All My Children

Protection is usually mentioned as the first purpose of clothes. Modesty is another, but there is little stress on it today. An aim with high priority throughout history has been to conceal or minimise the unattractive features of each person’s body and to call attention to the more appealing ones. When we want to please someone or a group we dress up; and when we don’t give a damn or want to show a subtle scorn, we dress too negligently for the occasion.

Human beings have a wavering attitude in regard to modesty and exhibitionism. (Exhibitionism is the pleasurable impulse to show one’s body—or one’s total self.) They start off in early childhood as frank exhibitionists; they’ll gleefully show their navels or their genitals to anyone who really appeals to them. But by six or seven, they are apt to be bashful about being seen naked or when using the bathroom, at least some of the time. In early adolescence, when a person is made strongly aware of his sexual interests but has not yet become sufficiently used to them to be comfortable with them, modesty tends to be even more accentuated. (A modest person may, at the same time, be having fantasies of exhibitionism.)

From mid-adolescence onwards, modesty and exhibitionism are more important issues for the girl than for the boy. Each girl learns to be modest enough to conform—more or less—to the customs of the society or group in which she lives; but she also learns how to make a discreet exhibitionistic appeal to the boys at the same time. It is interesting to realise how the customs vary not only between different groups but with the time of day and the activity. In the daytime, at school or work, the shape of the breasts can be revealed by the cut of the clothes, but the skin of the breasts must not be shown. In a formal evening gown the skin of 49 per cent of the breast can be shown but not the nipple area. At the beach the thigh has been revealed right up to the groin for many years, but until the advent of the miniskirt, this amount of exposure would have been shocking when people were away from the water’s edge.

Many girls assume, particularly in these days of relative nudity, that the more skin they reveal, the more attractive they are to the opposite sex. The answer is not this simple. In fact, in a nudist camp or nudist family, the excitement of males at seeing female bodies is, relatively speaking, at a low ebb. (I’m not saying it is absent.) In a striptease show, the performer knows that she would be a failure if she took off her clothes in her dressing-room, stalked out on to the stage and stood there. One aspect of the success of the show is the gradualness of the revelations. The spectators are constantly keyed up by the hope and expectation of more to come. Most exciting is the artful way in which the stripper keeps moving about, starts to take off a garment, hesitates, delays, slips it off, but then, quicker than the eye can see, drapes it or holds it in front of her so that much less is revealed at that moment than had been expected. Her reluctance (fake though it is) is what imparts value to her eventual revelations. To the man in the audience it is as if he is trying to persuade her to disrobe and she is hesitantly yielding. Her performance permits him to imagine that he is the active person.

(Similarly in dating. It is the basic nature of the male to be the pursuer. The seeming uncertainty of the girl— about whether she likes him or whether she will allow him to make any advances—is what excites him and spurs him on. When a girl on a date acts more ‘forward’ than the boy, her aggressiveness, in most cases, lessens his enthusiasm and initiative.)

You can see why clothes that half conceal are more provocative than clothes—or lack of clothes—that only reveal.

Exhibitionism is all relative. In Victorian times a man would be excited, according to the novels, to catch a glimpse of a girl’s ankle as she climbed into a carriage or bus—more excited, I suspect, than today’s man who has seen much of a girl’s thigh in a comparable situation.

Perhaps all that I’m expressing here is a prejudice against the homeliness and anticlimax of most nudity. I know well from doing thousands of physical examinations as well as from what I see at the beach that few individuals are so well formed that they look beautiful when naked or near-naked. Ninety-five out of a hundred people are much improved by clothes.

Styles in clothes change faster than other styles, especially for women, not only in such obvious respects as whether hems and waistlines go up or down, but also as to whether a woman is to look childish or sophisticated, feminine or gladiatorial.

Adolescents and youths in Western nations have usually had their own styles in clothes, as they have their own styles in entertainers, music, vocabulary and so on. Partly this is because during their long years of schooling and training, they are not accepted into adult society as fully participating members, the way teenagers are in many simpler societies. Not being accepted, they emphasise their separateness. Partly it is because their basic rebelliousness makes them prefer to be quite different from their parents and their parents‘ generation, in all their tastes and standards.

The intensity of the revolt of youth, which has expressed itself in such matters as the assertion of a freer and franker sexual code, in the rejection of competitiveness and materialism as the most admirable virtues, in a new recognition of the saving grace of love in all its forms, has also stimulated in some individuals a preference for clothes that are either severely plain or rumpled, and also for an ungroomed appearance. They decline to make the effort to look pleasing to others or to themselves. This attitude has elements of defiance, of self- denial, of pride in being able to do without, of independence even from one’s own age group. I admire the courage, independence and idealism that these people show. But I am always hoping that they will find other, more constructive ways of expressing these qualities, and can then revert to an attractive appearance.

I’m not decreeing that one type of dress or grooming is better than another just because I like it. Styles must swing—from formal to informal and back again, and from colourful to sombre. What I have been regretting is deliberate dinginess and messiness, which is not really a matter of style but of nose-thumbing—no matter how idealistic the nose-thumber is in other respects.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Modesty and Exhibitionism Dress: Boys Girls Relations in the Teens

• The Adolescent Years: Bodies in Motion continue...
• Children, Kids, Teenagers get all it right, what you should teach about juvenile offences or delinquency? part 2
• Romance and Sex in Later Adolescence: To Tell or not to Tell
• Child’s Play, Toys as Symbols
• “Fault” of the parents….Relations with Parents (Blaming Parents)
• The Adolescent Years: Bodies in Motion
• Play and Reality: A Delicate Balance part 3
• Love Attraction, Romance and Lechery, parents must know for benefit of Children
• Adolescence and Skin Problem Acne, Natural or not? Cause and Cure
• Street Children, break-up of Families in the South Africa continue...

Trackback URI | Comments RSS