I found little evidence of this distinction remaining in my breakfast experiment this morning, where a recent news blurb from wacky Florida got me thinking: Is there a gender distinction when we say Naked Man/Naked Woman or Nude Man/Nude Woman?
As is often the case with Breakfast Experiments, asking the question simply opened up deeper questions :
Experimental Proceedure:
Coffee: 100 g. of Panama 'Boquete' green beans was open flame-roasted in a skillet three days prior to the experiment and set aside. On the morning of the experiment, an aliquot of the same beans were ground and extracted with boiling H2O using a crude beaker/filter arrangement. Milk and sugar were titrated generously in preparation for the next phase.
Data: A web portal-search engine service known as "Google" was consulted for the four combinations of phrases, both with and without quotation marks to act as controls.
Perusal of the headlines often led to some amusing/ironic examples such as
"Man Caught Making Coffee Naked in His Home." (wait, can they see me through internet?), as well as some disturbing examples, such as:
"Naked Sultan Woman Waving Severed Dog's Head Arrested and..." -in such instances as the latter, coffee was diluted with single-malt whiskey to help assimilate the information. The author will leave it to the reader to fill in the ellipsis.
The results are shown in Table 3, below:
| Gender | “Man” | “Woman” | Ratio |
| Naked X arrested | 4,600,000 | 1,800,000 | 39% |
| Nude X arrested | 6,320,000 | 1,630,000 | 25% |
| “Naked X arrested” (with quotes) | 1,410,000 | 416,000 | 29.5% |
| “Nude X arrested”(with quotes) | 268,000 | 93,400 | 34% |
What is interesting is that, consistently, there are about 3 to 4 Naked or Nude Men for every Naked/Nude woman. Curiously, this confirms the author's casual observations on nude beaches at various locations around the world. The question that it arouses, however, is whether this gender differential is more of a language, cultural, social, or biological function. That is, are there actually more Nude/Naked men arrested because they are naked, or because they are men? Another way of phrasing this is, Do more men than women get naked in public in the first place, or is it more illegal for a man to be naked in public?
Any thoughts on the reasons behind this phenom? or is it just an artifact?
