Lakehead should become Canada’s first naked university.
Robert Carty
Whether we like it or not we all must live in a world of constraints; in fact, this rule perhaps can be considered the fundamental constraint. Some of these constraints we face are socially constructed like rules and regulations, while others still are imposed by the natural environment such as physical laws. Most constraints have a clear function; however, others for one reason or another can serve to make life more difficult. Constrains act upon individual behavior, cognitions and affections, while placing limitations on us psychologically and socially.
An example of a constraint that everyone must conform to due to both social and natural pressures is the wearing of clothes. We wear clothes as a social norm in adherence or observation of cultural standards of decency, and also not to violate the law. In this way it is a social convention, however, we also wear clothes due to environmental conditions that we require protection from such as intense heat, cold, light, rain, snow, and hail. Clothes help our bodies maintain homeostasis and keep us alive and well.
It is not clear whether it was social construction or natural conditions that first led to the wearing of clothes, but it is clear that the clothes we wear are now more greatly influenced by social construction. Clothing can be used to define our identities and may reflect social status, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age race and countless other constraints that the social world places on our identities.
It is to liberate us from these constraining articles of identity formation that I propose that Lakehead University become the first ever naked university. However, before continuing on this exposition let me assure you that this is not an idle fantasy generated by the base desires of a sexual deviant; I am merely a student of critical sociology.
Clothing is a technology that imposes often unattainable and unreasonable standards of beauty that may actually be male defined on individuals which can lead to various psychological pathologies such as low self-esteem. It also individualizes and builds the ego, as every morning when we dress for school we must consider our social-self and take the place of the other when we consider if we are dressed appropriately.
Clothes also represent the repression of desire that post-modern critical theorists attribute to modern industrial hyper-capitalism. It’s not a coincidence that it was the production of cloth that ushered in the current mode of industrial production. When we consider the constraints modern capitalism places on us and prevents us from having healthy relationships with each other, perhaps the argument can be put most simply by saying: if we weren’t so concerned with sexualized outer appearances and with seeing what we conceal inside our clothing, we could all concentrate more on what’s on the real inside.
It is for these reasons that I make this wholehearted appeal to our school’s administration that they take the first and most obvious step and immediately and without hesitation change the name of our university to Nakehead.