Perceptual Nudity

Cafe Society
1

Perceptual Nudity, Or the Nakedness of Nudity

If thinking about nakedness and naked people in the media bothers you, or would be a problem for you because you’re at work or something, you probably shouldn’t be reading this thread.

I was recently reminded of a scene from “Diamonds Are Forever,” the James Bond film in which Tiffany Case is on an oil derrick used as an evil lair by Blofeld, and she walks into a room full of technicians in lab coats and jumpsuits and Blofeld and Bond, wearing only a bikini, heels and a lanyard.

I was struck by how NAKED she looked in that scene. But the thing was, she wasn’t really naked. Here’s a link to her in the exact costume she was wearing in that scene. Safe for work, I think, but it IS a woman in a bikini firing a machine gun, so obviously not corporate research unless you’re working for a fairly freaky corporation.

There was something about the way St. John looked and the way she moved that just made her look incredibly fleshy and naked, though she was not really all that fleshy in terms of her figure.

Thanks to the Internet and VCRs and other technologies, I have seen a number of images of REALLY naked women. I mean, women who make Jill St. John look downright formally dressed in her “Diamonds Are Forever” bikini. I found it interesting that St. John looked so naked to me in a scene that could be aired in prime time on an American broadcast network. Surely my tastes are too jaded for that.

It got me thinking – is there some quality other than the extent to which a body is clothed which might account for how naked it is perceived to be? For example, could it be that St. John looked more naked because she was in the middle of a bunch very clothed guys? (I don’t think so – I’ve seen a lot of scenes in cop movies where strippers are dancing naked while surrounded by clothed guys, and they didn’t seem as naked as Jill St. John for some reason. And yes, I went back and looked at a couple to be sure. Research, y’know.)

I’m putting this in Cafe Society because I think it only applies to nakedness you see in the media. If you encounter a naked person in person, so to speak, they will of course make quite an impression on you. It is, for most of us not a commonplace event so that it’s really hard to make a distinction. But when you see a naked person in the mass media, there’s enough distance that you can say, “That person seems a lot more naked than that other person I saw in that other show/movie/website/whatever.” So the question becomes, have you seen a image of someone naked in the movie, on TV, on the Web or whatever that surprised you because they looked more naked than other people who were as naked, or even more naked, than them? Is there some perceptual element to nudity? And what might it be?

Oh, yeah, sounds like a lot of work. But then, you get to think about naked people while you do it. So it’s got its rewards.

2

YES!

Ripley, at the end of Alien. I think in her case it’s a combination of practical - it’s almost flesh colored and sorta translucent (or the seem at the armhole makes it seem as if the rest of it *should *be translucent), and that is one heckuva low cut “waistband” on the underwear - and emotional - it’s a very, very vulnerable moment for her when she thinks everything is OK, and then it isn’t. But I always feel like she’s “nakeder” than she really is.

Oh shit, do I need to spoilertag Alien? Fuck it. It’s about an *Alien *that tries to eat Sigourney Weaver. A lot.

3

I thought you were talking about the scene in which Jill St. John is shown wearing only a bikini bottom, which ABC though risque enough that they digitally added a bikini top when they aired the film a couple years back.

4

That’s actually Lana Wood (playing Plenty O’Toole, amusingly enough).

It was a lousy movie anyway.

5

Y’know, a sense of vulnerability could be a big part of it. Now, while the character Tiffany was the sort of gal who’d be quite comfortable naked in front of a lot of men in clothes – a very self-possessed woman who was accustomed to using her sexuality to get what she wanted from men – she WAS scantily clad in a room full of clothed men, so there might have been an image of vulnerability there no matter how the character was portrayed.

6

It’s like the way people are willing wear a swimsuit in public but not their underwear, even if the underwear is more concealing than the swimsuit.

7

I think a persons sensuality is more than the sum of their parts, curves, measurements, clothes or lack there of. Whatever IT is, she had it in that scene

8

I agree. It isn’t just what you got, it is how you use it.
One thing is for sure, JSJ had it in that movie. The scene where Bond stuck the casette tape in her bikini was, well, memorable.

9

I’ve noticed something along opposite lines, actually—actors or actresses who look just as, or even more comfortable* not wearing clothes. Like Tarzan, or Conan the Barbarian—they’d look odd if they were covered up.

I thought I’d actually made a note of them, somewhere—but Julianne Moore and Nancy Allen (!) came to mind.

*“Comfortable” really isn’t the right word, though. More like…well, the opposite of “naked.” “Naked” in the “exposed and vulnerable” sense.

10

And that’s really it.

Niven and Pournelle defined it this way:

Nude: Unclothed.

Naked: Vulnerable.

