Ah, so this is the story, the reason so many Americans are ashamed of their bodies, the reason we are so confused and uptight about nudity in America. We can blame it on all those Irish ancestors who influenced our national gene pool shortly after the Puritans finished their self-righteous handiwork. Their blood still courses through our veins.
I suspect our shame is rooted in centuries of religious doctrine, and that we have inherited it and adopted it as our own. Seems I remember something about God creating Adam and Eve in His own image, nude, that they lived blissfully naked in the Garden of Eden until Eve surrendered to temptation and ate from the tree of knowledge. The key words here are “in His own image” and “blissfully nude”. Seems more of us would be adding this up and drawing the right conclusions. Why every beach in America is not clothing optional is beyond me.
Well, back to the Irish. This delightful article published in a Dublin paper may explain some of our hyper modesty.
The bare truth of why we all like to look at naked women
By Kevin Myers, the Independent,ie, Dublin, June 16 2009
‘Irish Women and Public Nudity’, not so long ago, would have ranked with ‘Nuclear Fission; the Eskimo Contribution’ as the title of the world shortest book.
Along with ‘Zulus and Supersonic Flight’. Or ‘Lesbian Camogie in Saudi Arabia’. Or ’101 uses for Pigs’ Foreskins’, by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Simply, Irish women didn’t do public nudity. To be sure, Irishmen weren’t all that great at it, but Irish women were as likely to appear naked in front of strangers as Mother Teresa was to do a pole dance in front of the Pope.
I know three Irishwomen who once went to a naturist beach in France, but wore bikinis throughout. And they actually boasted about this on their return, declaring how “weird” the nudists were. No, girls, we know who the weird ones were. The actress Olivia Treacy once proudly declared that she was so principled that she had performed Lady Chatterley on the stage, fully clothed. Which is rather like mounting a production of ‘Hamlet of Sunnybrook Farm’. And Irish fashion models would refuse to do underwear shows. Girls had to be brought over from pagan England — the whores! the sluts! — to perform in Dublin’s annual commercial lingerie parade.
And far from this infantile prudery being a matter for embarrassment and shame, it was actually one of national pride. Irish women — it was said — didn’t demean themselves by taking off their clothes in public.
While male nudity on the stage became a commonplace in Dublin theatre, female nudity was almost unknown. English actresses such as Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren bared all on the London stage, and in film, and no one thought the worse of them: but their Irish she-peers still donned swaddling clothes in public. A priggish and grisly she-neurosis masqueraded as a Hibernian virtue. It took the American photographer Spencer Tunick to prove that the days of Irish reticence about public nudity were largely over.
