Thu 21 Feb 2008
How would our world be different if mankind never developed a concept of clothing — and was, in other words, a naked world?
Not intended to be horndoggy, although I understand it comes across that way and I’m blushing a bit. A throwaway line in TNG: Beyond Honor, by Peter David, prompted the thought. As the author speaking in third person omniscient, David is not exactly subtle in his appreciations of Jeri Ryan’s, er, charms. References are scattered in many areas throughout the book, but one particularly funny reference to it is where he has Seven of Nine musing to a rogue starship pilot about how she doesn’t see a need for clothing, but that Janeway had explained to her how it was needed in non-Borg culture.
After chuckling, I found myself wondering: what if mankind never saw a need for clothing? Putting aside the problems with improbability, the titillation, and the ample opportunities for jokes, seriously, how might the world have evolved differently, given that it’s played such an integral part in our current culture?
(I understand it’s overwhelmingly probable that someone would be consistently finding a need for clothing and would want to create something to cover their body. Assume, I don’t know, that God (or aliens or a supercomputer or a talking black hole or whatever omniscient entity have you) somehow repeatedly removes the idea from the heads of anyone coming up with the concept, so no matter how probable the thought is, it never develops.)
Off the top of my head:
Developmentally, I think mankind would never have settled in parts of the world that, here, require clothing for protection from the elements. I imagine that a pseudohibernation — a la stocking up on foodstuffs and hiding in shelter with a fire — might enable cold weather survival in some areas, but more likely than not, most of mankind would be centered around temperate climes. I think as a result we’d have a greater problem with overpopulation (comparatively — smaller space) and/or a much smaller civilization. Given that less land would be “habitable,” I imagine there would’ve been many more territorial wars.
Evolutionarily, I don’t know enough about the speed of evolution to know if the lack of clothing would have affected our actual bodies. Were the concept of “survival of the fittest” to have worked its way, I imagine physiological traits that better protect people from the elements would have survived to be passed on to the next generation. I’m thinking body hair, for example, and probably thicker skin would be beneficial as well. (I have this old science fiction anthology that has a story by L. Sprague de Camp from the ’30s about the same idea, except it happens to modern-day culture — well, what modern-day culture was in the ’30s.)
Depending on how protective that thicker skin became, heavy industry, where clothing serves an essential protective function, might not have developed — or perhaps might’ve developed based on a more remote-manipulation kind of basis, to put the employee farther away from harm.
I don’t know if wearable storage would be considered “clothing.” With no pockets, things that offer easily luggable storage capacity such as backpacks, etc. would be very essential to most everyone.
Socially and morally, I imagine things would be significantly different, but I find my imagination fails a bit here. I’m not sure I know precisely in what avenues they’d have changed. There are certain lines of body privacy that, globally, are considered taboo in public. I imagine that some would remain intact, and some wouldn’t, but I’m not sure by what metric you’d even make a guess as to which ones would never have developed and which ones would be the same as “our world.” Same with how social structures might remain the same (I imagine that the concept of the family would be relatively unchanged) and how they might differ.
Would our “standards” for what’s attractive have swung one way or the other? Would bodies be so unstigmatized that attraction would then be based on something different? Or would the constant exposure to them make societal standards for what’s pretty even more demanding?
I’m sure it’d affect about four million other fields. Fun little mental experiment …
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Thought experiment, that was the term I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Aka a gedanken experiment! Thanks, German!
(And is it any mistake that gedanken is an anagram from ‘Gen Naked’?)
Anyway, the question! One thing struck me as a bit sticky:
Developmentally, I think mankind would never have settled in parts of the world that, here, require clothing for protection from the elements.
I don’t want to shoot the what-if in the foot, but if we wanted to find a way to make this situation more plausible, I think we’d have to turn this assumption on its head: instead of saying “if mankind never decided they needed clothes, they’d choose to settle in warm climates”, I think it’s more likely to say “if mankind had settled in sufficiently warm climates, they might not have decided to bother with clothes.”
Once you get past the small tribal nomad stage, there’s a lot of incentive to grabbing some land of your own and putting down stakes. If all the really warm land is taken and the population keeps expanding, folks are going to wander to colder climates and elect not to die of exposure. Bam: clothes.
So maybe we’re presupposing a warmer Earth? Or a hairier human; or a smaller population; or, or, or. It’s one way of framing the idea.
This isn’t really a hypothetical. I’ve not been there myself but in many parts of Polynesia and Africa they wear very little clothing.
But do they wear very little or no clothing because they don’t have a more modern culture, or do they not have a more modern culture because they don’t wear clothing?
