clothing

"“Suppose we accept the argument that hijab is intrinsic and essential, then, surely (sic) they will be aware that they can’t pursue any career after completing education. The result will be they will become disinterested in pursuing education. Evil practices like triple divorce were banned. This (hijab row) is another attempt to push the girls back to homes. Don’t allow this to happen,”"

"In ancient Iran, aristocratic women used to wear hijab. ... Women from lower classes did not bother. But when Islam came, it rejected such instances of discrimination. It said that all women must wear the hijab. In other words, it wanted to honor all women. This is what Islam says. Now, they [in the West] behave as if we are doing something wrong and they are doing the right thing! No, they are in the wrong. They must answer why they have been treating women like a commodity in order to gratify their own lust. ... In their sensationalism concerning women's affairs, they blame us by saying: You have made hijab compulsory. They themselves have made lack of hijab compulsory. They do not allow girl students to enter university, if they wear a headscarf. Yet they have the audacity to question us by saying: Why have you made hijab compulsory? Wearing the hijab, is aimed at honoring women, whereas that [the practices of the West] aim to abuse and insult women."

"Women who do not respect the hijab and their husbands deserve to die. I do not understand how these women who do not respect the hijab, 28 years after the birth of the Islamic Republic, are still alive. These women and their husbands and their fathers must die."

"The correct view is that a woman is obliged to cover her entire body, even the face and hands. The face is the most tempting part of a woman's body, because what people look at most is the face, so the face is the greatest ‘awrah of a woman."

"To the Muslim woman, the hijab provides a sense of empowerment. It is a personal decision to dress modestly according to the command of a genderless Creator; to assert pride in self, and embrace one's faith openly, with independence and courageous conviction."

"The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex."

"“I have never been in favour of Hijab or Burqa. I still stand by that but at the same time, I have nothing but deep contempt for these mobs of hooligans who are trying to intimidate a small group of girls, and that too unsuccessfully. Is this their idea of ‘MANLINESS’. What a pity!”"

"Hijab is the most visible symbol of oppression, we need to bring down this wall.. “If Hijab is a small issue, why do they spend millions of dollars to keep this wall? To me, Hijab is a wall, and it is not an internal matter. We have to stand altogether and bring the wall down. The rest will get easier, and the first step towards equality,”... “I cannot see any women wearing a hijab here, but we are talking on behalf of them and supporting them, which is fantastic. But you never have this conversation in my own country. So supporting those women who do not wear hijab is important; I have to say I am not a western woman."

"The veil is not always a form of self-suppression; often it is an alternative, more modest, style of beauty, even a symbol of seduction rather than seclusion."

"The streaking syndrome started a new feeling about freeing the body."

"I'm so comfortable with nudity, it's difficult for me to keep my clothes on in just my own everyday life. As soon as I walk in the door when I come home, off go the clothes."

"It was so much fun. Everyone was freaked out because I’m nude, but in real life, when I have sex, I’m naked. I don’t have a bra on, and I don’t usually have panties on. So let’s make a real movie! Let’s bring truth to the scene! I didn’t want to be exploited, but this girl—like most girls when they first have sex—doesn’t know what she’s doing. I wanted their first kiss to be sloppy, teenagerish making out. When you’re younger, you think you know what to do, but you really don’t."

"For me, nudity in any film is a matter of what is realistic and authentic, not exploitative or unnecessary. These are the questions that I always ask myself when there is a love scene or a meditation scene on a ship [like in the film Adrift]. What I love about this film is that we explore sensuality in so many moments without needing any sexuality at all. The more we're able to capture sensual moments on screen the more we can start changing our view when it comes to our personal sexualities and sensualities. In a personal way, I find less to be more in most cases and I think leaving things up to the imagination leaves a little mystery when it comes to nudity or sex. It only intrigues the audience more."

"Going to have you naked, by the end of this song!"

"I am not allowed to travel without a passport … / My boundaries are set arbitrarily by others! / The Gates of Paradise are closed to me! … I don't know how to stop the wars! / You can't live if you don't have money! … / I'm not allowed to take my clothes off! … The actors begin to strip and when the stripping reached the legal limit, the actors shouted once more, "I'm not allowed to take my clothes off! I am outside the Gates of Paradise!""

