One fall afternoon in the mid-60's, 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 then -- and this is the part I still have trouble believing -- they 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 didn't occur to me to object: I'd 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, Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer. All of them -- whole generations of the cultural elite -- were 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.
There were several salacious stories circulating at Yale back in the 60's. Most common was the report that someone had broken into a photo lab in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and stolen the negatives of that year's Vassar posture nudes, which were supposedly for sale on the Ivy League black market or available to the initiates of Skull and Bones. Little did I know how universal this myth was.
http://www.tafkac.org/collegiate/ivy_league_nude_photos.htmlThere's one story I did for the New York Times magazine that was called "The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal", and another from Harper's about Elizabeth Kubler Ross and her famous "Five Stages of Dying". The "Posture Scandal" was about a bizarre ritual that I went through at a freshman in Yale that was described as scientific, but we didn't know at the time it was part of this research project that was headed by W.H. Sheldon (garbled) could be analyzed down to a 3-digit number, which was composed of measurements of body parts. And these measurements had to be done using nude photographs, and he talked just about every Ivy League institution into- women's colleges too, into using their freshmen as his subjects under the guise of taking posture pictures. These so-called posture pictures were weird and demeaning and what they did is they pasted pins down your spine- they said to measure the arc of curvature- it was a serious thing but it was done under the solemn mantle of science and we were like, you know, naive freshmen so we complied. Anyway, after decades of which I successfully repressed this memory, there was a two-paragraph letter in the New York Times in the early 90s which brought it all back. The letter was from a Yale professor who weighed in and said what she had studied about the whole posture picture and about W.H. Sheldon that behind it all was a sinister Nazi-influenced eugenics agenda brought by this pseudo-scientist Sheldon.
For one thing, I think that a lot of great stories come from two-paragraph letters that people ignore stories but have amazing stuff behind it. Of course, one of the things I wanted to know about these posture photos was; where did they all go? I mean, there were tens of thousands of them, where were they? I finally tracked down this 80-year-old guy who was living in a rooming house in Iowa, and he was the photographic assistant to the posture photo guy and he told me that he had facilitated the transfer of these tens of thousands of photos from a storage warehouse in Boston to an obscure anthropological wing of the Smithsonian. So I spent another year applying for a research grant to look at these photos, and I finally got in and saw them. I didn't see every one of them but, you know, the reason this story was in the New York Times magazine instead of the National Inquirer was that there is a journalism of ideas aspect to it which was that this guy Sheldon has convinced everyone that all of human nature could be reduced to a 3-digit number and that he has the "theory of everything" in terms of human nature.
Anyway, while this is an extreme example, but I have the feeling that people in this room could come up with- if you examined- I mean, I'll just throw this out but I think evolutionary psychology and sociobiology is just rife with punctures and is just filled with gashes of unsupported generalizations about gender and human behavior.
http://abrahamson.medill.northwestern.edu/WWW/Guests/Rosenbaum_talk2.html
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