We don't need to be naked to be sexy

From Lady Gaga to Femen, near-nudity is all the rage, but women are reportedly shy of it in the bedroom – they shouldn't worry

Dea Birkett

Shunga at the British Museum is a collection of intricate, intimate and anatomically optimistic Japanese wood block prints. Photograph: The British Museum

We're all near-naked now. From Lady Gaga's appearance on The X Factor tofeminist protest group Femen, getting our kit off in public places doesn't seem to be a problem. But at night, in the privacy of our bedrooms, we're not brazen strumpets but coy mistresses, too embarrassed to turn on the light. A survey commissioned by an online pharmacist company claims one in six women haven't let their partners see them naked in over a year.

So is there a serious problem with women not feeling sexy? Yes. But that's nothing to do with whether we're comfortable being in the buff. It isn't looking good naked that bothers us; it's being sexy that women struggle with.

And nakedness is not the same as sexiness.

Two major exhibitions in London show there's nothing exciting about being nude. Shunga at the British Museum is a vast collection of intricate and very intimate Japanese wood block prints from 17th onwards, all explicit depictions of couples having sex. Nothing is left to the imagination. The sexual organs are fully exposed and finely detailed – not a hair out of place. Visitors press their faces up close, admiring the anatomically optimistic (all the penises are enormous) work.

At the Wallace Collection, The Male Nude gathers together 18th century pencil and chalk drawings of male models. Here, visitors admire the muscular curve of the youthful model's gluteus maximus. There's no discernible embarrassment among either of these viewing publics. They're in a museum; they have permission to gawp. But they don't have permission to be titillated. It would be odd if they were. That's because all this nakedness doesn't have anything remotely stimulating about it. Seeing unclothed bodies is not the same as finding them sexy.

The secrets of the bedroom survey is also flawed in forgetting that looking is a two-way activity. It's not just women who don't like to be seen naked; any embarrassment is often in the observer as much as the observed. Some men may ogle at pornographic images, but they find it far more awkward when faced with real-life nakedness. (And this survey is about men and women, not same-sex couples.) Cabaret artist Meow Meow's recent show played on this male discomfort. Every night she picked a man from the audience, sat on his lap and asked him to unbutton her blouse. They squirmed, they giggled, they looked at their friends. Meow Meow moved from male lap to male lap, asking each of them, imploring, begging, helping them by placing their fingers gently on her top button. But not one man would undress her. In the end, frustrated, she unbuttoned herself. It was the same every show. Each night she ended up taking off her own top.

To make women (and their men) feel more comfortable in the bedroom, we don't need more explicit nudity.

The film Enough Said has a wonderful, tender scene where two middle-aged lovers Eva and Albert (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini) have sex for the first time. Albert asks Eva whether she opened her eyes. "No," she replies, "I kept my eyes closed. I figured if I couldn't see you, you couldn't see me." It's one of the sexiest scenes in a Hollywood movie for a long time.

We need to take the advice of Gypsy Rose Lee, often credited for inventing the art of striptease in the 1930s. Although Gypsy was the world's most famous stripper, she never appeared naked in public, not once. The thought abhorred her. She would, like the women in today's bedrooms, have been embarrassed. Her cultivated sexiness relied upon bits of her body remaining properly covered. She knew the illusion of nakedness was far more sensual than the sight of her flawed bare flesh.

Let's not worry about whether we can expose ourselves to our loved ones late at night. It doesn't really matter. It's sexiness we should be seeking. And to be sexy, you sometimes need to keep your kit on.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/28/naked-sexy-lady-gaga-femen-near-nudity