"His disciples said, "When will You become revealed to us and when shall we see You?" Jesus said, "When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then [will you see] the Son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid"."

"I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?"

"Yet, the truth is that nudity in the home, when handled in a respectful, matter-of-fact way, is perfectly natural and certainly not harmful."

"The fear that seeing naked people in some way harms children is not supported, however, by academic research. The small handful of studies on this topic in psychology and sociology have shown, instead, that children reared in an atmosphere containing family social nudity may benefit from the practice. If this is true, then proposed laws outlawing either social nudity in the home or children's participation at naturist (or nudist) settings are unjustified."

"Tuke's interview [in 1895 with The Studio magazine] weaves together many strands of his artistic and aesthetic credo: a commitment to working en plein air in front of the model posed in nature, his dedication to painting by the seaside away from the confinement of the studio, and his resolve to retain 'the outdoor impression' even when working afterwards in the studio. Since Tuke specialised in depicting male nudes, most often adolescents alone or in groups outdoors, The Studio interviewer, like its readers, was particularly interested in the exact nature of Tuke's fascination with naked young boys depicted swimming, sailing or on Cornish beaches, and his attraction to the sensual effect of light on young flesh- questions that Tuke tactfully avoided."

"However, other audiences encountering these works at the Royal Academy or in artists' shows, museums and commercial galleries saw Tuke's paintings with their sensually appealing surfaces, heightened chromatism and delicate handling as suggestive and evocative, but not illicit or sexually provocative. Consequently, they did not question Tuke's reasons for painting naked male adolescents bathing or sitting on the Cornish seashore or at sea. Nor did they see the manner in which male nudes were painted and the fascination with the sensual effects of sunlight on youthful pale flesh as anything other than a licit engagement on the artist's part with a legitimate modern subject. Moreover, as audiences for modern art expanded in the latter part of the nineteenth century, making the most of the greater opportunities in exhibitions, art galleries and museums to see it first hand, so the volume of biographical literature and critical writing on artists' lives exploded and press interviews with living artists offered new ways of evaluating not only their approaches and intentions, but their lifestyles and public images."

"By examining the physical attributes, poses and symbolisms of the naked youths that modelled for Tuke and were depicted in his key works, I argue that certain iconographic differences and pictoral correspondences were familiar to some of Tuke's viewers. This would have been due to their knowledge of classical precedents for representing the youthful male nude and through their exposure to erotic photographic images of naked youths in the open air that encouraged them to infer sexual intent. Yet for other audience, these sexualised associations remained elusive, as they approached the subject of youthful male nudes in landscape settings differently through the conventions of English pastoralism or by seeing the work as making reference to an updated visual language of neoclassicism gaining currency and critical support in British art from the 1860s onwards."

"As one Tatler critic recognised when praising Henry Scott Tuke as par excellence the painter of youth', the depiction of naked youths bathing or sitting on Cornish beaches looking contemplatively out to sea played an important part in Tuke's artistic success. However, these paintings elicted a range of different readings and conflicting interpretations from Tuke's viewers, some of which detected a sexualized approach on the artist's part to the unclothed adolescent male body, while many others did not."

"Perhaps the dissenters believe that 'offense to others' ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally. ... The purpose of Indiana's nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd."

"In fact, research suggests that children who have seen their parents nude do not grow up to be emotionally scarred, but instead are more likely to be accepting of their own bodies and comfortable with their own sexuality."

"A man who can't eat dinner naked on a leather couch is little better than a slave."

"The more a society requires its respectable women to keep their bodies covered, the more likely those women are to be oppressed."

"If people were meant to run around naked, they wouldn't have been born wearing clothes."

"I thoroughly enjoy seeing a beautifully proportioned nude male. So did Michelangelo and Rodin. But if the male is blubbery, he should keep his beer barrel to himself and not be a portly polluter."

"My parents were free about nudity, and we are too. I’d like our children to feel unashamed of whatever shape they are. People should worry about other things"

"And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

"Any excuse is good to... get naked."

