Naturism | Fiction | Redwall, Rihanna's Latest Video - Just Not Erotic Enough?

You have my assurances that I will speak of the cuts to our nation's libraries just as soon as I've invented a new form of language that allows me to discuss them without my becoming earnest, self-righteous or shrill, since I believe firmly in the superiority of waggling genitals over waggling pitchforks.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, a confession; I unconsciously associate nudity with sex. I’m well aware that this means, like most people, I have a somewhat over-simplified view of naturism.


It also means that I’m intrigued by the tendency of writers of children’s fiction featuring anthropomorphic animals to put their characters au naturelle or only wearing a top – understandable enough in ‘realistic’ works based in our world like Watership Down, Colin Dann’s The Animals Of Farthing Wood, or even The Deptford Mice, but a little confusing in books such as The Welkin Weasels or the Redwall series by the sadly-recently-passed Brian Jacques. Why do his hares wear jackets but nothing else? Why do his mice often wear very little at all? Are these creatures capable of building abbeys, wielding poleaxes and brewing cordials but somehow unable to put on a pair of trousers?

None of the characters even pause mid-battle to lick their own genitals.

It’s only an issue because all of these works, from the Batrachomyomachia onwards, have used the violence that’s an inherent part of survival in nature to explore human concepts of manufactured violence. Redwall, infamously (I was actually surprised by how many of his obituaries noted this fact) held an implicitly vegetarian philosophy, making every single outright carnivore villainous by their very nature, since killing other animals is part of their life. This could, of course, have led to a spin-off in which a heroic nunnery of earthworms battles evil moles from Yorkshire, but that’s beside the point. The rather more complex Farthing Wood played a smart piece of irony by having the carnivorous heroes swear that they wouldn’t eat any other animal…that was already a part of their society. The dumb stuff – such as Disney’s The Lion King – just ignores the issue entirely and blathers on about the Circle of Life.


But none of these books, in the fine old tradition of ‘violence is fine for children; sex isn’t’, really deal with that other issue of animal behaviour. Watership Down’s plot is, in the second half, all driven by sex, but it’s dealt with incredibly obliquely. The does’ situation in, respectively, Woundwort’s warren and their hutches, is made so clearly out to be captivity that the heroes’ actions can be posited as liberation rather than the Rape of the Sabine Women that it really is. Robin Jarvis’ The Oaken Throne (from the Deptford Mice universe) even went so far as to focus on the romance between a bat and a squirrel, but was forced to make them into doomed Romeo-and-Juliet-style lovers in order to avoid dealing with any of the serious questions.


It’s a glossy, unimaginative attitude that reminds me of nothing so much as the popular pop singer Rihanna, and in particular her latest song ‘S & M’, which currently has British mothers fearful that it will end up sexualising their young children. They really needn’t worry, since the image of BDSM that Rihanna presents in her song and accompanying music video is exactly the same image of sex as a whole that she presents in every single one of her videos. That is, that it requires props, multiple costumes, and a cast of thousands. Frankly, parents, in this economy, by the time your little Janey’s saved up for enough shiny leather pants for the forty male strippers to writhe lustily around her, she’ll be forty-three and that outfit simply won’t fit her any more.


The lyrics themselves, so vague as to be meaningless, suggest that Rihanna doesn’t care about S & M any more than George W. Bush cares about black people or Kanye West cares about other people. The point, in fact, is the same as with Christina Aguilera and Madonna before that – to take one of the most philosophically intriguing movements of deviancy and use it to dress up in a bizarro costume. The opposite of a fashion statement. Using a statement to promote yourself, then using the resulting controversy to promote yourself further. Basically, it's the fashion equivalent of the Groupon Superbowl ads.

Rihanna had always seen 'Venus In Furs' as an unconscious rebellion against primitive man's will to power.

With this in mind, I’ve taken the time to prepare Lady Gaga’s next music video, taking the animalian aspects of ‘furry-ism’ and bestiality that simply haven’t been dealt with sufficiently in children’s’ literature, and packaging them in a manner designed towards the fashion-pop philosophy. Because frankly, Isabella Rossellini’s series of videos depicting her having sex with other animals in animal costumes wasn’t nearly tasteless or gratuitous enough. It was educational rather than egotistical and it taught instead of glossing over AND THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH, DAMMIT!


JARRINGLY PASTEL-COLOUR-PAINTED HOTEL ROOM, INT, DAY.

LADY GAGA sits, singing on the phone. She’s wearing a FISH on her CROTCH. The FISH FLAPS ABOUT.

LADY GAGA:

Ooo ooo ooo ooo,

Ooo ooo ooo ooo

Doo doo doo doo-

Ooo ooo doo!

Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!

DELIBERATELY FAKE KITSCH BLUESCREEN CAR ON THE ROAD, INT/EXT, DAY

LADY GAGA is kissing a SMALL DOG. Now she’s wearing a dress made of HIGHLY-AROUSED POSSUMS.

LADY GAGA:

They say he’s hung like a horse

Hung like a horse

Oooh, yeah, he’s hung like a horse.

I'm Lady Gaga.

You know me, I'm Lady Gaga.

Submit to the power

Of the Illuminati.

STUDIO, INT, DAY


TWENTY MALE MODELS in BEAR SUITS grind up against LADY GAGA in such a way that, were they to attempt this during the act of sex, BITS would SNAP OFF. LADY GAGA herself is wearing an all-elk corset. For no reason, a bunch of paparazzi with KITTEN HEADS try and take pictures of her.


