I'm excited to be welcoming Victoria to the Forum Live next Monday 20 March, for her second appearance, this time following the recent publication of her new book Naked Feminism - Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty. Our previous session turned out to be one of the most popular - and definitely one of the most stimulating.
Victoria is an academic economist and Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and she’s also known for using her body in art and protest, whether to challenge assumptions and stigma about women’s bodies, to confront sexism in economics, or to fight Brexit.
She has posed nude for artists including Anthony Connolly, with nude portraits displayed at the Mall Galleries in 2014 and 2019, and has given naked performances at, amongst others, the Dartington literary festival and the Cambridge Juncton theatre.
She believes that academics should not only embrace the power of words but should also push social boundaries in order to reveal and confront practices and policies that are harmful and unnecessary. Freedom is the theme that unites much of her work and her utopia is a world in which every woman is free to do what she wants with her own body.
Members of British Naturism and those of other Naturist federations can join the session on the night via the BN shop at 19:30.
Not a member? click here to join online!
In the latest issue of BN magazine (BN235 - Spring 2023) BN member Sheila Maycock reviewed Victoria's new book which we publish here for your information:
A common question in British Naturism is ‘why do women find it more challenging to engage in social nudity and Naturist activities?’. This book provides 300+ pages of reasons. Widely researched with 30 pages of academic references it charts an historical perspective, necessarily with a broad brush encompassing continents and countries, centuries and societies. It explores how the cult of female modesty has impacted the lives of women and continues to do so. The causes are recognised and collated. The dangers such as lack of access to education, forced and child marriage, genital cutting, rape or the threat of rape as an instrument of war, restricting access to paid work or freedom of movement, intimate partner violence or lack of choice regarding fertility are documented in gloomy detail. The secret battle between puritanical feminists and naked feminists is revealed.
The book tells the story of when, how and why societies became obsessed with women’s bodily modesty, exploring the many adverse consequences that have resulted. The author not only utilises her considerable brain and academic expertise to produce the detail of how the nude became rude but also puts her own naked body out there, personally courting the disapprobation which she documents as the female lot across the centuries and across the globe. You just need to have a quick look at Twitter for a few examples.
This is not a call to arms for every woman to be a nudist. It is, however, about respecting every woman, regardless of what she chooses to wear or how she chooses to live her life, including her sex life. It is a call for societal change to end slut shaming, whorephobia and change the mindset of those who consider women’s uncovered bodies “a disruptive force in wider society”. To ensure that every woman has choice, poverty must be tackled alongside the modesty cult. The influence of trafficking and modern slavery is explored as much in relation to domestic labour or care work as in the perhaps more expected realm of sex workers. A dearth of resources leaves women with fewer choices and opportunities and ties them to exploitable occupations.
Outside of Islamic society it may be easier to object to compulsory hijabs, virginity testing and honour killings. Naked Feminism makes us aware of the insidious effect of the cult of female modesty within all religion: Christianity, starting at Eve and blaming womankind for the sins of men, to the newly emerging Evangelical purity culture; Judaism with gender segregation on the rise; Neo-Confucianism with its radical seclusion for women. Whilst religion is often blamed for repressing women, many other factors are charted. Biology, matrilineal or patrilineal kinship, geography, economics, property rights and their link to patriarchy, warfare, politics, population pressure and sociology are all shown to play a significant and for me, thought provoking, part.
Naked Feminism is an economic tome written by an economist with research interests in economic growth from an historical perspective. She’s a very impressive scholar. Yet it is by no means a dry academic text. What impresses me is the breadth of her exploration of the topic combining academic expertise with passion and skill. Each time I looked at it, I found something new and intriguing in it. There is some repetition of themes, which attest to the breadth of the authors knowledge and the wealth of material to which she refers.
What may be missing and what I would find interesting is a wider appreciation of the psychological and emotional impact of the modesty cult on women’s lives and mental health.
However I find the economists’ view fascinating, informative and enlightening, helping to question my own norms and world view alongside national and international customs as they constrain female lives.
This book saddens, shocks and alarms whilst revolutionising the way we think about and value women. Ms Bateman traces dualisms of many kinds: Madonna versus whore, respectable versus disgraced, chaste versus unholy, hot versus slutty. These are the kinds of conceptual structures around which moral values play out, and they are essential to understanding what nudity means to us and the influence that the cult of female modesty has on all societies.
Little escapes her wrath; raunch culture where value is only held by the ‘hot and sexy’ with women as prime culprits, putting others down to ensure their own position. The control and criminalisation, bullying and condemnation of sexuality and reproduction. Victim blaming is challenged as a construct of a society that bases its’ value and respect for a woman solely on her bodily modesty. Feminists too are held to account for problematising women who monetise their bodies and for judgmentally buying into the modesty cult. Campaigners are urged to embrace ‘My body, my choice’ in terms of ensuring that all women have choices and that women who may choose to monetise their bodies have the same rights and respect as those who monetise their brain. There seems a long road to travel towards the end of women being viewed as ‘sex objects’ and in changing the way we as a society judge women, rather than changing (and restricting) women’s behaviour.
Naked Feminism calls on the reader to be more tolerant of the choices made by individual women, ‘whether that is to don a veil, to sit topless on the beach, to uncover their hair, or to strip for money’. I sincerely hope this book will be a catalyst for change at governmental level as well as at a personal level so that systemic change can better support the ability of women to make real choices about their lives, livelihoods, relationships and their body - naked or not.
Naked Feminism - Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty by Victoria Bateman, was published by Polity on March 10 2023.
