Goodbye, 'Jogbra'...

May 2015: First up, though I still try to put up blog content whenever I can, it has been easier to more regularly visit the the Twitterverse. Follow me at @barethomas10 and let's keep the shirtless running flag flying. Of course, the blog still attracts very interesting comments, and good discussion. Keep it up.

Second, in the years since this venture launched, and as shirtless running among women has gone increasingly mainstream, the term "jogbra" has clearly declined in use. I will thus prefer "sportsbra" henceforth - as has already been the case on Twitter, and in recent posts here.

I continue to welcome guest posts (sent to barethomas@gmail.com) on any related topic, including from those who would discourage stripping to the waist. I am myself of course a fervent convert to the joys of running bare. But let all voices be heard!

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Porn, prurience and shirtlessness

Here's an acute, and rather disturbing, observation, excerpted from a comment on The Creed of Shirtless Running (click here), a post found on this very blog. The thought is by Crow. and runs:

I think going shirtless is a good habit... in any conditions where I don't feel bad because of it. People used to do it more, I think a modern prurience has set in because the net has made it easy to associate it with porn. I think people get embarrassed about seeing private stuff in public. The more they see sexuality, or even just a less than totally clothed human body, in adverts, on the net, etc, the more they feel confronted by their newly conditioned reactions when they see it on the street.
Interestingly put! Perhaps I might take three points of interest for further expansion:

1) 'People used to do it more': There are undoubtedly many places in the world where shirtlessness is on the decline. But as far as shirtless runners is concerned, I'd be interested to know if that holds true too. Haven't heard or read too much on that score, but some would claim that more people are running wearing less. My own experience has been that there has been neither an uptick or a drop.

2) 'A modern prurience linked to an association with porn': If indeed day-to-day shirtlessness is ebbing, the fact that shirtlessness is simultaneously more easily 'accessed' through porn sites these days would institute a damning, self-reinforcing cycle!...
a) People's exposure to shirtlessness would increasingly be through media glorifying sexual objectification, which
b) leads us to see all shirtlessness in such terms, causing us to scale back 'ordinary shirtlessness' all the more,
c) further reducing the contexts outside e-porn in which we see bare-chestedness... and so on.
If Crow. is right, then how can the circle be unbroken?

3) 'People get embarrassed about seeing private things public': Of course, some would allege that sexuality ('private things') is increasingly seen in these so-called liberated times as precisely something that can now be flaunted in public. And this may perhaps be why going shirtless - whether when running, exercising or just chillin' - tends now to be associated with 'showing off', at least with some folks. It certainly didn't used to be so, by all accounts.
From this, we might take away the fact that, perhaps for most people, a sense of modesty is still bred into our social DNA, so that we reject 'flaunting for the sake of it', finding it uncouth and cheap. The challenge is to break through the misconception that running shirtless is inherently about that sort of thing. Sundry posts on this blog, of course, hopefully tell against this falsehood.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wasn't expecting that. :) Anyway, I know that when I look on Google to see what precedents exist elsewhere for people going shirtless in cold weather (it is rare enough that this makes better sense than looking around me when I'm away from a computer), most of the offerings Google puts up are either 'celebrity hotties' or overtly gay sites. Going shirtless does excite me, it's part of the fun, but the distinction is not recognised, at least by Google, or it seems, by most of society. Maybe this is something we just haven't really understood, but that seems unlikely given how long humans have been around. it has to be something new. My guess is it's technology driven, people have this dream of a pure clean land where everything is new and safe and shiny and protecting, and going shirtless makes people fear a past they think technology will liberate them from. More than likely though it's more venal, might be jealousy of someone's confidence to risk doing it, or anxiety about what 'others might think', which is the (pathetic) excuse that supermarket staff sometimes use to defy me doing it if I go into their shops, something very few other shop owners are concerned with. Some cite 'heath and safety' as well, which is nonsense unless I'm working there.

I don't really know what the reasons are, it's complex, but there is more resistance to it now. Builders have been told they can't, either because of 'health and safety' directives, or because of complaints. There are so many restrictions that most people just go with them and don't reject them until they have lost whatever power them might have retained in order to resist!

Sometimes it works the other way though. A few years ago, November was so mild that it rose to 16°C and I'd gone up and down a main road a couple of times to do stuff, and by the time I'd returned the second time road workers were shirtless all over that road. They'd figured out that it wasn't cold, that the time of year wasn't reason enough to stay in a constraint that did not exist except in their minds.

A lot of the time the new conditioning affects me to the point where if I saw someone shirtless in the street I'd feel odd too. That's the worst of it. It's impossible to engage with the problem without becoming affected by it.

There's a very grandiose way to put that, but I like it. Someone (no idea who) said that if you choose to gaze into the abyss, the abyss WILL gaze into you. So the truth might be that we can't act like it's no big deal because it HAS become a big deal. But by engaging with that we do stand a chance to figure out why. Even when I'm not interested in why, going shirtless when I want to makes it a habit that stops me fearing it. Which is good enough for me.

Anonymous said...

I think your "self-reinforcing cycle" of point 2 is in fact occurring, but with yet one more reinforcing aspect. With the epidemic of obesity in our society, porn and related sexually-charged media (sex scenes in movies, Calvin Klein ads, etc.) are rapidly becoming the primary places many people see a fit shirtless body. That makes it much easier for them to associate shirtlessness by a lean, fit runner with porn.

Rockbound

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Anonymous said...

Being shirtless is very comfortable--especially when running or doing something physical in the heat like pushing a lawn mower. Sadly, an auto accident now prevents me from running or cutting the grass myself, so I don't venture outside without my shirt. In the summer or when exercising inside my house, I generally prefer to wear only my shorts and keep my windows open rather than use air conditioning. We'll see how cultural norms shift; I'd guess that folks raised with wearing bathing suits that fully covered the torso thought it excessively revealing when men removed their shirts and women wore bikini tops and bottoms... Times change...

Anonymous said...

Hmm..... This post crystalized some thought... and I must admit that I feel that being shirtless IS sexually stimulating and perhaps the reason that I like taking my shirt off so often--be it summer or not. I find the thought about this being a prurient interest is disturbing because I realize that, to some extent, this is true for me. This is causing me to re-consider pulling off my shirt every day after work and WHY I'm doing it. I don't think that I'll feel guilty taking it off when I"m at home and it's hot, but I don't want to do it solely because I find it sexually stimulating--that's not what I want to motivate me or who I want to be.