Then some more MALE MODELS, on bended knee, offer LADY GAGA a PHALLIC ANACONDA, keeping their gazes averted. She writhes with it for FIVE ENDLESS MINUTES. She also sings some more words but they DON’T REALLY MATTER.



Jon Ware
Fiction Editor



Naturism | Poetry | A Coat

"Everybody knows that the naked man and woman are just a shining artefact of the past."

- Leonard Cohen

We’re going to begin today’s discussion of ‘naturism’ and poetry with this famous short poem by W. B. Yeats:

A Coat

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it,

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

It is often tempting with poetry to pinpoint a single word or phrase as being the ‘lynchpin’ of the poem; the idea upon which every other word is leaning. One instinctively points at that word ‘naked’ in Yeats’ poem as being the keystone, for it is the final word, being leant on heavily by the half-rhyme of ‘take it’, and it is the word with the widest obvious semantic field.

Nudity in writing is often seen as a symbol of honesty (as in ‘the naked truth’) and this is certainly part of what Yeats is aiming at. He is miffed at the way that his ornate verse has been misinterpreted and mimicked by those who have no comprehension of what they are mimicking – like a British hip-hop enthusiast shouting ‘Westside!’ with no idea of where this tradition comes from.

Yeats laments how ‘fools’ have taken the superficial forms of his poems on board, without every truly understanding their essence; the vehicle of this metaphor being ‘coat and wearer’ and the tenor being  ‘poetic form and content’.

But what then, of this idea of ‘enterprise’? We have the obvious link here with boldness and adventurousness in an endeavour (eg. Starship Enterprise) but, do we not also take from this poem the idea of enterprise as meaning ‘business initiative’? Yeats’ ‘enterprise in walking naked’ can certainly be paraphrased with the idea that ‘there’s more money in nudity’.

In this sense, I do not think that we can equate Yeats’ use of ‘naked’ with ‘honesty’ – I get the sense that he is being a little more bitchy. If he were implying that ‘naked’ verse is better than this ‘coat’-wearing kind that everyone’s been copying, then he is more or less implying that all of his old work is not worth bothering with. This is not the sort of thing that Yeats would ever suggest.

So we have the possibility that he is using ‘naked’ in its most literal sense of ‘not dressed’, or to take it even further, ‘not bothered to get dressed’. We know that Yeats was very much of the opinion that poets should be ‘lamps’ rather than ‘mirrors’ to the world, and so the idea of blurting out language designed to merely reflect reality is something that would seem lazy to him.

If we are to modify our metaphor in this poem to take ‘naked’ for ‘undressed’ then what Yeats is perhaps referring to is the idea that ‘there is more money or business potential in writing poems that do not seem to have gone through the poetic process but rather appear as fragments of the familiar’. More ‘enterprise’ then, because ‘naked poetry’ is the sort of poetry that has a wider audience, and this is the sort of poetry that doesn’t take as much effort to write.

To fully understand Yeats’ use of the word ‘naked’ however, we must take some notice of the fact that it is preceded by the word ‘walking’. This choice of verb is an interesting one when we know that it is being done in the nude. ‘Being’ naked would be no point of interest, but ‘walking’? Are we to think of the emperor’s new clothes here? I am more reminded of this iconic line from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl:

“who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts.”

Whilst some read this as an ultimate depiction of crassness, I read it (and I feel that Yeats would read it) as the requisite lack of inhibition needed to write anything of value. By having his disorderly beatniks dragged off a roof holding their writing in one hand and their naked form in the other, he is forcing us to compare the two in terms of offensiveness. Ginsberg urges the conclusion that nothing he could ever write could shock or offend the status quo as much as the naked human body – and for what? As a species that require genitals for our continuation, why then such taboos over disrobing?

Which brings us to our final (at least for tonight) inference to be made from Yeats’ use of ‘naked’ -  nudity as symbol of vulnerability.

If you get nervous, just imagine everyone in the room naked, the age-old useless piece of advice goes.

It was so weird seeing my ex-girlfriend the other day, knowing we’d seen each other naked, we type into our instant messaging boxes.

Underneath your clothes, there’s a different story, that’s the man I chose, that’s my territory sings Shakira, one of the finest poets ever to have disguised herself as a pop star.

If we look back at what Yeats describes of his ‘Coat’ in the beginning of the poem; covered with ornate embroideries, full body-length in size; we get the definite image of what Neil Strauss would describe as ‘peacocking’, do we not? The idea of masking your insecurities by wearing the sort of flamboyant thing that only a very confident, secure and socially uninhibited person might wear.

So with the nudity comes that level of vulnerability and emotional earnestness that is at the heart of much of the literary heritage. I am reminded of a scene in one of the Bridget Jones films where our protagonist is trying to cover up her ‘lumpy bits’ with a duvet and Colin Firth in his loveable British way saying ‘don’t be ridiculous, I love your lumpy bits’.

For an interesting rebuke to Yeats’ ‘Coat’ however, one need look no further than ‘The Mask’, a poem in which he suggests that it is our lovers’ illusions and personas that we fall for rather than the naked self:

“It was the mask engaged your mind,

And after set your heart to beat,

Not what’s behind.”

As with any great poetry, Yeats is clearly forcing every word to pull its weight and then some. In this particular case, ‘naked’ is being used to tie together ideas of honesty, lack of inhibition, vulnerability, laziness and intimacy all in two sexy little syllables. Nice work W.B., now put the kettle on.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Naturism | Introduction | The Naked Blogger

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
John Berger



This week, it's all things naked. Nude? Crude? Perhaps, or possibly some kind of more intimate truth. Things are what they are, default and natural. Naked.