Keep Your Shame to Yourself: Teaching Gymnophobia to children is wrong
Most people understand that it is wrong to teach a child to be homophobic, sexist, or racist. When will we learn that teaching body shame is also bad?
Let’s say you’re chatting with some random stranger one day. Perhaps you’re waiting in a long supermarket checkout line and start up a conversation about this or that with the woman behind you. In the midst of the conversation, this person, who you do not know and will likely never see again, says something that is to you shockingly sexist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise just plain ignorant and hateful. Some people might call her out, but most of us will simply disengage…let it go. Not worth it. You’ll never fix these people. Unless it is simply beyond the scope of normal life, you are unlikely to even remember the encounter in a few days.
But let’s say instead, that instead of hearing the grown woman spew hate, what you saw was a grown woman intentionally teaching her child to hate. Imagine that in the first supermarket line scenario a woman called a celebrity on a magazine cover the “N-word”. In the second scenario, let’s say the mother showed that celebrity photo to a child and told the child that this kind of person should be called an N-word.
Wouldn’t agree that the second scenario would probably shock you much more than the first? You know people are racist and there’s not much you can do about a grown person who simply is hateful. But to witness this hate being transferred to a second generation right in front of you is something you may never forget.
I suspect that for most of us, our moral conscious is such that we recognize that the intentional manipulation of children to cause them to hate is somehow worse than the mere expression of hatred by someone long ago lost outside the parameters of reason and compassion.
Why exactly is this worse? I’m not sure I can answer that for you satisfactorily, but it seems to me that there’s an element here that has to do with the multiplication effect of parental indoctrination. Parents have more influence than the larger world does. When parents teach, children don’t merely learn information, they learn how to teach. The teaching that parents do is different from the role of an algebra teacher. The fact of the parent teaching it is itself a lesson to the child about what is important for life.
Teaching a child to hate members of another race is very likely to result in some non-negligible amount of suffering being inflicted upon members of that race by that child, or those influenced by that child. The child himself is unlikely to hurt anyone with this newly learned hatred, but the consequences of this instruction may be disastrous in the long run.
Although the mother is not noticeably directly hurting the child by teaching him to call black the N-word, she is still doing something that is morally wrong. Her moral responsibility lies in the predictable long term effects of her actions. She is intentionally creating the circumstances in which innocent people are likely to suffer — including perhaps the child himself if the child repeats these hateful comments at the wrong moment in front of people less restrained than yourself.
To sum up the lesson: Teaching children to have beliefs that are likely to result in suffering for the child or others is morally wrong. The obligation of all upbringers of youth is to teach them beliefs and habits most likely to result in their well-being and the well-being of others, and to refrain from teaching them beliefs and habits which result in their own suffering or the suffering of others.
I’d argue further that the obligation not to teach suffering-inducing habits and beliefs applies even when the parent herself holds suffering-inducing habits and beliefs.
Examples:
- A racist mother may know she’s a racist, and may regard herself unable to change, yet that does not absolve her from the obligation to teach her children not to be racist.
- A cigarette-smoking father may not be able to quit, yet he has an obligation not to allow his children to smoke.
- A homophobic teacher may find himself unable to refrain from a powerful disgust of homosexuals, but he has an obligation from refraining from taking it out on the gay students in his class or allowing their classmates from bullying them.
I’d like now to transition to an issue that is not commonly regarded as a moral infraction, but which I think most certainly is. As a naturist, I hold that it is morally wrong to disrespect the bodies of any person. I hold that in an ideal world, all persons should be afforded perfect bodily autonomy (short of hurting others or themselves), including the right to determine for themselves how much clothing they want to wear in a given situation.
I argue that textilism (which is the common cultural practice of insisting that all persons must be clothed at all times unless justified by medical or hygienic necessity, or by limited sexual and artistic circumstances) inevitably contributes to cultural gymnophobia (which is the common phenomenon of fear, anxiety, scorn, mockery, or suppression of the natural, nude human body), and that these two mutually-reinforcing phenomena result in a whole host of negative consequences which cumulatively result in what I call a Body Shame Culture.
