Nude Thoughts

I was just reading an article about a 18 y/o boy that got a ticket for being on a public street without wearing a shirt. Evidently, there is a 100 year-old law against being in public without a shirt in this Maryland town.

I mention this because it corresponds to a recent string of thoughts that I've had recently. What part of the body is too overtly sexual and should be covered up? Our culture certainly suggests that this includes the butt, pubic area and a women's breasts. But why? What makes a woman's breasts so much different than a man's? Certainly both sexes experience sexual pleasure from them almost identically, so what's the difference? And what about ass? OK, you can argue that it is commonly used in sex acts, but not any more so than one's hands and mouth. Yet we don't typically pop a boner when we see an exposed mouth.

My theory is that body parts deemed to be too sexual for exposure is almost completely determined by culture. That is, breasts only seem too racy because our culture tells us they are and therefore whenever we see them we take special notice that we're seeing something reserved only for intimate, sexual settings. Some parts of the world feel the same way about a thigh or calf or even an ankle as we do about breasts. It is the mere classification of these things as sexual parts that make them so. It seems to me that the only societies that at least treat such things somewhat consistently are those that require women to be completely covered. But even then, what about the men?

The downside of all this is that we begin to see the human form as equally desirable as shameful and inherently sinful. As a child when we happen upon a family member in a semi-nude state, we're already programmed to believe that we've done something very wrong. As we grow this shame becomes internalized into our perceptions of ourselves as well as transferred onto our perceptions of others. Fortunately, many of us learn how to deal with this as we age, but many also do not.

It is too bad that we see something so natural and beautiful as bad. That we've come to prefer the unnatural over the natural and that so many will spend their whole lives hating themselves because of inability to accept their body due to culture-induced, warped view of what the human body should look like.