There is a long tradition of the use of nudity for critical or satirical purposes. Imagining authority figures naked or dressed only in their underwear used to be a classic piece of advice to those nervous about speaking in public, or being interviewed for a job. This personal anti-anxiety tactic fits into a longer, more explicitly political, tradition of social critique in which nakedness has been a useful metaphor. Uneasiness with nudity is, in part, related to unease about sex. The etymology of the words "naked" and "nude" has nothing to do with sex, but in the popular imagination the link is almost automatic. As the author of a 1968 report on the public image of nudism commented, many people continue to "link the words nudity and sex as readily as they would link knife to fork" (Clarke 1982: 212). But the automatic association between sex and nudity can itself be treated as a phenomenon.
A commonsense link exists, too, between nakedness and universality, which is no doubt why many popular books about nakedness start with paradigmatic tales from myth or folklore, such as Adam and Eve, Lady Godiva and The Emperor's New Clothes. Nudity calls up fantasies of universality, for it is true that every human being on the planet has a naked body. But to speak of the universality of nudity is to say everything and nothing, for the meanings and experiences of nudity differ markedly between contexts. The use of nudity as a sign of universal humanity is, however, highly significant culturally, and it continues unabated.
Basically cultures make identity or, conversely, cultures reflect identity. Clothing functions here as a metaphor for all social and cultural institutions and practices - not only gender roles, but also moral systems, laws, economics or political systems. At either end of this continuum, the naked body must implicitly be understood differently - as either the neutral, raw material out of which identities are fashioned according to social circumstances, or the authentic self that social circumstances allow to shine forth in particular ways.