Body Shame Culture refers to every way in which society fosters an unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship with the body. The manifestations of Body Shame Culture range from social stratification and prejudice based on clothing, race, sex, or disability, to sexual repression and homophobia and transphobia, to rigid gender norms, sexual objectification and assault, unhealthy eating and fitness habits, and general shame, self-loathing, and violence directed at the body.
Many of the manifestations of Body Shame Culture are commonly recognized as problems in our society, especially by feminists, and most especially by those who call themselves Body Positive Activists or Fat Acceptance activists and so on.
As a naturist, as well as a male supporter of feminism, I support most of the work done by these activists. However, I am deeply disconcerted by the lack of recognition of the specific problems of textilism and gymnophobia. It should be obvious to all feminists and Body Positivity activists, that the continued suppression of the human body in our daily lives directly contributes to so many of the problems they are concerned about.
For examples, feminists have long recognized that the fashion and entertainment industries do irreparable harm on female psyches by constantly presenting women of a very specific and rare body type, namely, young thin white women. We live in a culture so inundated with images of these pretty white girls that these images become fixed in the minds of everyone as the ideal of perfection and beauty. The vast majority of women who cannot match this ideal spend countless hours and dollars striving to achieve an ideal that they simple will never approximate. Even the few who possess such beauty in youth, will lose it as they age. It is a competition that can never be won, yet one in which nearly all are pressured into competing in.
For the last decade or more, there has been a major movement on the internet and elsewhere to produce images that show greater diversity and realism. Most of us have seen such campaigns, and I imagine that if you are still reading this, you probably support these efforts (as do I).
However the problem with these campaigns is that they seem to entirely miss the point. The major problem isn’t that the media shows us a few scantily clad white girls and says “these are the ideal.”
The problem is that we are collectively so ignorant of what human bodies actually look like that we have no well-established basis for comparison. The power of these images lies not in some magical forces wielded by the advertising industry, but in the fact that they are exploiting a massive gap in our knowledge. That gap: Most of us don’t really know what human beings actually look like. Out of the many thousands (or millions?) of times we see a human being, we see them naked only in a tiny fraction of cases. Then, when we look at ourselves or our lovers, we lack an accurate standard by which to judge the aesthetics of what we’re seeing. The suffering this seems to cause is incalculable.
An analogy I’d like you to consider:
Imagine you lined in a sinister alternate universe where you and everyone else ate a McDonald’s hamburger for every meal of every day, but the burger was always consumed in the dark. When it was meal time, you went into a dark room, the food was delivered to you there and you ate it without ever seeing it. Not let’s also imagine that outside of those dark restaurants you were constantly exposed to McDonald’s television commercials — and no other food was commonly advertised to you.
Growing up in such an environment you would develop a very specific mental image of what a McDonald’s hamburger looked like. In your mind these hamburgers are hot, juicy, with perfect fluffy buns and crisp green lettuce, red ripe juicy tomatoes…perfect. Delicious.
Since all meals are eaten in the dark, the residents of this dystopia don’t know what you actually know: that in reality, McDonald’s hamburgers actually look like squished, disfigured, stale, microwaved, pale, almost gelatinous blobs that resemble their advertisements not at all. In the real world, we know that a McDonald’s advertisement hamburger is not what the average McDonald’s hamburger actually looks like. Some hamburgers somewhere probably look like those in the commercials, but not the ones I’m gonna find at my local restaurant.
For fans of McDonald’s this is not a problem. They know what they’re getting and they separate the fiction from the fantasy. The discrepancy between the ideal and the real does not cause them much heartache (only the food does). In the real world, McDonald’s advertising may alter your perception of their product at some subconscious level, but the power of these image are greatly diminished by your real world tangible experience with the actual thing.
