lightly.
Someone filled with vigour may be described as ‘fit to jump out of her skin’, her energy almost unable to be contained by the constrictions of her close-fitting epidermis.
Someone who ‘gets under our skin’ may do so in a pleasurable or abrasive fashion. Regardless of whether we’re drawn to or repelled by such a person, their existence provokes a reaction akin to that of a splinter. Impossible to ignore, we must poke and worry at the source of irritation, raking at it with our nails until it’s dislodged.
Most crucially, for all its symbolism and associated imagery, the skin, made up of layers and stretched over the entire body, is our body’s largest organ. It exists in contrast with the more visceral images of pulsing wet muscles and the red masses of heart, liver, and kidney that usually spring to mind when we contemplate our organs. These are hidden and slightly repulsive, glistening dangerously, revealed only when the body itself is laid open. The skin, as an ideal, is smooth and pliant, inviting connection, promising containment, and defining beauty.
An adult’s skin-surface area will measure between one-and-half to two square metres, and be between one and two millimetres deep. Contrast that with the whale shark, whose mighty epidermis complements its massive size with a depth of around 102 millimetres. Visualise your own skin as a pelt with thickets of hair erupting from the head, the armpits, and the groin, stretched out as a rug on a floor or pinned to a wall, much like a trophy hunter might display the hide of a tiger. True, it may not boast the exotic stripes and wild, elemental beauty of the coat of a big cat, but it is impressive nonetheless.
Thickest on the palms of our hands and on the soles of our feet and thinnest on our eyelids, our skin is constantly being rubbed off and replaced by cells that migrate from the deeper layers of the epidermis. Unlike most mammals, we are relatively glabrous, or hairless, which allows for more efficient evaporation of our sweat, and so assists in the regulation of our body temperature. Embedded in the skin, and growing through it, are hair, nails, and sweat glands. Buried within it are blood and lymph vessels, nerve endings, sebaceous glands, and tiny involuntary muscles attached to our hair follicles.
Our skin envelops us, acting as a barrier against invading microbes and chemical irritants. It protects the underlying tissue from injury and infection, helps to regulate the body’s temperature, and alerts the body to environmental factors through its nerve endings: too hot, too cold, too toxic, too sharp—the skin alerts us to the dangers, and the comforts that surround us.
Surprisingly tough yet vulnerable, the skin is a frail and all-too-penetrable veil: blades can slice it, fire can burn it, and toxic substances can be absorbed through it. The loss of a substantial amount of our elastic armour will kill us, rendering us unable to regulate our temperature or block bacteria intent on colonising the warm, wet recesses of our susceptible body. Breach it and we bleed.
You only have to see the pulse beneath a baby’s fontanelle, where the skull bones are yet to fuse, or the subtle but continuous beat of blood coursing through the carotid arteries at the throat to have the vulnerability of the body’s first line of defence impressed upon you. The merest nick of knife—yes, it would have to be well placed—could see our life drain away, leaving nothing but a dry husk.
Because of this vulnerability, is it any wonder then that few of us ever really feel comfortable just in our own skins? We spend most of our lives draped in clothes; poor, naked, hairless apes we are without them.
The skin is a border, and one that is usually heavily protected and shielded from view, and from the elements. Even the triangles of skimpy bathing suits worn on beaches lend a modicum of defence. Not only does one feel less exposed in the obvious way when one is clothed, but also more veiled at a metaphysical level.
Visually, as well as in a tactile sense, our edges are blunted and muffled when we are dressed. Naturalists are a minority, although most of us have dared the pleasure of skinny-dipping at some point in our lives. There is an abandon associated with nudity, a reckless joy exhibited by streakers at the cricket and by the whoops of bathers plunging naked into the ocean.
Of course, it is also the flagrant display of sexual organs that excites and titillates, not simply the unimpeded view of the skin. Still, it is slightly bewildering that public nudity is viewed as anarchic and an effrontery that warrants being arrested.
I didn’t brave the cold and dark on the day that the photographer Spencer Tunick came to Melbourne in 2001 to photograph the bare bodies of the city’s citizens as they lay on Princess Bridge. Tunick is famous for his photos, taken all over the world, of groups of humanity in the altogether, lying on city streets or standing in orderly, terraced rows along roads, crowding the upward curve of a pedestrian bridge, or lying on their sides before the looming bulk of an enormous ship. In Tunick’s images, the variations of skin colour follow the curves and hollows of the bodies in stark opposition to the unyielding urban surfaces that they are often juxtaposed against.
Watching an edited video of the Melbourne shoot on YouTube, I found it inexplicably moving to see the mass of people—thousands of them—bare-arsed and happily excited in the muted dawn light, stampeding past the ladder on which the artist was perched with his loudhailer. They dropped onto the cold, wet road at his shouted instruction, but before the photo could be taken a man (fully clothed) ran into the shot bearing a large handwritten sign that echoed the words he chanted, ‘All men will bow to the name of Jesus Christ.’
‘God sent us into the world naked,’ one of the participants shouted back as the police dragged the protester away. His remonstrations were akin to objecting to dancing on a Sunday: there was nothing less lewd than this crowd of adults in their birthday suits, grinning like children at a birthday party. I experienced a mild pang of regret that I hadn’t dropped my daks, and the rest of my gear, to pose stark-naked with the lot of them: solemn, ridiculous, exposed.
The exposure of nakedness is something we sometimes crave because of the intimacy that it can help us to forge with another person. When we take a lover, our most urgent impulse is to caress our beloved’s skin. We delight in the warmth of their body against ours, and explore their skin as if it were a wondrous new terrain. We seek to discover the blemishes as well as the beauty, eager to know their physical shell in intimate detail. We might pause in delight at their mouth, tracing the shape of their lips, marvelling at the difference in colour and texture. Gently, we circle their nipples with our tongues, smiling with delight as these highly sensitive areas of skin tighten and become erect.
According to our predilections, it may be the smoothness of the underside of our lover’s upper arm, the hairiness of other parts, or the contrast between the two that intoxicates us. In our desire to get even closer, we attempt to penetrate the barrier of the skin through deep kissing and sexual intercourse so that, literally and figuratively, our bodies are joined.
What would sex be if not for touch? At its most fundamental, sex is, after all, just rubbing your skin against someone else’s. The platonic idea of love is all very well, but who would give up the delicious sensation of sinking into another’s arms and feeling wholly embraced within their skin?
And it’s not simply the feel, but also the smell of another’s skin that can transport us. I can recall vividly the sweet sweatiness, completely devoid of staleness, exuded by a young man whom I studied with decades ago. On hot Brisbane mornings, he would arrive at college, having ridden his bicycle up the myriad hills of the western suburbs, and arrive in time for our first class of the day, wet and glistening, and smelling divine.
The touch of skin on skin is not just for lovers, of course. It is a delightful sensation at any age, and is essential to our physical and psychological development. Anxious parents of premature babies huddle beside humidicribs, gently reaching inside to stroke their tiny offspring’s bodies. Desperate to hold their babies, but prevented
