Scabies Zine #2

Every time I am at Homerton Sexual Health Clinic I think about a lecture I attended on the Aphrodite of Knidos, a Greek Classical sculpture and the first Western sculpture of a nude woman in the round. Read ‘nude’, not ‘naked’. By definition, to be nude is to wear no clothes, whereas to be naked is to wear no clothes and feel ashamed by this fact. Adam and Eve were nude until the Original Sin, after which they noticed they were nude, rendering them naked, grasping quickly for the fig leaf.

Back at Homerton Hospital, the lovely nurse asks me to strip from the waist down, pulling a curtain between us for dignity. What is strange, is that when I squeak a feeble ‘ready!’ from the bed, the nurse whips away the curtain and I am lying, fanny out and legs spread, under cold lights. Dignity no more. There was almost no point in the curtain. Except, there was.

It is always at this point I think of my Professor. She said, in that seminal lecture, that what is undignified about being unclothed is not the very fact of it, fanny out and legs spread, but the undressing, the between stage, which renders us vulnerable to embarrassment. Think about that next time your knickers drop round your ankles.

Undressing, nakedness, nudity, sexuality, and shame- they’re rarely far from one another. Do you remember the first time you felt real shame? I do. I was 10, it was summer, and I had taken my top off to run around my best friend's garden when suddenly, I felt it, shame, right where my ribs met. That Original Sin feeling, my grasping for the fig leaf.

Working through shame, carving out the space we want our bodies to fill as we move through life: sometimes entirely perfunctory, sometimes an Aphrodite in the round, is a challenging and beautiful experience. Each of us has to work through this, and it is important that this is not taken away from us. The development of ‘bikinification’ and so forth, the generation of fake pixellated imaginations of our bodies, render us naked, not nude, unable to mediate shame or enjoy sexualisation, cutting down the crutch of the fig tree.

Introducing your editors, nude, naked, sexualised, unashamed, flesh, blood, sweat and scabies.

Love from, Evie and Spencer x