By Andrew Grossman
We have all been washed too well in Christian moralism’s filthy legacy — even decades of belligerent atheism cannot fully exfoliate those layers of shame acculturated and inculcated during the months we spend as toddlers twiddling with our bizarre appendages and groping through fantastical stages of Freudian anality. Following the terrific yearnings of adolescence and brazen awakenings of young adulthood, we at last cast aside every folk neurosis and totemic inheritance with which our irrational upbringings smothered us. We soon become overconfident in our sophistications, as complexly layered in their denials as our toddling naivetés once were in their credulities. We watch Pasolini during tea, page through Civilization and Its Discontents in the tub, and employ Erwartung as the soundtrack for our weekly nosehair tweezings, so what possible meanings can New Testament shame, ruler of the unlettered and beguiled, still portend for us, who’ve endured and absorbed every cultural revolution?
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Twain’s famous remark that “Man is the only animal that blushes . . . or needs to,” is trenchant in its misanthropy but perhaps too easily equates human folly with post-Christian habits of socialization. In The Unfashionable Human Body, an amusing tour through history’s garment neuroses, Bernard Rudofsky describes “an unauthorized easterly version of the Fall [in which] the first man and woman are described as sexless; only after having sinned ‘were the halves of the forbidden apple grafted unto them in the shape of breasts and testicles.'”3 This “unauthorized” Eastern Orthodox incarnation of Eden, wherein developmentally arrested Adam and Eve are instantly socialized through some fruity magic, makes abundantly clear Christianity’s equation between abstract, totalized knowledge and bodily knowledge per se — an equation both neurotic in its reductions and logical in its identification of the body as the source of primal knowledge, a Platonic notion that reaches its apogee in Rousseau’s Emile. Our familiar Western version of Eden is coy to the point of discomfiture: the fruit, once digested, becomes an internalized desire (shame) to cloak the sex organs in leaves, rather than becoming an externalized manifestation of the organs themselves. Though more blatant in its associations, this Eastern version refuses to equate sexual knowledge with knowledge totalized, or the procreative act with all productiveness. Had this been the version on which we were socially weaned, perhaps our nudity neuroses might be at once more intensified and more limited, compartmentalized in a special place in our collective conscious as a unique category of sexual-bodily knowledge distinct from the illimitable sensory investigations of every innocent, autodidactic Emile.