Shame and Modesty

"Well, aren't these people ashamed at all? Don't they have any feeling of shame?" This was roughly the gist of a long speech that my dear Aunt Polly spouted forth the other day. She appeared in my study as I was putting together the material for the new number of SOLIS. Scraps of paper, books, a note-pad, manuscripts, earlier issues of SOLIS were lying around on my desk. In the midst of all this, there were by now swarms of naked people. Of course, only on photographs. And it is these to whom my Aunt Polly's indignant scolding referred.

It is lucky I've always been in my dear aunt's good books. That's why I could talk quite simply and reasonably without being strunck down by the lightning of her reproachful look because I dared to speak up in the defense of these "shameless people", and even to write for and about them. In short, Aunt Polly allowed her-self to be pressed into accepting a seat and listened for at start. It was only then that I realised how hard it is to acquaint some-one with the nature of nudism, to explain the purposes of this movement to him if he regards the whole thing with inward repugnance.

Hesitantly, I reached for a stack of photos. I held one of them out towards Aunt Polly. She raised her hands as if to ward something off.

"Goodness gracious me, I'm certainly not going to take an extra look at those naked fellows and those women. I got enough of a shock when I accidentally looked at your desk..."

"But Auntie, I'm sure it won't hurt to take another look. By the way, I swear I'm not holding a picture of naked sun worshippers under your nose..."

A little sceptical still, Aunt Polly condescended to look at the picture I had picked out. It was quite an "ordinary" beach scene at a beach for people with bathing suits.

"Well now, that's what I like., my aunt praised her good nephew. .That certainly looks much nicer. At least these people are wearing something."

Here I must interrupt to say that my aunt doesn't hold old fashioned views by any means. As far as she's concerned, she is even a modern woman who moves with the times. She goes in for a bit of winter sports and is among the fervent bathers on the beach in summer. Well, together we looked at the beach scene and the people who were "at least" wearing something. Since the picture showed a larger group, I really had no ironical intentions when I pressed a magnifying glass into Aunt Polly's hand. For, in the case of most of the ladies, it was only by the aid of the glass that you could ascertain if and that they were really wearing "something".

Such an experience as this — and I am sure there are enough friends of sunlight who could tell of something like this — makes one begin to wonder involuntarily what shame and modesty really are. They are acquired ideas which are extremely flexible, say some people. They are a brake inherent in man and intended by God or Nature to keep him on the one true path of morality, claim others. For the convinced nudist there is no middle course in a case like this, no matter how gladly he would welcome one in his willingness to get along with people. What people call "being ashamed" is properly speaking the most atrocious kind of hypocrisy imaginable if we examine it more closely.

Why are not children ashamed? If modesty were really a .natural. tendency and not an acquired prejudice, then children above everyone else should be especially modest.. Yet they aren't. However, they become "modest" only under the influence of adults who teach them by force, threats and punishments down to what part of his body a person is "decent" and where he starts getting "indecent". How often a poor little thing has to listen to "oh, shame on you!" until it really begins to feel shame. It is then that the great lie of life to which we human beings have condemned ourselves mostly begins.

A short glance at history will show that the kind of shame we get dinned into us today is not intended by nature, nor does is arise out of some natural necessity. No single concept has undergone so fundamental and thorough a change so often in the course of relatively short periods of time. Clothes that were rejected with a shocked cry of disgust during one century were already considered wearable in the next. Or what had been considered wearable in one era seemed highly immoral in the next.

In spite of many a modification in this or that direction, concepts of modesty in our times were obviously most strongly influenced by the values of the late Middle Ages when the intensified vitality of a flourishing epoch was overshadowed by dark mysticism and finally overwhelmed by it.

The obscurantists of that period, great thinkers though they may have been, will, in our eyes, always have the ineradicable stigma of having humiliated the body as never before. The medieval authorities assigned so excessive a value to all things spiritual that they saw the human body as a mere prisonhouse within which the soul was kept in bondage waiting to be freed to soar to a better world. In that time, or as its outcome, songs about an earthly vale of tears. were composed and whole books of regulations were written on all the possible kinds of castigations to mortify the flesh. Some of these fill the modern reader with horror. There was nothing low and sordid enough that was not done to the human body to show one's scorn for it wherever possible. Everything was possible, even to the verge of suicide, if it would only gain the higher glory and salvation of the soul.

From that era, dark shadows reach into our bright present. Their windows had to be as small as possible, so as to admit no light. Where glass was already in use, it was placed in the windows in darkly tinted colors. It was a sin and disgrace to look at one's body at all or to represent it pictorially, unless one did this arouse or evince disgust and repugnance.

In old books we find such terms as "the cesspool of the body" or "the foul sink of corruption". Such descriptions, which were probably to be taken quite literally, are, of course, no surprise if we realise that, be-cause of the conscious neglect of the body, washing or — Heaven forbid — a bath was prohibited by the strictest taboos.

