Because they appeared in public nude as a signal

felt it a spiritual duty to do this. . . . The suggestion of such a sign came seemingly from Isaiah's walking 'nude and

Canada in the early 1900s.253 Paul Ableman records that "In May, 1979, Emperor Bokassa . . .
African tyrant, detained a sizable number of kids on charges of sedition and massacred some of them. According to
The Guardian (London) of 18 May, 'Hundreds of women demo nude outside the penitentiary until the survivors
were released.'" 254
In the 1920s, as portion of a widening rebellion against genteel society, the size of bathing suits began to
diminish. Nude beaches, reaching their peak of popularity in the 1970s, are the greatest outcome of the process of
social emancipation. The free body movement generally in the 1970s fit this societal and historical pattern. Examples
include casual nudity at Woodstock; "bare-in" demonstrations; plus a record-setting demonstration by Athens,
Georgia university students on March 7, 1974, when more than 1500 went naked on their college campus. It took
tear gas to make the pupils dress.255
Historical origins of the repression of nudity.
167. Repressive morality was designed by the state and also the Church as a tool to preserve control over
otherwise free people.256
"A complex culture has an enormous investment in differentiated attire. It's
no accident that one of the first issues a ground-breaking regime turns its attention to is clothes. BtoB: You know, it is interesting. I think that there's definitely a huge push for more "real" and "normal" things recently. There are so many companies who have switched their branding to attempt showing diversity in body types, a more natural appearance, etc. But it's kind of weird because even with all of the "real" things we're seeing recently, they are still typically polished to be their greatest variation of that. decreed classical grace and simplicity. The Chinese homogenized clothing.
Iran returned girls to the black chador and so on. . . . Sexual energy is needed by the authorities of the world to
maintain order. . . . It instantly becomes apparent why the accurate obscenity of killing and violence has consistently been
of less concern to those in power compared to the pseudo-obscenity of erotic acts. Death supplies no scope for a network of
regulations by which society may be controlled. . . . But sex is a permanent fountain of dynamic energy, which can
be tapped for social purposes by regulations concerning marriage, divorce, adultery, fornication, incest,
homosexuality, bestiality, chastity, promiscuity, decency and so on. All those who wield power intuitively perceive
All transferrals of power, all revolutions, are always
accompanied by transformations of the regulations regulating sexuality." 257 Seymour Fisher writes: "The
Consequences of nudity as a means of declaring one's complete independence have frequently evoked powerful countermeasures
from those in power. Nudity is punishable by death in some cultures. The Roman Catholic church has taught in
convent schools that it's sinful to expose your body even to your own eyes. The wearing of clothing signifies a
form of submission to prevailing mores. Nudist Clothing and Lingerie - What Garments is Unsuitable or too sexyforNudists? to putting on a 'citizen's uniform' and agreeing to play the game." 258
168. Appreciating Naked Art in the Nude - Experiencing the Art Unclothed at THEMUSEUM has regularly sought to control not only nudity, but sexuality in general.
Margaret Miles finds that "the regulation of sexuality was a leading power problem in the fourth-century
Christian churches. Management of sexual practices was a method to inject the authority of church laws and leaders into


the intimate and daily relationships of Christians. Examining the rules of the Council of Gangra in AD 309,
[Samuel] Laeuchli found that 46 percent of the eighty one canons were concerned with sexual relationships and
practices."
forbidding sex on Saturdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and also during the 40-day rapid intervals before Easter,
Christmas, and Whitsuntide--all for religious reasons. They kept adding feast days and days of the apostles to the
proscription, along with the days of female impurity, until it reached the stage that, as Yale historian John Boswell
has estimated, just 44 days a year stayed available for marital sex. Human nature being what it is, the church's
proscriptions were enthusiastically ignored." 260 Don Mackenzie notes that Christ and the very earliest church, in
contrast, emphasized a message of freedom--"from demonic powers, from tyrannical governments, from destiny. . . .
[and] a prevalent commitment to the separation of secular and ecclesiastical power. . . . [The Church] embraced
asceticism, not in obedience to its founder's teachings but as a bid for support in the face of competition, offering
spiritual comfort to people whose material world (the Roman Empire) was failing. Once the Church was formally