Naked at Lunch (4 page)

No wonder babies are born screaming.

No wonder we are obsessed with skin.

Western society equates skin with sex. When we’re consciously trying to be sexy, we wear clothes that “hug our bodies” and “show some skin.” Plunging necklines, backless dresses, miniskirts, and fishnet stockings all reveal ample amounts of skin and are considered evocative of sexuality. Our celebrity culture feeds on flesh; hemlines and cleavage and nipple slips are analyzed and dissected by pundits on television and in magazines. People are judged by how much skin they show and how they show it. And in Los Angeles, people are judged by their tattoos and how they show them. It’s skin as mobile art gallery.

The dark side of this is when a woman who is “showing some skin” is sexually assaulted and then accused of “asking for it” because of the way she was dressed. On January 24, 2011, a law enforcement officer in Toronto, Canada, famously advised victims of sexual assault to “avoid dressing like sluts.” Which is a stupid thing to say, obviously, and launched a wave of protests called “slut walks,” where women march against victim blaming and “slut shaming” by dressing however the hell they want. If you listen to what the fashion industry says, what the media tells us, what the obsession with self-portraits plastered on social media reveals, then you could be brainwashed into believing that looking sexy is the ultimate achievement of a human being alive in the twenty-first century. But if something bad happens to you, it’s your fault because of the way you were dressed. That is a fucked-up kind of thinking.

Strip away the marketing campaigns designed to sell you stuff for your skin, ignore the television ads and reality programs where showing skin is a sign of sexuality, and look at skin as the simple sense organ it is, and you quickly realize that skin is the gateway to hedonism. Of course it is. Skin looks good, it feels good; you want to touch it, you want to be touched. Which explains why some societies find it threatening; too much skin is too much connection, too much intimacy, too much sex. I think of the burka and niqab as examples of extreme anti-skin apparel, though to be fair, every culture has dress codes.

This compulsion to keep our skin covered is a relatively recent development in human evolution. According to archaeologists, we didn’t start wearing jeans or haute couture or velour tracksuits or any kind of clothing until about forty thousand years ago. For the hundred or so thousand years that preceded that moment, humans lived in tropical climates and wore very little except the skin they were born with. There are still indigenous peoples living this way in the world: the Zo’é people of the northern Amazon rain forest, the Mursi and Himba tribes of Ethiopia, and the Kombai of Papua New Guinea are just a few of roughly a dozen societies that live textile free. Which is not to say they don’t accessorize their bodies with various piercings, tattoos, lip extensions, body paints, and penis gourds—even an isolated tribe likes to have style.

Humans are relatively hairless compared with other hominids—chimpanzees and gorillas, for example—because, evolutionarily speaking, we were meant to live in a tropical climate. This whole cold-weather,
reindeer-sweatered, fondue thing is an aberration. Unlike other animals, we developed the ability to process the heat and humidity of equatorial regions. In other words: we sweat. As anthropologist Nina G. Jablonski states in her book
Skin: A Natural History
, “For an active primate living in a hot environment, having a functionally naked and actively sweating skin is the best way to maintain a steady body temperature and—literally—to keep a cool head.”
⁴

Most animals have very few sweat glands and are wrapped in fur that insulates them. For example a dog can only cool itself by panting, which is why they tend to overheat in hot weather. Our ability to sweat gave us the evolutionary edge, keeping our bodies cool and allowing early humans to go about the hard work of foraging for food, often covering large distances. This cooling function gave us the physical stamina for what’s called persistence hunting—basically chasing antelope or other furry animals on a sweltering day and annoying them until they dropped dead of heat stroke. Some evolutionary anthropologists have theorized that persistence hunting led to an increase of protein-rich foods in human diets, which led to brain development, which led to technological innovations like bronze and iron, which led to Coco Chanel and her Little Black Dress or, if you’re so inclined, the velour tracksuit. For those who take a more faith-based approach to human development, you could say that God put Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden—implying that the Garden of Eden must’ve been somewhere in the tropics—but they were still naked, hairless, and sweaty.

However, none of these evolutionary theories means that I’m going to run naked through the streets of Los Angeles persistence hunting my favorite taco truck. That would be crazy. I could get sunburned on my genitals.

Aside from being a sophisticated cooling system, our skin allows our bodies to absorb vitamin D, which is essential for calcium assimilation and healthy bone development. Without adequate exposure to sunlight, a person can develop rickets, a disease that creates a softening and deformity of the bones and can lead to bowleggedness and other abnormalities. When the industrial revolution began cranking up its smokestacks and people crowded into coal-smogged cities to work in factories, rickets became rampant.

In 1875 a Scottish missionary and physician named Theobald Palm moved to the city of Niigata, in Japan, where he engaged in the traditional missionary work of healing the sick and converting the locals to Christianity. Trained at the Edinburgh University School of Medicine, Palm had seen firsthand the toll taken by rickets, which, at the time, affected an estimated 60 to 80 percent of children in the United Kingdom. But in Japan, rickets was virtually nonexistent. Palm was intrigued by this and began writing to doctors and missionaries in countries around the world, compiling a study of rickets based on geography.

Medical science in the nineteenth century had a lot of theories, but doctors didn’t really know what caused the disease. They speculated that rickets was an infection, or maybe a congenital condition, or something caused by urban crowding and air pollution, or perhaps it could have something to do with a lack of vitamins, like scurvy.

Theobald Palm made it his mission to figure it out.

