10. The Plan to Systematically Take Nudes of America’s Best and Brightest
One day in the late 1970s, a Yale University employee unlocked a room on campus that had not been used in many years. Inside, there was a huge surprise: thousands of photos of nude young men, showing their fronts, sides, and rears. Stranger still, metal pins seemed to stick out of the naked men’s spines. What could it be? Was it the trove of some weirdo, with a niche fetish for BDSM voodoo porn? As it turned out, the answer was not so juicy, but it was still weird. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Yale and other Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Vassar, and Brown, had required freshmen to pose nude for a photo shoot.
The goal was to furnish material for a massive study into how rickets developed. That involved sticking pins to the backs of male and female subjects. Although the goal was laudable, the failure to consider and protect the students’ privacy backfired. Generations of elites who attended the Ivy Leagues had posed, and the archives included naked photos of well-known figures ranging from George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton to Diane Sawyer to Meryl Streep. The photos were burned after news leaked, and the study was denounced. However, it is possible that some might have escaped the flames, and are still circulating out there, to potentially end up on the internet someday.
