Even though it may cause embarrassment, nudity is frequently easier to discuss than gender. Nudity might seem to reveal gender, in so far as clothed men and women can sometimes confuse onlookers about their gender. It used to be thought that nudity undoes that confusion, but now we know better: seeing a person’s genitals does not tell us his or her gender.  Such simplistic correspondence is a thing of the past. Of course, social conservatives can and often do disagree with this new view.

A society unevenly committed to the idea of gay equality might pretend to fight nudity when in fact it is blocking a political crusade. A society with a puritanical inheritance can insist it is only being true to itself when it punishes some instances of nudity. A predominantly Christian society in which women regularly expose décolleté, arms and legs might look askance at non-Christian women who refuse to.

An old topic indeed, nudity befuddled Americans anew at the outset of the 21rst century. Rest rooms especially but locker rooms as well became the new battleground in an ongoing culture war. As Americans were trying to prevent or veil the nudity –or partial nudity—of their school age children, the Internet was dousing them with ever more plentiful images of naked men, women and even post-op transgendered people. Heated bathroom debates in North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania (among other places) sometimes suggest that being naked will lead to unwanted sex. A person from a distant culture might struggle to understand how Americans decide which sorts of nudity to allow and which to condemn. It is not enough to say that mutual, consensual adult nudity is moral and adolescent nudity is not

The importance of covering up one’s body has spawned a special regard for modesty, which is sometimes taken as a synonym for chastity. Of course, modesty extends beyond dress: students, employees and politicians are expected to show modesty in speech (the 1986 court decision Bethel School District v. Fraser compelled it in public schools). Many Westerners will report they feel it immodest to gaze openly at strangers or at familiars who are changing clothes. And so on.