Ron Rosenbaum - The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (Singles Classic)

The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal:

In Which a Cunning PseudoscientistCatches the Elite with Its Pants Down

By Ron Rosenbaum

Copyright 2016 by Ron Rosenbaum

One afternoon in the late 1970s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he round was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side, and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they wereand took swift action to burn them. He called in a professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed to the flames, thereby ensuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale studentssome of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and societywould survive.

It was the Bonfire of the Best and the Brightest, and the assumption was that the last embarrassing reminders of a peculiar practice, which masqueraded as science and now looked like a kind of kinky voodoo ritual, had gone up in smoke. The assumption was wrong. Thousands upon thousands of nude photos from Yale and other elite schools survive to this day.

When I first embarked on my quest for the lost nude posture photos, I could not decide whether to think of the phenomenon as a scandal or as an extreme example of academic follyof what happens when well-intentioned institutions allow their reverence for the reigning conjectures of scientific orthodoxy to persuade them to do things that seem silly or scandalous in retrospect. And now that Ive found them, Im still not sure whether outrage or laughter is the more appropriate reaction. Your response, dear reader, may depend on whether your nude photograph is among them. And if you attended Yale, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, or Princetonto name a few of the schools involvedfrom the 1940s through the 1960s, theres a chance that yours may be.

Your response may also depend on how you feel about the fact that some of these schools made nude or seminude photographs of you available to the disciples of what many now regard as a pseudoscience without asking permission. And on how you feel about an obscure archive in Washington making them available for researchers to study today.

While investigating the strange odyssey of the missing nude posture photos, I found that the issue is, in every respect, a very touchy matterindeed, a kind of touchstone for registering the uneven evolution of attitudes toward body, race, and gender in the past half-century.

Up Your Legs for Yale

I personally have posed nude only twice in my life. The second timefor a John Lennon and Yoko Ono film titled Up Your Legs Forever, which has been screened at the WhitneyI was one of many, it was Art, and lets leave it at that. But the first time was even more strange and bizarre because of its straight-laced Ivy setting, its pre-liberation contextand yes, because of the metal pins stuck on my body.

One fall afternoon in the mid-sixties, shortly after I arrived in New Haven to begin my freshman year at Yale, I was summoned to that sooty Gothic shrine to muscular virtue known as Payne Whitney Gym. I reported to a windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. And thenand this is the part I still have trouble believingthey attached metal pins to my spine. There was no actual piercing of skin, only of dignity, as four-inch metal pins were affixed with adhesive to my vertebrae at regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it.

It didnt occur to me to object: Id been told that this posture photo was a routine feature of freshman orientation week. Those whose pins described a too violent or erratic postural curve were required to attend remedial posture classes.

The procedure did seem strange. But I soon learned that it was a long-established custom at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff, and Bob Woodward were required to do it at Yale. At Vassar, Meryl Streep; at Mount Holyoke, Wendy Wasserstein; at Wellesley, Nora Ephron, Hillary Rodham, and Diane Sawyer.* All of themwhole generations of the cultural elitewere asked to pose. But however much the colleges tried to make this bizarre procedure seem routine, its undeniable strangeness engendered a scurrilous strain of folklore.

[*Most Wellesley photos were taken seminude, in bra and panties.]

The Mismeasure of Man

There were several salacious stories circulating at Yale back in the sixties. Most common was the report that someone had broken into a photo lab in Poughkeepsie, New York, and stolen the negatives of that years Vassar posture nudes, which were supposedly for sale on the Ivy League black market or available to the initiates of the Skull and Bones. Little did I know how universal this myth was.

Ah, yes, the famous rumored stolen Vassar posture pictures, Nora Ephron (Wellesley 62) recalled when I spoke with her. But dont forget the famous rumored stolen Wellesley posture photos.

Wellesley too?

Oh, yes, she said. Its one of those urban legends.

She can laugh about it now, she said, but in retrospect the whole idea that she and all her smart classmates went along with being photographed in this way dismays her. We were idiots, she said. Idiots!

Sally Quinn (Smith 63), the Washington writer, expressed alarm when I first reached her. God, Im relieved, she said. I thought you were going to tell me you found mine. You always thought when you did it that one day theyd come back to haunt you. That twenty-five years later, when your husband was running for president, theyd show up in Penthouse.

Another Wellesley alumna, Judith Martin, author of the Miss Manners column, told me shes appalled in retrospect that the college forced this practice on their freshmen. Why werent we more appalled at the time? she wondered. Nonetheless, she confessed to making a kind of good-natured extortionate use of the posture-photo specter herself.

I do remember making a reunion speech in which I offered to sell them back to people for large donations. And there were a lot of people who turned pale before they realized it was a joke.

Distinguishing between joke and reality is often difficult in posture-photo lore. Considering the astonishing rumor Ephron clued me in to, a story she assured me shed heard from someone very close to the source:

There was a guy, an adjunct professor of sociology who was working on a grant for the tobacco industry. And what I heard when I was at Wellesley was that, using Harvard posture photos, he had proved conclusively that the more manly you are, the more you smoked. And I believe the criterion for manliness was the obvious one.

The obvious one?

I assumewhat else could it have been?

In fact, the study was real. I was able to track it down, although the conclusion it reached about Harvard men was somewhat different from what Ephron recalled. But, clearly, the nude-posture-photo practice engendered heated fantasies in both sexes. Perhaps in the otherwise circumspect Ivy League-Seven Sisters world, nude posture photos were the licensed exception to propriety that spawned licentious fantasies. Fantasies that were to lie unremembered, or at least unpublicized until