Nudity and Censorship

DEFINITION: Depictions of naked people in art, photography, film, and theatrical productions

SIGNIFICANCE: Nudity is the oldest and most common target of censorship

The naked body has long been the essential subject of artistic expression and the most frequent and persistent object of censorship. The taboos associated with nudity and the general disapproval of the practice of recreational nudism has created a moral justification for the censorship of images of nude men and women. Censors have disapproved of nudity even when no sexual activities are portrayed.

Ancient Greece and Rome

Nudity has played a vital role in the history of visual art. Early Greek sculptures known as kouroi featured handsome young male nudes. Roman art continued to use the nude figure as a symbol of strength and beauty. The advent of Christianity cast a pall of sin over sex and nudity, replacing pagan celebration of the human body as the mirror of divine perfection with the condemnation of nudity as shameful and immoral. The earliest censorship of nudity came in the form of church decrees prohibiting nude images except as part of mythological themes.

The power of art and self-expression persisted in the face of official censure. The works of Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, Donatello, and Sandro Botticelli made plentiful use of nude figures. Nevertheless, great art was always vulnerable to disapproval from those in high places, as in 1558, when Pope Paul IV ordered that the genitalia of the nude figures in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment be painted over with drapery.

In every era, in every age, portrayals of nudity risk official condemnation. In 1769, the Royal Academy of London prohibited unmarried art students under twenty years of age from drawing female nudes using live models. In 1784, a nude Venus was banned in Philadelphia. In 1815 in New York City, a nude painting was vilified as “a deplorable example of European depravity.”

The Victorian period in England and America engendered strict standards of morality under which portrayals of nudity were not tolerated. The enactment of the Comstock Act of 1873 and obscenity laws codified social and religious taboos on nudity in the arts. In 1933, U.S. Customs seized books containing reproductions of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment (which were later released).

Hair and Oh, Calcutta!

A brief nude scene in the musical Hair (which began on Broadway in 1967) was too much for the local officials who ran the municipal theaters in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1971, when the city denied permission to stage the show, the producers sued, claiming that the Chattanooga municipal theaters were a “public forum” where the city could not deny permission simply because it objected to the nude scenes in Hair. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed and ruled that the city had the burden of seeking a full and prompt adjudication of the issue before it could deny a permit.

Twenty years later, when Kenneth Tynan’s Oh, Calcutta! (1969), a provocative revue featuring a variety of nude scenes, reached Chattanooga, the city fathers had learned their lesson. Lawyers for the city promptly went to court, arguing that the show violated city and state public indecency laws and was obscene. A local judge empaneled an advisory jury, which found the play patently offensive but not legally obscene, since the play had serious artistic value and lacked an appeal to prurient interest. The trial judge reluctantly concluded, “Whatever little value the play might have, the First Amendment normally protects against prior restraint where the production is not obscene under the legal test.” As far as the public indecency charge was concerned, the judge deferred the issue on the grounds that the predicted illegal conduct had not yet occurred. Oh, Calcutta! ran without incident, and there were no arrests for public nudity.

Nude Dancing

In 1991, the Supreme Court, in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., upheld the use of Indiana’s general law against public nudity to ban nude barroom dancing. In particular, the case dealt with the state’s requirement that dancers at the South Bend Kitty Kat Lounge wear G-strings and pasties. The judgment of the Court, written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, was only joined in by Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy. Justice Rehnquist reluctantly acknowledged that nude dancing was a form of artistic expression, whose primary message was “eroticism and sexuality.” Noting that laws against public nudity were part of American history and traceable to “the Bible story of Adam and Eve,” Rehnquist upheld the state’s requirement of pasties and G-strings on the basis of its interest in “protecting order and morality,” which would “not deprive the dance of whatever erotic message it conveys, it simply makes the message slightly less graphic.”

Justice David H. Souter wrote a separate concurring opinion, arguing that nudity in entertainment could not be banned on the basis of vague notions of morality. Instead, he upheld the law because of the state’s interest in combating the “harmful secondary effects” of nude bars, including “prostitution, sexual assault, and associated crimes.” One commentator, Marjorie Heins, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Arts Censorship Project, noted that “it didn’t seem likely that these minor additions to the dancer’s anatomy would have an appreciable impact on prostitution, sexual assault, or anything else that might occur in the vicinity of erotic dancing establishments” and doubted that there was any basis “for assuming that nude dancing caused sexual assault or prostitution, or that such problems would be reduced in an area if nude dancing were eliminated.”