Going back to the issue of beauty advertising:
If the hamburger analogy is not yet clear enough, we live now in that dystopia when it comes to our understanding of what a human actually looks like. We see idealized images of photo-shopped artificially enhanced pretty white girls everywhere, but the real-world equivalent is rarely seen in the light. Our knowledge of real human bodies is not exactly entirely unknown to us, but the real thing is so nearly perfectly covered in darkness (or clothing) that the images shown us take on an over-sized space in that part of the brain where we might otherwise be storing the combined memories of thousands of naked bodies.
This collective ignorance of the human body results in a great deal of suffering as women strive to match the artificially constructed image of what a woman “should” look like, largely in order to please men who similarly are attracted mostly to these same artificial women.
My proposal is that the only large-scale, sustainable, and efficient solution to this problem is not to focus on altering the media’s presentation of women (which will necessarily always be only a small quantity of the total amount of women we will see in our lifetime), but to encourage the expose of all humans to as many real-life humans as possible.
We must destroy the mystique of the human body which gives sexualized advertising its great power. We must get naked, be seen naked, see others naked, encourage nakedness, celebrate nakedness. We must identify textilist attitudes wherever they exist and challenge them with pro-nudity attitudes wherever reasonable. We must identify expressions of gymnophobia wherever they manifest themselves and contradict themselves with message of body positivity and respect for the nude, natural, nonsexual human body.
Finally I return to the topic of the morality of teaching children and the point I made earlier about the moral obligation to teach children positive and righteous habits and beliefs, even when those beliefs contradict even our own deep-seated irrational prejudices.
You may never be able to overcome your own gymnophobia and textilism. The indoctrination may be too strong in you. The habits too well-established. You might simply fail to see how you can ever remove your clothing in public.
But wouldn’t you agree, that the teaching of body shame is an immoral act? Regardless of your own feelings on the matter, you have an obligation to refrain from indoctrinating your children with those same body-hating views. Teach them that they are responsible for their bodies, and no one else. Teach them that clothing is a tool, and not a cage. You use a tool when you need it, but you do should keep animals permanently in cages. Allow your children to develop their own sense of modesty untainted by your own gymnophobic scarring.
It occurs to me that this principle applies also to a matter of some recent controversy and that this the practice of the wearing of headscarves and niqabs other other coverings by some Muslim woman. As a naturist and one who believes that clothing is irrelevant to modesty and respect, I find it challenging to respect a tradition which goes to such extremes in covering the body. I believe that all women ought to determine for themselves how much or how little clothing they wish to wear. To me, hijab is simply not my concern. So long as it is not mandatory, I don’t see how it ever needs to be the concern of anyone but the wearer.
That said, there is an aspect to this that we should recognize as very relevant to the topic at hand: that is the teaching of children that the body is something shameful and that they ought to be ashamed of some parts of their bodies. As I have made clear, I regard this to be the intentional infliction of suffering on children. I regard it therefore as entirely immoral to teach children that they or other women ought to be wearing hijab in order to be respected.
The principle is summed up thusly: I respect the right of any person to wear (or not wear) whatever they wish, including the hijab and niqab. But teaching children that the display of their body is shameful or sinful is an immoral violation of their rights to live with as little suffering as possible. The indoctrination of “modesty”-based suffering is immoral, regardless of whether we are talking about the entire body, or just a part of it.
Certainly there are real-world concerns about the safety of children and their potential exploitation. They do need to be taught the practical realities of living in the gymnophobic and textilist world. There are many times and places where practical or real physical safety becomes a concern, and where compromises must be made to accommodate our body-shaming society. They can’t go to school naked how much they want to.
Regardless of the challenges of overcoming these prejudices and superstitions, we as a society need to discover a path to transition away from Body Shame Culture, and discover a new way of life in which all bodies are respected, and all persons are respected, and no one is indoctrinated into a self-image designed to inflict suffering on the innocent.
As a parent you have an obligation not to simply pass your prejudices on to your offspring. You must teach them to know better, even if it is very challenging for yourself.
