Just found this on boing boing. Apparently many Ivy League schools like Yale, Princeton etc. took nude photos of most incoming male and female freshmen. This went on for decades. It is almost too bizarre to believe. The description of the story from boing boing- I don't even know where to start describing this story [from a 1995 edition of the New York Times Magazine]. It's completely insane. It involves nude photos of George Bush, Sally Quinn, Miss Manners, Hillary Rodham, Bob Woodward, Brandon Tartikoff, and Meryl Streep, among thousands of others. But not just nude photos of these people. Photos of them with metal pins glued to their spines. Taken during their freshman orientation, at the direction of a eugenicist and somatacist who once wrote that "Negro intelligence comes to a standstill at about the 10th year." http://www.boingboing.net/ The Story- THE GREAT IVY LEAGUE NUDE POSTURE PHOTO SCANDAL By RON ROSENBAUM; Published: January 15, 1995 ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, 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 found 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 were -- and 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 insuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale students -- some of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and society -- would 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 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 folly -- of 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 I've found them, I'm 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 Princeton -- to name a few of the schools involved -- from the 1940's through the 1960's, there's 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 pseudo-science without asking permission. And on how you feel about an obscure archive in Washington making them available for researchers to study. While investigating the strange odyssey of the missing nude "posture photos," I found that the issue is, in every respect, a very touchy matter -- indeed, 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 time -- for a John and Yoko film titled "Up Your Legs Forever," which has been screened at the Whitney -- I was one of many, it was Art, and let's leave it at that. But the first time was even more strange and bizarre because of its strait-laced Ivy setting, its preliberation context -- and yes, because of the metal pins stuck on my body. 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. see the rest of the story at- http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE7D91131F936A25752C0A963958260
Playing the percentages, you figure some graduates will rise to prominence in very powerful positions, including US President. Perhaps these pictures were taken to blackmail these future leaders, when the time came, in an effort to control the world. ...dun dun dunnnnn!
I highly doubt there's such correlation between ivy leaguers turning into pr0n stars. Would be cool though. Maybe
