This is a really, really long article (content safe for work, url may not be) about the Ivy League tradition of taking nude photos of men and women to catalog their physique. The reasons for doing this are not clear, but the article raises many fascinating questions about this country and our society including:
1. Why would students submit to this?
2. What does the issues these photos raise say about power and body image?
3. How did our self image become so tied up in our physique?
4. What does our physique say about us, if anything?
5. How much leeway (and benefit of the doubt) should we give the scientific community?
Sheldon’s dream of reducing the complexity of human personality and the contingency of human fate to a single number is a recurrent one, as the continuing I.Q. controversy demonstrates. And a reminder that skepticism is still valuable in the face of scientific claims of certainty, particularly in the slippery realms of human behavior.
The rise and fall of “sciences” like Marxist history, Freudian psychology and Keynesian economics suggests that at least some of the beliefs and axioms treated as science today (Rorschach analysis, “rational choice” economics, perhaps) will turn out to have little more validity than nude stick-pin somatotyping.
In the Sheldon rituals, the student test subjects were naked — but it was the emperors of scientific certainty who had no clothes.
| Posted by: Kimberly | Link to this post |
