(This is my article from the Spring 2004 issue of Kitsch Magazine.)

According to data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov), the world population is currently tipping the scales at 6.38 billion. Approximately 3.2 billion of those people are female, and approximately 2.3 billion of those women are over the age of 14. Assuming that most females have at least begun puberty by 14 years of age, these figures all point to one staggering statistic: there are nearly 4.6 billion breasts on our humble, blue-green planet, give or take several hundred million.

Let’s say that the average bra size, worldwide, is 34B — the size that graced the most bra labels in America before we started supersizing everything, including ourselves (now our country proudly lugs around a pair of 36Cs). If we estimate the volume of a single 34B breast at about 400cc, and assume that it is composed almost entirely of human fat (which has a density of 0.918 grams per cc), then the breast mass index (BMI) of the world is roughly 1.9 million tons, and the total breast volume (TBV) of the world is nearly 500 million gallons. That’s enough to bury the entire island of Manhattan in breasts to a depth of a foot.

In short, there are more breasts in the world than you can shake a stick at. But despite their abundance, and the fact that they are a perfectly normal physical feature just like arms or legs or noses, Western culture treats breasts as a physical anomaly that must be covered up, while arguably indecent noses are constantly exposed. Why is it such a necessity to cover up these benign lumps of flesh?

The most obvious answer is that breasts are sexual, and that, because sex is a private matter, sex organs should be covered in the public domain. In order for this explanation to be successful, two basic assumptions must be true: 1) breasts are naturally sexual, and 2) it is natural to cover the sex organs in public.

If we do a cross-cultural comparison, it becomes immediately obvious that both of these ostensibly axiomatic assumptions are false. There is nothing “natural” about the concealment of breasts — or, for that matter, about the concealment of any part of the body. Modesty standards across cultures run the gamut, from covering oneself head-to-toe to walking around completely unclothed. There are plenty of cultures in which women walk around topless without evincing so much as an ogle, and there are plenty of other cultures in which a woman might be savagely beaten for behaving in such a manner.

Even more persuasive are the conflicting standards within Western culture. Rather than banning the exposure of any part of the breast at any time, there are specific rules and norms regarding which parts of the breast are acceptable to show and in what contexts. Generally, bare breasts are acceptable in art; educational materials such as textbooks, nature shows or publications; and locker rooms — and occasionally it is tolerable for a woman to breastfeed her infant in public. In contrast, bare breasts are deemed indecent when they appear in pornography or other sexual contexts.

Of course, these divisions are murky at best. How, exactly, does one distinguish between sexual and asexual contexts? There have been ample cases in the past where parties have disagreed on precisely this matter. In February, the Harvard Committee on College Life voted to approve H-Bomb, a student-run magazine that would feature nude photographs of undergrads and frank discussion of sexuality. The Harvard newspaper called H-Bomb a “porn magazine” and many members of the school community were outraged.

On a more national level, in 2002 the U.S. Justice Department spent $8,000 on curtains to cloak the “Spirit of Justice” statue during Attorney General John Ashcroft’s news conferences. The statue, of a woman with one breast bared, was installed in the 1930s and it had become a tradition for photographers to capture shots of politicians in front of it, their grim visages providing a stark contrast to the gleaming breast directly above their heads.

The Western standard of breast concealment is clearly arbitrary — but though the choice of body part is cultural, when one looks at the myriad of ways in which societies manifest modesty it becomes obvious that they are all built on a foundation that is quite natural: the omnipresence of modesty. All cultures, including those that wear no clothing, experience modesty in some capacity; it is simply the what, when, and where that vary.

***

Modesty often involves covering up certain parts of the body, and because of this people long thought that clothing developed as a result of some inherent human shame — it was not until Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, for example, that they became aware of their nakedness and subsequently fashioned clothes for themselves. However, in the late 1800s people began to question the assumption that clothing followed from modesty. As cultural awareness grew, it became obvious that there were many cultures in which people did not wear clothing, and these people were certainly not free of modesty. The men in the Yanomamo people of the Amazon wear a string around their waist, into which the penis is tucked. If the penis falls from its rigging, its owner is as embarrassed as an American whose pants fall down in public. When a group of women from the Amazonian Botocudo were asked by the anthropologist Baron von Nordenskiold to remove the plugs in their noses and ear lobes, they did so with much trepidation, and then fled in humiliation.

The theory that clothing was created for protection also does not tell the whole story. Though clothes certainly serve a protective use in our temperate Ithaca clime, many peoples who live in the sweltering tropics wear clothing as well, and the earliest humans evolved in warm areas where there was no need for even a skimpy loincloth, let alone a ski parka. If clothing were really created to protect our bodies from the elements, then shoes would have developed long before any kind of midriff-based genital covering.

