An eloquent essay

[John P]

No BlueTrain, you have it backward. It's the textiles who fetishize the genitals, and it happens all around the world, as I was trying to show. The genitals must almost always be covered, but you're "clothed" as long as you wear some minimal thing. Naturists are the ones who are saying "We want a world where everyone can go around completely naked" and the textiles (sorry BT, but you sound like one of them here) say "One could be fooled into thinking that nudism is just about the genitals". It's not, it's about nudity. Wear pants, or a gourd, and you're not naked.

So my question is why do people in so many places feel the need to wear something? Got any answers?

[Peter S]

Given that we on this forum do not see the need to wear clothes, it’s probably the wrong place to expect an answer to that one 

[BlueTrain]

No place for free thinkers, eh?

[jbeegoode]

John P. wrote: "No BlueTrain, you have it backward. It's the textiles who fetishize the genitals, and it happens all around the world, as I was trying to show. The genitals must almost always be covered, but you're "clothed" as long as you wear some minimal thing. Naturists are the ones who are saying "We want a world where everyone can go around completely naked" and the textiles (sorry BT, but you sound like one of them here) say "One could be fooled into thinking that nudism is just about the genitals". It's not, it's about nudity. Wear pants, or a gourd, and you're not naked.

So my question is why do people in so many places feel the need to wear something? Got any answers?"


Why do they get hung up on clothing even just a genital cover or augmentation?

Briefly: Clothes make the man, identity, sexual suggestion, habit (feeling naked without it), hardwired tribal thinking becoming conformity, body image problems, bas-ackwards thinking. Clothing coupled with other important issues in life, examples maybe uniforms, status, power, or flimflam cons. Covering as signs of wealth. Comfort in weather, or practical cover becoming something else as it gets ingrained into the social/cultural contexts. Security blankets. Religious belief, which is sometimes coupled with fears.

The native in the pictured example could be a very simple person. There is often a childlike quality in more isolated an din primitive people. He may be attached to it in a childlike manner, so the importance is amplified, like a child looses his teddy bear.

Jbee

[JOhnGw]

Most rules should say what IS LEGAL, and not what is illegal.  And, laws should be broadly worded to legalize normal human behavior is legal. 

Its legal to go naked.
Its legal to be partly naked
Its legal to talk to people or look at people.
Do whatever you like as long as nobody else is being actually hurt.   Hurt means physical or financial injury.

You'r getting back to:
"The only proper freedom is the freedom to go to hell in your own way and should only be overridden by the duty to take nobody else with you."

[John P]

Most rules should say what IS LEGAL, and not what is illegal.

Now I'm thinking of the joke (an old joke, is my guess):
In France some things are forbidden. In Germany some things are permitted.
Which country would you rather live in?

And that links up with my claim that textile-compulsive people are the ones obsessed with genitals. In some countries, a few parts of the body must be hidden. In other countries, a few parts of the body can be shown. But in which countries can the body be entirely shown? Ah, not many.

[jbeegoode]

No BlueTrain, you have it backward. It's the textiles who fetishize the genitals, and it happens all around the world, as I was trying to show. The genitals must almost always be covered, but you're "clothed" as long as you wear some minimal thing. Naturists are the ones who are saying "We want a world where everyone can go around completely naked" and the textiles (sorry BT, but you sound like one of them here) say "One could be fooled into thinking that nudism is just about the genitals". It's not, it's about nudity. Wear pants, or a gourd, and you're not naked.

So my question is why do people in so many places feel the need to wear something? Got any answers?

I might add that in many all the parts may be shown, but in only certain locations, hence, free range.

As for textiles being the ones who fetishize genitals, I ponder about that thing going around, when for some, shaving pubic hair is more naked than genitals being hidden by hair. For many textiles this is so. How much so is the textile influence on nudist women shaving genitals? For the voyeur tendency in men, how much does curiosity play into the inner minds of naturist men? Do they get a buzz seeing more? Is it a stripping? For many, it is a fashion pressure to shave. Some just like how it feels. Some say they like the way it looks. Some say men's penises look bigger when shaved...We were taught these things by the culture that we came from? Are genitals naturally of some innate sense of importance? Then, we're back to,"Is covering genitals a sexual message?" Desmond Morris, "Naked Ape" hypothesized that pubic hair is left on us, evolving from a sexual attraction thing. It draws attention, points like an arrow, like men's prominent genitals are a sexual message.