11

The censor’s eye for nudity, which concentrates only on the concealment of naughty bits, would be the exact opposite of what I’m taling about. I mean, when Janet Jackson flashed her breast at the Super Bowl, her nipple may have been visible, but it was the least naked nipple I have ever seen. It was such a carefully planned and presented nipple that the only reasonable response to the sight of it that I can imagine is polite applause.

OTOH, there’s a porn model named Asheley Renee who has large breasts, I think augmented somewhat, but they tend to droop a little when exposed, and she has very large nipples as well, and somehow the slight droopiness of her breasts in conjunction with the large nipples makes her breast seem more … naked, somehow, than the more perky production-line breasts more typical of porn models. (I’m generally not going to give cites here lest this become a porn thread, we all know how to Google.)

A censor would not distinguish between either set of breasts if the nipples were visible. Or covered. That would be all that mattered.

12

I think that may be a matter of social appropriateness.

If you are wearing sleepwear, it means you are either planning to sleep or if the sleepwear is meant to be seen rather than just worn, to have sex. If you wear sleepwear to the beach, you clearly intend it to be seen, which is to say, you intend to have sex with someone on the beach. That crosses a line, for most folks.

Beachwear, on the other hand, means you are either planning to swim or get tanned or be seen or all three, but does not necessarily imply any plans to have sex.

13

I don’t think that’s it. I think it has to do with the fabric. Underwear is usually see-through in bright sunlight, or when it’s wet, which makes it a bad choice for the beach. OTOH, if a woman has a thicker bra on, she’s likely to take her shirt off if she feels like it.

I’m reminded of when I was younger and my friends and I used to go swimming late at night with groups of young women of our acquaintance. Whether a woman swam naked or in her underwear had nothing to do with how revealing the underwear was and everything to do with what else she was wearing. Jeans and cutoffs - naked; Skirts or other shorts- underpants.

14

Figures. The Alien gets a movie - I just get a restraining order.

:wink:

:smiley:

15

She can cook, too. The perfect woman!

16

I’ve heard, somewhere on the Dope, that Sigourney Weaver wanted to do that scene completely nude, to heighten the “nakedness”, but that the producers wouldn’t let her. In my mind, this ranks as one of the great cinematic tragedies of history.

And I think that Evil Captor does have it right, on the swimsuit/underwear distinction. I recall once in high school with some friends, one of the guys showed off a picture of his girlfriend. Someone commented “Nice bikini”, to which he replied “That’s not a bikini”. The picture suddenly became much sexier, knowing that the lass in question was posing in underwear rather than swimwear, even though we were still seeing exactly as much fabric and skin as before.

17

Of course, there was the naked Superman - due to the lighting, in the current Superman Returns. He was actually wearing a skin tight black suit.

18

I found it funny in college that the girls in the neighboring dorm (we were, alas, in the engineering dorm) would lay out for hours in suits coving about 5 square inches of skin. Then cover up in huge towels when going inside so people couldn’t see them. (or modesty, or og knows what.)

19

yeah, the image of her with her panties pulled halfway down her hips in that tiny closet trying to work her way into a spacesuit was pretty damn good. I think the panties pulled halfway down added to her nakedness, because it appeared to be so artless and unposed. She had them pulled down because she was alone and it just didn’t matter where they rode on her hips. (Of course, IRL I’m sure this was done deliberately, but within the context of the film, it was “artless”).

I don’t know if it would have been better or worse if she’d been nude. I think slightly worse. Those half-down panties accentuated her crotch much better than a big bush of pubic hair would have. (I’m betting she didn’t shave down there back when Alien was made).

20

Well, that’s social appropriateness too. They wear the tiny suits to tan. Wearing the tiny suits around in the dorm, well that’s just showing off. But they HAVE to expose their skin in all its glory to tan it. So it’s all right. When I was a dewy-eyed young collegian, the coeds would spread blankets on the lawns and hillside near their dorms to tan in their skimpy bikinis, like so many basking seals. Sometimes they would ask their fellow collegians to put lotion on them. It was a good time.

And, apropros of the OP, there was never a nanosecond when I was not KEENLY aware of all the naked female flesh around me when I was on a college lawn on a warm spring day. But I had to be cool and not act all that keenly aware, because it was a time of rampant feminism on campus, and drooling on female students was deeply frowned upon. Even worse, some of the women would think you uncool if you did, and that was worse than any mere ideological issue.

I also endountered women running around in various states of undress in the dorms while visiting girlfriends. I was keenly aware of their flesh there, too, but not any more keenly aware than I was out on the lawn. Which is what I meant about in-person nudity being too immediate and, um, personal to make for proper distance.