Among people that go naked, as among animals, the difference between the sexes is less accentuated in our climates. Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman.
She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women having nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.
On Tahiti the breezes from forest and sea strengthen the lungs, they broaden the shoulders and hips. Neither men nor women are sheltered from the rays of the sun nor the pebbles of the seashore. Together they engage in the same tasks with the same activity or the same indolence. There is something virile in the women and something feminine in the men. This similarity of the sexes makes their relations the easier. Their continual state of nakedness has kept their minds free from the dangerous preoccupation with the “mystery” and from the excessive stress which among civilized people is laid upon the “happy accident” and the clandestine and sadistic colors of love. It has given their manners a natural innocence, a perfect purity. Man and woman are comrades, friends rather than lovers, dwelling together almost without cease, in pain as in pleasure, and even the very idea of vice is unknown to them….
Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor — rather, to love him.
— Noa, Noa, The Tahitian Journal by Paul Gauguin, around 1902
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