Dr. Victoria Pitts-Taylor - Professor of Sociology, Queens College

Taboos show us how culturally relative our ideas about the "natural" are. In relation to the body, taboos show us not the body's physical or biological boundaries, but its cultural boundaries. What does the natural body look like? What is naturally beautiful? What looks healthy and normal? The answer to these questions depends upon the social and historical context -- what is normal in one place and time might be taboo in another.

In one culture, a natural, perceptibly healthy body might be considerably larger than in another culture. In the Renaissance the beautiful woman's body was often large and fleshy, as depicted in the renderings of great artists. Displaying such a body now in an advertising campaign would violate a contemporary taboo against showing what we may presently call an "obese" body.

The "perfect" Victorian body in Europe and America - which still informs some of our western beauty ideals - might have relatively unmarked skin, but a tribal body elsewhere might proudly display permanent designs made by scarring or tattooing. Colonial perspectives often viewed the marked bodies of tribal peoples as "primitive" or savage.

Violating taboo can be appealing, of course. Subcultural groups have long found ways to violate taboos, and in doing so, to establish their social distance from mainstream culture. Punks, goths, tattoo enthusiasts, contemporary body modifiers, sailors, bikers and many other subcultural groups have used or adapted tribal body practices like tattooing and body piercing as a way to mark their distinct sense of bodily style.

Sometimes, the broken taboo can be so alarming that it seems to demand attention as a social problem. In the 1970s, the British media openly worried about what the rise of punk represented in Britain's youth culture. In the 1990s, the popularity of body art raised media concerns about an epidemic of "self-mutilation." Sociologists who study social problems often see such media responses as promoting "moral panic," which has the effect of buttressing cultural norms and marginalizing or pathologizing groups who violate them.