During the lunch break at the Mockingbird Midwest event in Minneapolis last week, I watched the crowd of people balancing their food truck subs and wood-fired pizzas. Normally people-watching is great entertainment, but HBOMax has infected my brain with their new dating show. They’ve quietly rolled out Britain’s Naked Attraction, and I’m ashamed to admit it caused me to consider my fellow conference attendees as, well, contestants in the game show.
In each segment of a Naked Attraction episode, the host welcomes individual guests who will encounter a half dozen potential dates who stand in translucent colored boxes whose front panels slowly reveal them to the guest. The reveal starts with unshod feet, calves, and knees and progresses to parts only hinted at on The Newlywed Game. The lure of the show is that the potential dates stand there in their full-frontal glory and/or ignominy to be critiqued by the guest and eliminated as more of their bits, as the British say, come into view.
At first glance Naked Attraction is a horror show, patently tasteless in its prurience, yet Velcro in its ability to snag one’s gaze. What does it say that this is offered on the same streaming service where I watch my cozy home improvement host couples rebuilding small-town America? I’m normally a Home Town kind of guy, and yet I found myself watching five episodes of TV that made me question my morals.
I can’t say I watched them so you don’t have to, so maybe this is a confession of my own status of being the curved-in-on-myself sinner who’s the perfect mark for titillation. If so, the allure only lasts through the shock of the initial reveal. After the first response of “Wha?!?!?” comes the second: “Hmmm, well…”
My first jaw-dropping response was to marvel at the state of the world in which the last shred of decent comportment has been shed, and humanity has been revealed in its utter deshabille. No longer our first parents’ hastily stitched fig leaves placed over our unmentionable places in shame. Now it’s a game of glorying in naked display for the sake of naked display. And, get this, the show is currently in its seventh season, and one of my Scandinavian students casually reported there’s a Swedish version.
Not that naked is inherently artless and crass. Rodin’s “Thinker” and Michelangelo’s “David” come to mind. I remember being in the Vatican Museum before the statue of the nude “Laocoön and His Sons” battling serpents, standing with the same awe Pliny the Elder had. If you had money in sixteenth century Germany, you could purchase one of Martin Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach’s renditions of the “Three Graces” who were clad only in necklaces (apparently if the subject is classical mythology, immodesty is allowed).
On Naked Attraction there are certainly exemplars of the human form standing in their pastel boxes. But it’s those plexiglass boxes that shift them from a thing of beauty beheld by their beloved to a mere tool to be used for commercial gain. They lose their humanity, their God-giftedness, and are transformed into objects shilling for ratings and higher profits for media company investors. The contestants’ shortcomings aren’t found in the parts Paul described in 1 Corinthians 12 but in their willingness to be used for such purposes and in their weak justification that their taking part in the affair allows them to be honest and real.
However titillating the prima facie nudity might be, the “Wha?!?”-factor soon fades. What replaces it is an astonishment at the variety of the human form, for Naked Attraction doesn’t just present six platonic ideals as options for the episode’s guest contestant. They’re real people distinctly un-airbrushed: blue collar workers, professionals, service industry workers. They’re curvy and rail-thin, buff and pudgy, pierced, tattooed, and wearing a prosthetic leg.
One summer when I was in seminary and was the program director at a Bible camp, I asked my staff to work at being unabashed goof-balls. I reminded them that every kid who came into camp had some idea of what “normal” is and knew themselves to somehow be standing outside that designation. The staff’s silliness worked to move the range of “normal” rather than requiring our campers to do the moving, so that our actions themselves signaled to the kids they belonged.
The nudity of Naked Attraction holds the same potential. Who hasn’t stood before the bathroom mirror post-shower and shaken their head at their reflection? The full-frontal assault of an asinine British dating show establishes a range of shapes, sizes, and colors, shallowness and intelligence, that shifts the viewer’s perception of their own place. Whatever you see in the mirror really is just fine.
What something like Naked Attraction can’t do, though, is deliver the certain grace that Mockingbird’s Midwest gathering pointed to in its theme, “Grace Under Pressure.” In spite of the affirming variety of the show, the law’s voice and the world’s demands for progress and perfection keep pressing in, relentlessly declaring that “enough” still hasn’t been achieved. We may be okay, but there’s still more we could do.
When St. Ambrose baptized Augustine in a pool of water in Milan in the late fourth century, the future bishop of Hippo went into the water naked. As was the tradition, he no doubt came to the font in burlap, stripped off his scratchy sackcloth, and stepped on the rough fabric. Then standing unclothed, unhidden, bare in the water, Augustine was at the moment of anticipation. We know from his Confessions that he’d done a fearless and searching moral inventory. He knew his shortcomings and was aware of the long game of achievement and personal gain his sinful self had played for his first thirty years. His now stripped desire for a will other than his own awaited the water and a word that changed everything.
Perhaps the contestants and their potential dates (and we as well) are also ready for another voice. This is the voice who speaks the words tov me’od, or waayy good, as God said in Genesis 1 when Creation is established. It’s the voice from the cross who declares “It is finished;” there’s no more perfecting or judging to be done. It’s the voice of the one who bids the burdened to let him take the onus of living from their shoulders. It’s the voice aimed at the grave on the Last Day that says “Rise up, sleeper.” It’s the gospel voice of the one who is pure good news himself.
At that voice, the attraction of our naked sin is silenced. Paul reminds us that we have put on Christ. In the end that’s what I saw in a Minnesota church narthex. Looking at all those people with their variety of bodies, their panoply of histories, their own deepest flaws and hidden regrets, I was wowed that they, too, had known something akin to a failed Naked Attraction contestant’s rejection for not measuring up. But they had heard another’s voice speaking his lambs’ names. They recognized him and had come to that transitory moment and that specific place to be clothed again in Jesus’ righteousness, in the Spirit’s joy, and the Father’s endless “Yes.”
When a Naked Attraction rejectee leaves the studio, our final look at them is always clothed. They always look better, and clothed in Christ, so do you.
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