The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
outside normal public consumption. Indeed, if we were to conjure up a
mental image that represents the phrase ‘the naked body’, without even
thinking about it, most would automatically visualize their favourite pinup.
Who would visualize the naked body of their eighty-year-old grandmother,
a terminally ill patient or an Argentinean desaparecido?
One television commercial, however, even dared to show an old lady
naked in the bath, overdoing, perhaps, the grotesque effect of the lively
granny in her colourful shower cap, her modesty preserved, nevertheless,
by an abundance of bubbles. Better to cover up that presumably withered
and wrinkled body. On the other hand, everyone loves the bare bottoms of
TV toddlers and so we are obviously horrified when we read in the newspapers
about acts of brutality committed against children; it seems unimaginable
that those little bodies in nappies could be violated.
The mass media representation of the body should be reassuring, honest
and healthy; it should give the impression that the body is known insideout
by its owner, that its functions can be controlled and its anomalies
modified. Some time ago there was a three-dimensional image on the
Internet of a human body which had been completely penetrated by all the
current scientific technology. It was more than naked, more than dissected,
and was also an amazing computer spectacle, a virtual body, yet very real.
Compared to this, the pictures of the autopsy of a supposed extraterrestrial
recorded in utmost secrecy in America at the end of the 1940s and released
to the public some time ago (who knows why) raise a smile. But perhaps
they also make us think a little: the dissected alien, be it real or not, naked
on the autopsy table, gives the impression of an old, helpless foetus.
Newborn babies, aliens, the old and the sick are all alike: they make us
think of a nakedness that is part of us all and that makes us, despite media
reassurances to the contrary, a bit alien in our daily lives.
Watching her on television commercials can really get on your nerves;
not her, Barbie, so much as those simpering little girls who smother her
with endearments and caresses. As a doll she is not that bad, once you
overcome your prejudices about the stereotype of female beauty that her
perfect body represents. Even the most critical adults have come to believe
that the most beloved doll of the second half of the twentieth century is not
as harmful as they once thought. Partly because the ex-children who were
the first to play with her have become mothers themselves, and partly
because the messengers of doom concerning children’s toys have forgotten
her for the moment as they have recently started to rail against videogames
and Internet. So Barbie is still the queen of little girls’ daydreams. Little
boys’, too, given that ‘new mums’ and, more importantly, ‘new dads’ are
learning not to repress the ‘feminine’ desires that their little boys might
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