University Students Won't Strip

A group of final-year veterinary students at the University of Glasgow in Scotland stripped butt naked and took up positions behind sheep and other animals in a fundraising venture for animal charities.

The photographs form the centerpiece of the group's 2017 calendars which cost PS10 each (approximately J$1,800)

Jess Simmonds, one of the students who took part in the shoot, which also shows naked students having a milk fight in the cow shed, is reported to have said it "was great fun".

It is not the first time that university students have gotten butt naked for photo shoots. Back in 2004, Edinburgh University's Royal School of Veterinary Studies students stripped to raise money for their university club.

But it appears unlikely that Jamaican college students will catch this new craze any time soon.

"I don't think any of the students at UWI would do it," Davianne Tucker, outgoing president of the Guild of Students at the University of the West Indies, Mona, told THE STAR.

serious consequences

"There are many innovative ways of getting funding, many innovative ways of getting a point across, and I believe that my university students are creative enough to be able to do other things," she reasoned.

University of the West Indies (UWI) lecturer and cultural researcher Dr Donna Hope-Marquis, too, is of the opinion that the ordinary Jamaican citizen still has ways to go in becoming accepting of the nude human body in this manner.

"We have this sort of Victorian repression and the sort of values that suggest that using the nude body in any way is immoral," she said.

"Nudity in our culture is usually conceded with pornography - Not with art, nor with anything positive - because nudity goes with sex,"

Hope-Marquis further told THE STAR that in the event that any university student opt to raise eyebrows posing nude for whatever the reason, they ought to be prepared to face the music following such a bold move.

"They are going to be lambasted, they are going to be chastised, and are going to be seen as deviants," she said.