Then there is the common experience when going from social textile to nude, that people stop being so obsessed with genitals when nude. They look, curiosity is satisfied and move on to the person and less the sex object.
Jbee

[nuduke]

That's a deeply philosophical point John P and thank you for making it - that the fetishisation of clothing is the problem of the clothed not the naked.
I googled for why we wear clothes and woo-hoo all sorts of guff rolls out of the internet.  Whilst I didn't browse for long, equally there wasn't much that commented seriously or informed the question at all.  I learned most often in the list of links the chrisitian religious angle that we should be clothed to hide our original sin. No thank you on that point.  Basically it goes so far back in history that we probably shall never know the answer clearly but it's got to have something to do with the human race(s) migrating further and further across the world and having to cope with increasingly harsh climates.  I'm sure the status, signalling and social aspects of clothing came after the basic protection from the elements.  Sewing needles have been found that are over 30,000 years old.  We have done clothing for a longggg time.  Maybe there's some point to it after all?  Hope not!

Is it my imagination or are those sectors of humanity that live naked or very nearly naked (apart from stuff like penis gourds) also those peoples who generally live in both high temperature and high humidity conditions such as South American rainforest?  Perhaps these were the original conditions in which humans arose, where there was no need for clothing?   
John

[Greenbare Woods]

Here is about Clothing from philosopher Kahlil Gibran

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.

Some of you say,"It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear."
And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,
But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.

And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

[jbeegoode]

Was this from "The Profit"? I just put my copy in a box for storage during my transitions and can't look it up.
Jbee

[Greenbare Woods]

Was this from "The Profit"? I just put my copy in a box for storage during my transitions and can't look it up.
Jbee

Yes, that's were it comes from. 

[John P]

Kahlil Gibran's Wikipedia entry seems to say that he took his profit from The Prophet and used it to drink himself to death; apparently  Prohibition didn't hinder him. And hey, he was from Boston (kind of).

Nuduke, my point about clothing wasn't really related to "protection from the elements" or any such practical thing. People can be somewhat practical about clothing, and keep it minimal if they live in the tropics, for instance. But once it does become minimal, why not eliminate it altogether? There have been societies that did that, but more often there was some part of the body that people felt a need to keep covered. I'm wondering why there's such a widespread instinct that some clothing needs to exist.

[nuduke]

I'm wondering why there's such a widespread instinct that some clothing needs to exist.

Quite so!  This is the great enigma that I was ineptly trying to get at.  Looked at from a slightly different angle but tagging on to your point...whilst some clothing may be considered necessary for practical reasons, why is it considered fundamentally necessary by most societies? 
Why aren't there more options to wear little or nothing?  On a few occasions that I have watched documentaries about the discovery of 'lost tribes' usually in the jungles of S. America, the discovered people have been virtually naked but as soon as they hit 'civilisation' they start wearing western clothes.  Why?  If you don't need them in one part of the jungle why do you need them in another part of the same jungle with a slightly different society.  I'm sure that Christian Missionaries must be responsible for some of that but why do they always seem to adopt clothing over the (almost complete) nakedness that was their norm and habit before? 
Is there something inherent in the human psyche that adopts clothes?  Naturists are not free from this 'something'.  We naturists do the opposite - we reject clothes.  None of us have been brought up in a 100% naked society, quite the opposite.  All of us have discovered the benefits of being naked and actively eschewed raiment. We come from societies where being clothed is the status quo.  That's not the same as being a member of a society that has been naked for many generations at least.
Where nakedness is the norm of society in these marginal civilisations, I guess they reject nakedness and adopt clothing on integrating with western culture.  It's a puzzle.
Am I in fact wrong, based on very limited observation through the documentary makers' lenses?  Is it in fact the case that a naked tribe entering western style society in fact does sometimes opt to be clothed and sometimes naked (that's an enviable condition looked at from our perspective).  Does that happen?  Do some tribespeople stay naked whilst others begin to don T shirts and shorts?
It would seem that in the presence of clothing, naturally naked people adopt it.  So John P's speculation highlights this anthropological question with a bright spotlight.  I have no answer but I recognise the conjecture!
John

[Peter S]

I suspect the reason for previously naked folk to don clothes when they meet “civilisation” is that they think this is how they should behave in the new world they have joined, in the same way that the colonised of th3 past liked to ape the colonisers. Who’s to say they’re wrong? (We are!)

[jbeegoode]

One reason is missionaries. It is often a bribing process and they get the "primitives " to adapt an "Higher" way of life. God wants you dressed, shame, etc.

Another is ridicule.Nakedness associated with primitive, inferior and "Indios." Status being more modern, advanced, worldly to contact the west and have souvenirs.

Who wouldn't value a rock from the moon, the gift of clothing is similar.

That is how it makes inroads. Racism is rampant in these places, Indios are looking to be treated differently than that, so they dress the part. They are safer trying to blend in, rather than look like easy targets to exploit and hurt. Some strip down when they return home, so I saw in one doc. Some expect the outsider to conform to their customs as a way of showing love, acceptance, or respect.
Jbee

Anyone of these has the factor of outside influences.
Jbee