Kim Kardashian vs. Donald Trump: Why America can’t make up its mind about nudity

We come into the world nude. Then things get complicated.

On Monday, Kim Kardashian, cloaked in nothing but her absurd fame, posted another naked selfie (black bars strategically placed to protect a fickle modesty). The slut-shaming ensued. Singer Bette Midler said we’ve seen it all before. Actress Chloe Moretz told her to be a better role model. Journalist Piers Morgan offered to buy her some clothes. But many also came to her defense, lamenting the shaming and wondering why anyone felt they could tell her what she should and should not do with her own body.

A generation ago, access to nudity was limited. Today, it’s omnipresent. Our culture simultaneously permits more nude imagery now than at any other time in history, and yet has a somewhat paradoxical tendency to be shocked and disturbed by it. It’s also a culture that, unsurprisingly, consents to one set of rules for men’s bodies and another for women’s.

Take Donald Trump’s penis.

Kardashian’s tweet was a punctuation mark on a weekspent musing over the fact that the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination felt the need to assure the American electorate there was absolutely nothing wrong with the size of his hands. For anyone having trouble with euphemisms, that’s code for his penis.

The conversation after Trump evokes his member during a debate is, "What is wrong with us as a society?" The conversation after Kardashian posts an unexceptional semi-nude photo is, "What is wrong with her?"

“When Trump brings his penis to the limelight, while obviously this rankles the Republican establishment, nonetheless, there is a certain kind of respect he's afforded for going there,” said Juliet Williams, a professor of gender studies at UCLA. “He gets credit for that swagger. But when a woman does it, the thinly veiled slut-shaming is immediate.”

So how did we get here?

“Throughout history, nervousness and embarrassment about the human body has changed at various times,” said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.

In the 1960s, I Dream of Jeannie viewers weren’t permitted to see even Barbara Eden’s belly button. Accessing nudity was a clandestine exercise, an illicit adventure marked by scouting newsstands and shuffling down the darkened row of a pornographic theater.

"You might be able to find Playboys under your dad's mattress,” Thompson said. “Or you'd have to settle for the lingerie section of the Sears catalog."

In October, Playboy announced it would stop publishing nude photos. But not because execs felt there was anything fundamentally exploitative about them. It couldn’t make a profit anymore.

"That battle has been fought and won," CEO Scott Flanders told The New York Times. "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free."

According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of American adults use the Internet, and 74% of online adults use social networking sites. For obvious reasons, the prevalence of Internet pornography is difficult to measure, but according to one assessment in 2008 approximately 100 million men in North America logged on to porn.

Yet we keep telling women to cover up.

In 2002, the Department of Justice spent thousands of dollars on drapes to cover two partially nude statues in the Great Hall. It was reported that Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the statues covered because he didn't like being photographed in front of them.

In 2013, The New York Times ran a cover story on breast cancer that showed part of a woman's nipple. Some readers were shocked, outraged even, that the newspaper of record would, as they argued, try to sexualize the disease to sell papers. Others weren't sure what was so provocative about a partial areola.

We can’t seem to make up our minds about women’s bodies. We’ll cover up an offending nude statue, but we’ll comb the Internet for leaked photos of Jennifer Lawrence. How many searched for footage from Erin Andrews' peeping tom?

Kardashian’s post Monday wasn’t anything we hadn’t seen before. Her public life began with a sex tape (likely not on her terms). She posed nude in Paper magazine and broke the Internet (more on her terms). She made a book of selfies that show her bare body (completely on her terms).

In the case of Kardashian’s recent photo, which was actually a throwback, what got attention wasn’t her flash of flesh — we’ve seen it before — it was all the chatter about it. And that becomes a conversation about her character.

"The pretense is that the scandal is the exposure of her body," Williams said. "When really it's about a woman who is unabashed about profiting from our society's consumption of those bodies."

In response to the controversy, Kardashian posted an essay on her website called #StraightUp: Happy International Women's Day. She wrote: "I don't do drugs, I hardly drink, I've never committed a crime — and yet I'm a bad role model for being proud of my body?" She signed off with, "I am a mother. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, an entrepreneur and I am allowed to be sexy. #internationalwomensday"

Rachel Kitson, a psychologist who has written about the Kardashian phenomenon, said in an email that while Kardashian is a feminist paradox, one area that troubles her is the effect her images can have on young girls.

"What concerns me are the expectations for teenagers, especially girls, to expose themselves," she said. "I think it can set unrealistic and unhealthy standards for both genders in certain contexts."

Kardashian, who's become the paragon of modern narcissism, will likely post more nude photos. And you'll likely look at them. And then we'll all talk about it.

“You can have a great poet, but they're only wonderful if someone reads them,” Thompson said. “You have the artist, and you have the consumer.”

Would Thompson call the selfie virtuoso an artist?

"I would,” he said. “She's certainly not a physicist.”