It seems that clothing was first developed as a way of decorating the body, and in many societies where people wear clothing only for ceremonies or ritual dances, clothes still serve only a decorative purpose. The utilitarian purposes of clothing were secondary; the string around the waist was discovered to be useful for hanging tools and weapons from, and the Yanomamo found that if they tucked their penises into the strings about their waists, the most sensitive parts of their anatomy would be protected from insect bites and other unpleasant irritants encountered while sitting on the ground.

If the development of clothing did not proceed from shame about the body, why are the two now so closely linked? Many anthropologists argue that modesty is simply a habit, just like any other; the discomfort one feels when certain parts of the body are exposed is just a reaction to being in a situation to which one is unaccustomed. In 1899, W. I. Thomas made just such a claim, writing, “When once a habit is fixed, interference with its smooth running causes an emotion. The nature of the habit broken is of no importance. If it were habitual for grandes dames to go barefoot on our boulevards or to wear sleeveless dresses at high noon, the contrary would be embarrassing.” Sleeveless dresses! Heavens! The fact that this is habitual a hundred years later only drives Thomas’s point home: Now that we are used to baring our shoulders and seeing shoulders bared, to wear a tank top in public seems only ordinary. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking — now it takes a nipple.

***

Of course, modesty is not only linked to covering up certain parts of the body and baring others; in most cultures where people customarily wear a fair amount of clothing, the parts of the body that are covered up are considered sexual and the revealing of those parts is arousing (and therefore scandalous). Though there are likely other psychological aspects at play, it is clear that the actual body parts that are found arousing are dependent on which parts are usually covered by clothing.

Despite the fact that sociologists called attention to the mutability of modesty standards a century ago, the idea that there are certain inherently shameful parts of the anatomy is a dogma that persists. In Love and Responsibility, Pope John Paul II makes the sexual dimorphism case for modesty, asserting that the shameful body parts — the ones steeped in sexuality — are those that distinguish between the sexes, and that immodesty is present only when exposing these parts evokes concupiscence, or “a wish to enjoy concentrated on sexual values with no regard for the value of the person,” in others.

David Knight, a pastor, takes this idea one step further, calling female immodesty a “mild form of reverse rape, by which a person arouses unsolicited sexual desire on another person who may not want to be aroused.” He adds, “this may explain some of the hostility and aggressive behavior that men are guilty of toward women.”

Father Benjamin D. Wiker, in “Drawing a Hemline: Sexual Modesty and the Pursuit of Wisdom,” appeals to women’s desire to be taken seriously in his argument for modesty: “Is that not what feminists have been telling us, that they do not want women to be sex objects? They have been right to say so and should follow through with the natural consequence: modesty.”

It is taken as a given that the exposure of female skin is provocative, that this sexual advertising is wrong, and that the only solution is for women to cover up. Whether or not one agrees with the church’s view on sexuality, one has to wonder if covering up is really the solution. As E.B. Hurlock writes, “When primitive peoples are unaccustomed to wearing clothing, putting it on for the first time does not decrease their immorality… It has just the opposite effect. It draws attention to the body, especially for those parts of it which are covered for the first time.” John Flugel echoes this sentiment, stating that “while the imaginative contemplation of the naked body may be a highly erotic proceeding, the actual experience is exactly the reverse.”

It makes sense, then, that strippers draw such crowds; it is the act of removing clothing, not the state of nudity, that makes the performance so titillating. It suddenly becomes understandable that a six-year-old girl can run around without a shirt on and it’s adorable, but were she to don a midriff-baring tee, adults everywhere would cluck disapprovingly and mutter about the early sexualization of children. In these situations, flesh is nothing without fabric.

If modesty stems from wearing clothing, if some cultures walk around naked all day long and only put on clothing for fertility dances, then clearly the only way to put an end to the “reverse rape” wreaked upon unsuspecting men is to make nudity the norm. Only then will bare skin lose the overwhelming power it wields in modern America; only then will our flesh be free of any sexual associations.

Man is one of the only animals that engages in sexual activity year-round, for recreational rather than procreative purposes. Is it possible that clothing has something to do with this aberration — that, as Lawrence Langner writes, “instead of reducing man�s sexual desires, it actually increased them”? And if so, do we really want to lose one of our most beloved pastimes by habituating to the sight of bare skin? Clerics, take note: perhaps another argument for your beloved “modesty” lurks here.