I read this post and watched the video on Urban Vox and I had some thoughts
This has been on my mind for many months now and I haven’t been able to find the words to articulate my thoughts on this properly, I’m still not sure I have managed it, but I am going to try anyway.
Nudity is not a problem.
Shame is.
Time and time again we are told about the dangers of teen sexting, that celebrities phones have been hacked and their nudes are all over the internet. That we should all be very careful about who we send naked pictures.
Why?
What is it that makes this so dangerous? We are all born naked, it is the default state of the human being.
It is because we have allowed other to shame us, to hide our bodies, sometimes even from ourselves. It is all about control; Religion likes shame because it reinforces the need for repentance which is only available from them. Society likes it for the moral superiority it allows them to wield. Business likes it because it allows them to control their employees behavior even when they are not on the clock while at the same time exploiting the titillation factor to sell their products. This is why we live in the warped world where someone simply being naked is a cause for great scandal, where reams of writing on how good or bad a person is seems to be dependant on whether or not someone has seen them with their kit off. And then the scandal sheets gleefully depict stars and sports figures cavorting with very little on while bemoaning the lack of morals in today’s world in the very next breath.
We happily subject ourselves and our children to bloody and graphic violence, depicting the worst that human beings can do to each other in the pursuit of entertainment, yet a nipple is somehow going to damage us irreparably? Our sports heroes rape, beat and kill women and yet seeing a penis is a cause for concern? The government claims there is no money for benefits or healthcare but there seems to be lots of money to make sure that no one can see sex that they don’t approve of on the internet?
Insanity I say.
Imagine if you would, a world where being naked was no big deal. Where children saw that their parents were comfortable with their own bodies. That clothes, or the lack of clothes said nothing about who you were as a person. That a woman being topless in public elicited the same exact response that a man topless in public does. How would that change things?
I say we make those changes, each in our own little way, that we show those around us that nudity does not equal shame and shame does not equal control. Lets take away the power of shame over nudity that makes us behave in such completely ridiculous ways. Let’s start talking to our children honestly and openly about nudity and sex and we won’t have to worry what they are doing, because we will have taught them to make those decisions with information and not with fear. Now obviously you want to talk to your children about whether or not they are old enough to send naked selfies and whether or not the person that they are sending it too is the best choice because there are, and always will be, unprincipled people who will try to take advantage of them. But it is never to soon to start having the conversations that will allow your children to be better adults and to learn to remove the shame that people will use to try and control their behavior. What we are currently doing certainly isn’t working. I think that if we all made nudes as common as pictures of kittens we might make them just as uninteresting, cute, but nothing to worry about.
It is time to stop being ashamed.
Michael (@DomSigns)
P.S. A note about the video in the link at the top of this piece, if I send you a nude and you don’t share it, I will be disappointed 😉
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