Not that he didn’t have other things to do too. He also had to convert heathens to Christianity, which, in a predominantly Buddhist country, didn’t go as smoothly as he’d hoped. In the summer of 1879, a crowd attacked Palm and destroyed his “preaching-place” because they felt that a cholera epidemic was caused by Christians.
⁵

In 1885 he returned to northwest England and was again struck by the prevalence of children with rickets in the cities. But Palm had lived for a time in Tokyo, which, while a crowded urban environment, didn’t have incidents of the disease, so he knew that the cause wasn’t as simple as overcrowding, it was simpler. Studying maps and the anecdotal accounts he’d gathered from missionaries around the world, Palm posited that the main difference between areas that had rickets and areas that did not was sunlight.

In 1890 he published a paper called “The Geographic Distribution and Etiology of Rickets” in a medical journal called
Practitioner.
Of course in 1890 no one understood how sunlight caused the synthesis of vitamin D, and the medical establishment largely ignored Palm’s observations.
⁶

But other researchers were looking into the benefits of sunlight, and in 1903 the Danish scientist Niels Ryberg Finsen won the Nobel Prize for his work on light therapy and its ability to inhibit bacteria growth—in other words, sunlight as an antibiotic—and by the time 1920 rolled around a doctor named Auguste Rollier had opened “sunshine schools” in Switzerland. Early photos of these schools show shirtless children sitting outdoors, their desks arranged in neat rows as they studied and tanned at the same time. Heliotherapy—after Helios, Greek god of the sun—soon became the rage. Daniel Freund, in his excellent book on the subject,
American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light
, quotes a typically gushing article that appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
in
1927
describing “the curative effects of sunlight therapy on dry and scaly skin, asthma, tuberculosis, bladder conditions, runny ears, polio, and of course, rickets.”
⁷

Nowadays we don’t worry too much about rickets, although a 2012 report from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in England suggests we should, warning that cases of rickets have risen fourfold since the mid-1990s.
⁸
This new outbreak is blamed on a number of factors, such as children spending the majority of their time watching television and playing on their computers, and in a 2013 BBC News report, a six-year-old boy in Leicestershire developed rickets because his mother constantly slathered him in SPF 50 sunblock.
⁹
Of course not getting enough sunshine is only one of the problems related to the disease; poverty and malnutrition play major roles as well.

Then there’s seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which is a kind of moody depression and ennui that affects people who live in northern climates with extremely long dark winters. It’s more common in extreme places like Finland and northern Alaska, but has been known to affect people in New England and the Pacific Northwest. One effective treatment for SAD is to spend a few hours a day getting bombarded by bright lights and UV radiation. Obviously humans need a certain amount of sunlight to thrive both physically and mentally but, just like really tasty cocktails or an unlimited amount of free gelato, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.

It used to be that lying out in the sun was supposed to be good for you—sunshine gave you a healthy glow. People would slather cocoa butter or baby oil on their bodies with the intention of broiling themselves a rich mahogany color. But as these glowing, healthy tans began to age, signs of solar wear and tear became evident. The deeply bronzed sex appeal of George Hamilton and the sun-kissed vigor of girls in bikinis gave way to precancerous growths, crinkled skin, and leathery hides. The Saint-Tropez tan has gone the way of the cigarette and the three-martini lunch. Things once considered glamorous are now suspect habits and health risks.
****
You’d be nuts to tan like that in this day and age. Now a sunburn is more than just a painful and unpleasant condition; overexposure to ultraviolet radiation from sunlight can damage cellular DNA and lead to all kinds of skin problems. As Jablonski says, “UVA has been implicated as a major culprit in the premature aging of skin caused by sun exposure (known as photoaging), and it has been associated in epidemiological studies with the most dangerous form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma.”
¹⁰

Back in the examination room, Dr. Grenier lifted my arm and peered at some freckles. She took off her magnifying glasses and looked at me. “You know, this is a dangerous assignment. Any damage you do, you’ll live with for the rest of your life.”

Which sounded dramatic. It’s not like I’m headed into a war zone on a mission behind enemy lines. But then I’m not sure I want to be the old geezer who points out misshapen warts and precancerous moles while telling stories about that nudist resort I went to.

I tried to reassure her. “I won’t be laying out in the sun. I’ll put on lots of sunscreen. And I’ll wear a hat.”

She didn’t seem convinced. She handed me a list of recommended sunscreens and shook her head.

“They should give you combat pay.”

****
A two-margarita lunch is, however, perfectly acceptable.

Gymnophobia

“
G
ymnophobia” is the technical word for “a severe and abnormal fear of nakedness.” It’s easy to mock sufferers of this phobia, as David Cross did so brilliantly as the character Tobias Fünke in the television series
Arrested Development.
In the show Tobias has “never-nude syndrome” and wears a pair of cut-off denim shorts at all times, with a tube sock underneath so that no one, including himself, ever sees his genitalia. In the show it’s taken to an extreme for comic effect, but for people who really are gymnophobic, just the thought of getting naked can cause shortness of breath, irregular heartbeat, and nausea; the sight of people without clothes can induce a panic attack; and a stroll au natural through a nudist resort could result in a full-blown psychotic episode.

It’s hard to estimate how many people suffer from this phobia because nobody really wants to admit he or she has it. Being gymnophobic can expose you to ridicule and mockery, even if it does come from body image anxieties, shame, and possible sexual trauma. Some psychologists speculate that it is related to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I think that most of us can relate to the anxiety that arises from being naked in front of other people. Just think back to high school gym class and walking into the showers. Or the locker room at your health club. And how many people prefer to have sex with the lights off? When you start to think about it, it seems like there is a low level of gymnophobia running through almost everyone. Being naked, or seeing someone who’s naked, can be an uncomfortable experience. Unusual, to say the least.