Fear of Nudity

The list extends to any location where a one-way mirror or a hidden camera could be installed, and to anywhere a phone or a recording device might be used, which in practice is everywhere.

What the anxiety attaches to

People with it feel anxiety from nudity even while recognising the fear as irrational. The worry may be about seeing others naked, about being seen naked, or about both at once.

The proposed origins cover a wide spread:

• body dysmorphia
• trauma, and fear of sexual assault
• general anxiety about sexuality
• a belief that one is physically inferior
• the sense that being naked leaves a person body shamed, exposed and unprotected, which is a fear about what other people will do rather than about the state itself

Which other sense the word carries

Gymnophobia has also been used for prejudice against naked people or nudists, which is a different thing wearing the same word: a position about other people rather than a fear of a state.

Why the avoidance list has no end

The places listed for avoidance are the ones a body is uncovered in, and they can be counted. The clause that follows them in the Wikipedia article cannot: the fear applies to any place where one-way mirrors and hidden cameras can be put, and where phones or other recording devices could be used.

That is every room. A fear whose object was a set of buildings acquired, with the camera phone, an object that has no boundary, and the article states it without noticing what it does to the rest of the entry. Somebody avoiding changing rooms has a manageable problem; somebody avoiding anywhere a phone could be pointed has an unmanageable one.

It is also the point at which the fear stops being disproportionate in the way the definition requires. Recording does happen in changing rooms, and the person worried about it is not wrong about the technology.

Where the line is drawn

The article puts the threshold in a specific place, and it is not the intensity of the feeling. The condition can be regarded as hypochondriasis or an anxiety disorder, it says, if the person cannot control the phobia or if it is interfering with their daily life and their medical examinations.

Medical examinations are named separately, which is the same consequence recorded under the fear of hospitals and the fear of eyes: the fear costs the person a form of care that requires them to be looked at.

Which word covers undressing instead

Dishabiliophobia, the fear of undressing in front of other people, is described as overlapping this substantially. The distinction is between a state and an act: gymnophobia takes the condition of being unclothed and dishabiliophobia takes the moment of becoming so, and for most people the second is the difficult part.

The comparison the article reaches for is fictional. Gymnophobia has been likened to the never-nude, the invented condition Tobias Fünke has in Arrested Development, a man who wears cut-off denim shorts in the shower. That a comedy invention is the most recognisable reference point for the term is a fair measure of how thin the clinical record is.