"I’ll give an example using my favourite show, Breaking Bad. In the pilot, a topless woman is seen for less than a second. It’s uncensored on Netflix, but AMC had the scene blurred. It seems like a lot of fuss for something that takes up less than 1% of the episode’s screen time. That same episode features the main character, Walter White, attempting to kill two men with poisonous gas. One of them survives, which leads to White locking him up by his neck by a bike lock in a basement before strangling him to death (all of that is on screen, and for much longer than a second). Breaking Bad would go on to feature multiple characters being run over, shot, having their necks slit open and bleed out (all on-screen), and included the killing of a child, whose body was then put into a barrel full of acid and melted down. I’m not saying that we need to censor violence heavily; I love a good beat ‘em up scene as much as the next guy. I am merely asking the question of, “why is one OK, and the other isn’t?” Nudity, sexual or not, being portrayed on screen can help remove the “taboo” of it. After all, everyone has bodies, and most of us have some degree of sexual feeling; why not work towards having a media that reflects that in a healthier way?"

"I’m not trying to say that male nudity should be shown only in non-sexual matters. If eye-candy like Chris Hemsworth wants to bare it all in front of the camera, then, by all means, he should be able to do that. I am saying that this new conversation and increasing acknowledgement of nudity on screen and the growing calls for equality should also include discussions about what nudity on the screen means and why. A rising amount of nudity, male and female, could help remove the taboo around it. Male nudity has also been used in the past for comedy. Judd Apatow once said that people “fear the penis” and vowed to include one in every film he makes. This had me thinking; when I do see male nudity on screen, when is it usually used? I think of the infamous hotel fight scene in Borat or the running joke in Arrested Development about David Cross’ Tobias being a “never-nude.” Media has tended to have a slant in showing nude male bodies in the context of some sort of punchline. By the time a child reaches elementary school, they will have seen as many 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on television (According to the Council on Communications and Media). Killings, murder, and violence are commonplace in media. Most people aren’t leaving the house to murder and maim, but everyone possesses a body (sometimes they even get naked!), so why is one so heavily censored while the other is constantly shown?"

"Nudity on television is nothing new. I don’t find myself spitting out my tea and clutching my pearls at the sight of *GASP* A NIPPLE while watching something on Netflix. However, when someone mentions that a show contains nudity, most of the time, I assume it’s going to be female, not male. Frontal male nudity has never been as common as female nudity on screen. A Google search of “Male Nudity On-Screen” will show article after article about an increase in male nudity, as well as article saying things along the line of “OMG So-And-So was NAKED in last night’s episode!” and actors like Chris Pratt and Kevin Bacon have gone on the record saying there should be equal representation when it comes to nude scenes. It’s no secret that we live in a hyper-sexualized world. Sex sells, and today it’s all about the money. But does nudity have to always be related to sex? Can nudity be portrayed in normal, non-sexual ways? Can someone be shown taking an ordinary, non-sexual shower? Is the purpose of nudity always to inspire sexual feelings in the audience?"

"Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be, To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views, That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem, His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them. Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made For lay-men, are all women thus array’d; Themselves are mystic books, which only we (Whom their imputed grace will dignify) Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know; As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence, There is no penance due to innocence. To teach thee, I am naked first; why then What needst thou have more covering than a man."

"To me the the coolest thing about having a boyfriend is that you can just stare at his naked body and not have to look away out of politeness. I find the male form so fascinating. I have a few [favorite body parts]. I like that kind of dent [pelvic bone], that V. And I love [men's] butts. There's nothing better than a good butt."

"I think male nudity is wonderful."

"Crawford: One day my girlfriend, her boyfriend and I were sunbathing topless because that's Barabados - you can wear nothing if you want. And the Pepsi guy walks up and with my agent to meet us for lunch. I wondered if I should put on my top because I have a business relationship with him. I didn't want him to get offended because the rest of the beach had seen me with my top off. Meanwhile as he's walking towards me, he's saying to my agent "I hope she puts on her top." He wasn't even being a schmuck, like wanting to see. He wanted to keep our relationship professional."

"Do you wish to honor the Body of the Savior? Do not despise it when it is naked. Do not honor it in church with silk vestments while outside it is naked and numb with cold. He who said, “This is my body,” and made it so by his word, is the same that said, “You saw me hungry and you gave me no food. As you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.” Honor him then by sharing your property with the poor. For what God needs is not golden chalices but golden souls."