Justice Antonin Scalia upheld the ban on more direct grounds, without reliance on any secondary effects. He found that the Indiana law raised no First Amendment issue because it simply applied a neutral law against public indecency without any evidence that the state legislature intended to interfere with artistic freedom. Souter questioned Scalia’s implication that theatrical nudity could constitutionally be banned. It was “difficult to see how the enforcement of Indiana’s statute against nudity in a production of Hair or Equus somewhere other than an ‘adult’ theater would further the State’s interest in avoiding harmful secondary effects.” Heins calls Souter’s view elitist, since it would “deprive Joe six-pack of the entertainment that classical dance and opera-goers could enjoy.”

Public Funding of Public Nudity

During the uproar over the National Endowment for the Arts and public funding of controversial art, nude images played a prominent role. In 1990, Cincinnati museum director Dennis Barrie was criminally charged with obscenity (for exhibiting homoerotic photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe) and child pornography (for two photographs of children, also by Mapplethorpe). The case drew international attention and renewed the debate over whether nude images alone, unaccompanied by any sexual activity, could be legally obscene. After an extensive trial in which the defense called numerous art experts and the prosecution called one (who had worked on the children’s television program Captain Kangaroo), the jury acquitted Barrie and the museum.

Another artist who came to prominence in the midst of the NEA controversy was Karen Finley. A provocative performance artist, Finley appeared on stage nude, using her body like a canvas, painting it with chocolate, red candies, alfalfa sprouts, and tinsel to dramatize “society’s institutionalized debasement of women.” When the NEA denied grants to Finley and three other artists, they sued, challenging the denials and the new decency standards imposed by Congress. In June 1992, a federal court upheld Finley’s claim, ruling that the “right of artists to challenge conventional wisdom and values is a cornerstone of artistic and academic freedom.”

Thousands of years of nudity in art, theater, film, and photography, paralleled with thousands of years of efforts to censor nudity, reveal the power of the image of the nude body.

Nudity and Censorship in the Digital Era

The digital age has ushered in an era of corporate, rather than government, censorship of nudity in popular culture. In particular, twenty-first-century social media platforms have struggled to determine their criteria for acceptable content. Facebook, the most widely used social networking site, has been criticized—and even sued in French court in 2015—for removing images of famous artworks containing nude figures. It has prohibited certain nude images of its users as well, and its content policy has been vague and enforcement inconsistent. Black activist Jay-Marie Hill has accused Facebook of treating the nudity of people of color differently from that of White individuals. Other critics have pointed out disparities in how nudity is treated by gender, citing the acceptability of showing men's nipples but not those of women as an example. Facebook has officially sanctioned photographs of mothers breastfeeding their infants, but also removed some such images in 2008 and 2012, to vocal opposition.

In March 2015, Facebook executives sought to clarify the site's community standards, saying that it would not allow photographs of genitals, fully exposed buttocks, or female nipples but images of breastfeeding or "breasts with post-mastectomy scarring" were acceptable. Facebook's nudity policies attracted media attention again in 2017 when a famous image from the Vietnam War was removed from the site because the girl pictured was naked, and in 2018 when they censored a photo of the Venus of Willendorf, a 30,000-year-old statue depicting a naked woman. After public outcry in the latter case, Facebook apologized, stating that the site banned all images involving nudity, but made an exception for statues, and thus the Venus of Willendorf had been banned in error.

Nevertheless, many continued to complain that the site's content policies were arbitrary and inconsistent. The company bases its nudity policies on user feedback, as well as guidance from human rights, public safety, and technology experts, and as the needs of its users change, its policy also changes. Facebook and Instagram's guidelines concerning nudity have been further adapted to allow users to post images and videos containing nudity if the image is an artistic or creative work, aiming to limit the censorship of art. Photos of a mother and baby just after birth, some gender confirmation surgery images, and images posted as part of protests are also allowed. In direct messages, nudity is automatically blurred if the recipient is an individual under eighteen. Ensuring safety in a digital world while avoiding over-censoring content is an ongoing challenge for social media platforms. Critics fear that corporate censorship online will lead to greater self-censorship and restricted self-expression.

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