who had absorbed the structure underneath him: the sense that the unmanaged body was the body that had failed to maintain proper governance over itself. The shame was not theological. But it had been generated by a tradition that was, and the tradition’s logic had outlasted its theology.
What I notice about Wallis’s language—and I notice it as evidence about Wallis rather than as evidence about nudism—is the quality of investment it reveals. Sentences do not reach for “the zenith of human rebellion against God” unless something is being protected that the writer finds genuinely threatened. The threat was not to Christian civilisation in any literal sense.
Organised nudism in 1930s England posed no actual danger to the social order. What it threatened was a particular account of what the body meant—the account in which the managed body was the good body, in which submission to the regulatory framework was the evidence of character, in which the body’s willingness to be clothed was the body’s acknowledgement of its place in the hierarchy of governance that ran from individual self-mastery through family and church and state up to God.
The body that said: I am going to lie in the sun, with my own authority, without your permission—that body was not actually committing “the zenith of human rebellion.” But it was refusing a specific thing. And the specific thing it was refusing was exactly the thing the tradition required it to accept.
I have read a more recent document, from a Catholic writer, that makes the same argument in slightly different terms: “Nudity calls for covering because of its mystery, and this mystery should be unveiled only in the privileged moments when God allows the spouses to reveal themselves to each other in the sacrament of matrimony.” The body’s visibility is regulated by the institutional framework—the sacrament, the marriage, the permission granted by God through the church. The body that unveils itself outside that framework has removed itself from the regulatory system. Not because nakedness is inherently wrong, but because the regulation is the point.
What the tradition could never quite resolve—and what Wallis’s over-investment reveals—is that the regulation produced exactly the charge it claimed to be managing. A body that requires this much governance has been made to seem as though it deserves it. The energy that goes into containing the unclothed male body is itself evidence of how much that body has been loaded with significance. If it were simply a body, lying in the sun, it would not require sentences of this magnitude to oppose it.
It was never simply a body. It was always already the site of something the culture needed to decide about. What I spent thirty years watching was men trying to locate themselves in relation to that decision—the decision about what the unmanaged body meant, and whether they were entitled to have one.
Most of them arrived still uncertain. The Captain had done his work well.
You are here: Uncovered