A true story
The reason why religious people are often found making a greater fuss about nudity and verbal bawdiness than about economic oppression – the precise opposite, of course, of the priorities of their founders – is that zealous concern with the rules of polite dress and speech is a class marker but charity is not.
A novel set in Madrid at the end of the Forties contains a true and documented incident: poor people are scavenging for food in the rubbish, watched by the Guardia Civil. Suddenly the wind blows a woman’s skirt over her head, exposing her malnourished flesh. The civiles go beserk and arrest her for ‘offending public morals’. Such a position has its own internal logic: if we, the religious people, are to admire ourselves and consider ourselves superior on the strength of what we do or don’t do, it must be for something that lies within our power. Preventing starvation is very difficult; especially if we are the same people as are responsible for, and benefit from, the economic arrangements that have caused it in the first place. Not revealing naked skin in public, however, is really quite an easy matter to arrange; let us therefore arrange it, begin to congratulate ourselves on our decency, and make visible the distinction between ourselves and the indecent by vigorous police action. That is why the poor woman’s involuntary exposure was an offence to public morals and her starvation was not.
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