No harm in baring all for a good cause

If you ask me, a wholesome, handsome, winsome young priest getting naked, with a Bible where Adam's fig leaf should be, is the best publicity the Catholic Church could ask for. Yet The Bare Shakers 2001 calendar was forced to withdraw its photograph of Father Olan Rynn, of Salthill, Co Galway - leaving organiser Aileen Dunleavy with a blank month. This destined the calendar (with a doubled print-run of a mere 4,000) to be a collector's item.

Priests should be allowed to appear naked in the eyes of God - and everyone else if it's done in a positive, unsleazy context. Nudity is a good, healthy, positive thing - so what is the church afraid of?

We allow rap singers to rage on about raping their sisters, we allow exploitative pornography to ripple through society like the after-effects of a nuclear bomb, we expose our children to visual and aural art that pre-sexualises them before their time. And we're worried about a little innocent nudity? Now, that IS sick.

The naked human body - liberated of a sexualised context - is a very funny thing. My reaction to the picture of the Connolly brothers - Joe, Michael and John - holding their hurley sticks in strategic positions nearly made me giggle myself sick. It's like those pictures of tribes which extend the size of their penises by attaching long wands to them. But the image is beautiful too. The men are laughing and enjoying themselves. They are appealing because they're not trying to be. As Margaret Atwood writes in The Blind Assassin, the young never realise how beautiful they are.

Irish society has had a warped relationship to sex and nudity for so long that it's going to be a struggle to purge ourselves of our negative attitudes and begin to appreciate nudity as children do - all in good fun.

Nudity, done in a healthy way, is not sleazy. It's therapeutic that the Galway calendar should appear at this time, when we are beginning to strip ourselves of all the harmful hang-ups that came from sexual abuse and stifled sexuality and punitive Christian Brothers and institutionalised rape. If we want a healthier, more open, more positive society, then we should celebrate our bodies.

A child who is happy in his or her body is much less likely to be abused. It's shame that makes a child collude with an abusive adult in hiding the "secret" of abuse. If we feel good about our bodies, and have strong boundaries around how we do and do not want to be touched, we're much less likely to allow people to hurt us.

That's why countries which are open about sex - Sweden, Denmark, France - have much, much lower rates of teenage pregnancy. There, children grow up seeing sexuality for what it is: recreation. There's a time for procreation, but you choose the time. To have this attitude, you can't have hang-ups about your body.

But that's enough of the deep analysis. There's a much more amusing question about all this: why would an ordinary person want to appear naked in a calendar?

Everybody, it seems, is doing it. The British Women's Institute Calendar was a best-seller in the UK over Christmas. Its attraction was in the unself-consciousness of the middle aged women, who posed nude while coyly flower-arranging or baking bread, their creamy English skin matching their pearls and showing how the human body - without clothes - can be simultaneously dignified and silly.

Fame is an obvious incentive for these models. We're living in a society where everybody wants their 15 minutes of it. To have appeared in the media, with clothes or without, is a signal that you have arrived. If humiliation is the price you pay, then so be it - especially if it's all in a good cause, as the Galway calendar is (cancer and cerebral palsy charities are set to benefit).

There's more to it than that, though. Exhibitionism is at the heart of human nature. We've always painted, pierced and decorated ourselves. Social conditioning brings inhibition, a calamity (if you believe the story of Adam and Eve) which has its origins in shame. Ideally, the Bible tells us, we shouldn't feel shame about our bodies.

Over the past three decades, pop stars, actors and other entertainers have pushed the boundaries of nudity further and further so that we now define clothing not according to how it is designed, but according to what bits are missing. In the case of a Jennifer Lopez or a Liz Hurley, most of it is missing.

But even they have lost their capacity to shock. The more nudity you see, the less you notice it - as anybody who has ever been on a topless beach knows. Nude and Natural - the Quarterly Journal of Clothes-Optional Living reports on the activities of spiritual naturists, opera and theatre naturists, volley-ball playing naturists, poetry naturists and Christian naturists - among others. Apart from big savings on wardrobe costs for social activities, these groups seem to offer an ideal world in which the body is seen as something to be enjoyed outside a sexual context.

This assumption that nudity and sex are two different things is what is really shocking, for some people, about the Galway calendar. It's a revolutionary concept: nudity isn't dirty. So get rid of your hang-ups and hang the calendar on your wall - if you can get your hands on a copy.