I haven’t done my research, but I’ve jumped to the conclusion that what you are describing are small groups of people in Polynesia and Africa living by traditional, less modern ways.
I got a Desmond Morris flash there, thinking that I, as a constant shopper/looker, am adorning myself for whatever societal female purpose there might be. In reality, I have more than enough clothes to keep me warm here in the lower tundra (I am trying not to whine, since it does no good and I did my yoga this morning so theoretically, I’m happy with living in a cold place because my energy is “corrected” now)…
What about body adornments? I was watching TeeVee last night and flipped to a show where they didn’t have clothing, but razor-blade cuttings were the norm. Are we all trying to attract others through our plumage? Are humans more likely to have male or female body/clothing adornments?
For the most part, I don’t buy clothing for purposes of keeping my body warm, I buy it for some weird endorphin-releasing-I-must-have-this-now sort of thing (and that is pretty far and few between, once a month, maybe). For instance, I bought 2 dresses recently on clearance for no reason at all, but it turns out we have a wedding to go to on March 1 so I have a dress to wear. As my husband laughs, he of the “one dress shirt for every occasion” crowd.
In winter, I have a set layer: long-sleeved t-shirt, zippered hoodie or flannel shirt, oversized fleece jacket, and good Scottish wool scarf – you must keep the neck and chest warm in winter to avoid the plague. Track pants and LL Bean slides on the bottom. Fleece-lined track pants are even better.
I’m not sure how else it could be, given the cold temps. I’m thinkin’ people migrated toward a food source, deer, bear, elk, etc. And then someone said, “hey, this deer/rabbit/fox hide is warm!” and there ya go. Someone else figured out that flax made linen and fleece made wool.
As far as clothes being bad, I am not sure how far back in history you have to go (as Meatbomb said, it’s okay in some parts of the world today). Frankly, I’d rather the bra had never been invented.
I would be king.
I actually suggested this very thing to my family today, that we should all become nudists, while I was sorting through the huge stacks of clean laundry. I generally do this every laundry day, really.
I’d think there would be no wicker chairs, sunblock would be sold at a premium (it kinda is now already), we’d worry more about pedicures, manicures, waxing and laser hair removal and less about designer names, and that–sorry, jonmc–Meatbomb would be king.
So, yeah, assuming that, let’s say, the whole earth enjoys a temperate climate in your thought experiment, so there’s no need for clothes-as-protection, and people wouldn’t go ahead and make them anyway, for funsies, and to be perverse (because we would – so let’s just say clothes are outlawed for religious/legal reasons or something), then tattoos and body mods of all kinds, and body-shaping mods similar to neck-rings for stretched necks and footbinding techniques, for example, would be the big thing.
Sexually, I see a lot of foot fetishism. Why? Because even if we don’t need clothes, we need shoes (assuming we have the same bodies we do now, instead of mutations of thicker skin, etc.), and so the shoes themselves as well as what they cover would be of extreme interest and titillation. I also see people growing their hair really, really long and doing lots of elaborate hair weaving and designing, and skin coloring – dying ourselves different colors. There would be natural physical endowments/traits that were deemed more desirable, just as there are now, but the rich must have ways to purchase status and beauty, so – for example, those really, really, creepy-long fingernails that are so disgusting? Something like that would probably be supahcool, because it indicates you don’t have to do any manual labor at all, and you can have your servants dress you and wipe your butt, etc. Plastic surgery would be the new haute couture (as if it isn’t now o_0), with increasingly extreme (and expensive) procedures designed to satisfy increasingly extreme standards of physical beauty – stuff like limb-lengthening, etc.
And while people would be nude, almost nothing else would be. There would be a huge industry for “clothing” of all kinds for furniture, equipment, car seats, etc., because with unclothed people using all this stuff, we’d really need to cover things with washable fabrics… Think head rest protectors on airline seats.
I also think that some amount of fetishism might grow up over situations and conditions in which certain people would have to cover themselves to some degree in order to do certain work, like welders, haz-mat workers, divers. I think some of this would be seen as really hot/sexy/naughty, the way a lot of people in the real world see certain tight/revealing athletic gear as hot, say.
Well, I’ve talked quite enough, I reckon, but I wonder if we’d come up with ways for men to control erections, or if erections would just be oh-yawn, same-old-same-old? Menstrual stuff? Would all women use “the cup” or would signs that a woman has her period not be all hush-hush? And I wonder how it would affect us militarily? And what would the Pope wear on his head? A really tall beehive ‘do?
Fun question!
Only the superfurry survive.