"He's had a bath, the swine" is an expression of disgust at the sight of one such vile creature, and this is not even very old as literary history goes. It is only obvious — at least to our contemporaries — that the pendulum must swing in the other direction following such a mystical longing for spiritualisation and transfiguration. Historians significantly observe that at certain times the most somber renunciation of everything physical is found side by side with an almost indescribable delight in the senses. Such a complete reversal in ideas always appears to have been caused by military conflicts. In times of war, an individual is usually torn away from his community in city, town, village, castle or monastery. He no longer feels watched by his environment. On the other hand, at such times, he becomes more aware of everpresent death, which in turn intensifies his vitality.

Typical examples of the evolution of shame and modesty can be found if we carefully study the Thirty Years' War; Grimmelshausen's novel "Simplicius Simplicissimus" and other books of the time provide convincing examples and proofs which show how flexible these ideas arc and have always been. The common soldiers led a frivolous life. The commanders and officers caroused in orgies of sensual pleasures. And at the same time we meet the forest hermit, who castigates his body and despises earthly existence. The chastely draped hermit is shown side by side with the shamelessly naked soldiers' wenches, the deliberately gallantly dressed mercenary soldier side by side with the pious and hence simple young man raised in a monastery.

Who can still declare that shame and modesty are concepts whose limitations and definitions are indisputably fixed? Who, for instance, is "modest"? The old maid who wears a highcollared dress even in the heat of summer Or the young girl who wears her dress above the knee and yet wears long dark tights under it? Does modesty in decolletes extend 1, 2 or even 3 inches down? Why do we call a woman with a low-cut gown a "person without modesty", while the hairy chest of an athlete in gymnastic shorts is no longer considered immoral or lewd even by my grandmother today? Yet a few years ago,things were still quite different. In grandpa and grandma's youth, modesty extended down to a woman's ankles. And woe to the female who would dare to show her wicked legs.

Today the generation which we customarily call the "older" one has at least come to the point where a woman's legs are not considered to be immoral. But with the appearance of short skirts in the past years, excitement welled up promptly about the knees which would now be revealed to a greater or lesser extent.

Indeed, we could tear our hair and scream this question out into the world: "What in the devil's name is that shame and modesty you talk about so often? Where does it start and where does it end?"

The answer? — Well, there isn't any. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. The argument which most often crops up in objective discussions is that shame and modesty consist primarily in concealing the sexual characteristics.

Is this so and can we accept this? Is a person who hides his sexual characteristics truly modest?

Retort: where do you start with this concealment and where do you stop? We can see that a man is a man from his beard, no matter how carefully he has shaved it off. Then a man, to be truly modest, must hide his face as well, or at least the lower part of his face. We recognize a man, if he isn't overly covered up, by his broad shoulders and narrow hips. Is he, then, to put on a shapeless cowl (this has actually been done and is still being done) in order to hide the fact that he is a male? A woman is recognized by her more rounded shoulders and wider hips and pelvis. Er-go, her shamelessness begins when these parts of her body are deliberately accentuated, which is after all no more than an invitation: Look at me, I am a woman. But this is exactly what is supposedly for-bidden and frowned upon if one intends to be modest. And lastly we should not even be allowed to talk to each other any more if we had to hide all our sexual characteristics from modesty.

Let's go on a little longer talking about this question "logically". What does life conssts in? Is it a renunciation of all things physical or a turning toward them? Of course, I know enough married couples who have never seen each other naked from sheer "modesty". But should not these people be pitied. And should not those be punished who drove them into so perverse a way of life through education, force, and threats of all kinds of sufferings?

Experience, on the other hand, teaches that natural impulses always find some way to break out within a person, insofar as he is healthy human being. Of course, nature often takes a roundabout way if forced to do so. The too-modest wife who puts out the light before each embrace is not infrequently the most lascivious when it comes to divulging other people's bed-room secrets, imagining them to herself or embroidering the details. And the man who is unsatisfied at home steals away secretly to a brothel, he has a library for amateurs« and nowadays collects a certain kind of color slides to look at in his quiet hours.

Oh, of course people are modest. But not when they are alone. They are oh so moral — on stage. It is just that nobody may look behind the scenes. People get violently upset and disgusted about moral decadence and shamelessness — while withone eye they peek through the well-known knot-hole in the fence around the nudists' beach.

Where, now, are the sinners? On the side of the bigots and the fanatics? or on the side of those who make no secret of being human beings with all the consequences? It is quite beyond doubt that concepts which are subjected to constant change cannot represent any sort of permanent values. If what is permitted tomorrow is shameless today, then all one can do is turn away in horror — and go to join the nudists. For there you can find answers to all the questions which had to remain open of necessity in this article. You recognize, frequently with a mild shock, how hollow and empty traditional concepts of shame and modesty are. They've been polished up, distorted, readjusted and polished again so often that by now not much remains of them. When we look at them closely, they turn out to be a film of shimmering and slightly sticky oil over the face of today's society.

The spots where this shimmering film is being torn and pierced are on the increase. And every time such a gap is made some-where, our eye glimpses a nudists' beach, a sunny meadow, a shady wood — and joyous, free, happy people without distorted moral feelings and full of a natural modesty which consists simply and solely in respect for one's fellowmen.