Like an earlier discussion over the whole question of profanity, this will be my one statement on the whole issue of what images I consider appropriate and what images I consider inappropriate for inclusion in this blog. After all, this is supposed to be from a Christian perspective, so it would seem natural that anything here would be acceptable to an adult Christian, correct? I use both epithets, "adult" and "Christian" as descriptive of the type of person who might find something of interest here, although not exclusively, because I have non-Christian here all the time, and, as I always say, everyone is of course welcome. It is just that I am an adult, and a Christian, so there you go.Having said all that, I will ask you to take a few minutes and scroll down the page, or click this link, read the post, and view the accompanying photograph, and then read the comments. I'll wait. Whistling "Warm Wet Circles" as it plays on the stereo. You back? Good. I mean no disrespect to Neon Prime Time because, despite our political differences, he is a fellow Midwesterner, and he seems a decent fellow. My problem, however, is that he saw the photo I put at the top of the article as not just inappropriate, but bordering on pornographic. What it came down to, as far as I can tell, was the fact that the model is nude. I guess Susan Sarandon was right when she said a nipple will upstage you every time.
All this is by way of introduction. I shall begin my main point by stating something that, while perhaps controversial, I believe to be nonetheless true: I believe that our society is so repressed, so afraid of human sexuality that we have ended up, in some bizarre process of inversion, sexualizing everything, to the point where appropriateness and context are meaningless. A Calvin Klein ad, Deep Throat, Body Heat, and Michaelangelo's David (at top of this post) are all on a continuum in which the unclothed human form, or barely clothed but suggestive human form, create an unnecessary salaciousness, a sexual desire that must be stamped out. All this repression, all this fear of sexual desire, creates an atmosphere in which sex pervades our culture, creating an endless cycle of unwanted desire and screeching reaction.
I tried to find, but was limited by time, one of a myriad of Renaissance Virgin and Child paintings in which (a) Mary was topless, and (b) the baby Jesus was naked. The reason for this is simple: Renaissance Italy was a society in which human sexuality was repressed, especially among the lower clergy, who also happened to make up many of the artists. This repressed sexuality came out in perverse ways, including somewhat disquieting images of Jesus and his mother. Yet, these paintings are, despite the suggestive nature of the composition, considered great art, indeed they are great art. A sexually repressed society often creates hyper-sexual art.
I believe that there is nothing inherently sexual about an image of the nude human form. Indeed, I believe that to so view nudity is a failure of imagination, less a reaction to whatever may or may be in the piece in question that a reaction to the desire that wells up in the viewer. Since sexual desire is a no-no, any instance of it, and its cause, must be stamped out. I am not speaking here of obvious sexual imagery - porn, both hard-core and soft-core - or the sophomoric obsession with sex contained in popular entertainment, including television and popular music (although, to be honest, sex has always been a part of the music of the common people; that's why our betters never liked it all that much; can't have the great unwashed multiplying, you know). I am speaking of any image or representation of the human form. When sexual desire is kicked in to drive by any glance at a naked person, I do believe we have reached a place where collective neurosis has set in.
For my part, I believe there is something beautiful about the human body. We are, after all, created in God's image, and the Creator did happen to say something after all was said and done on the sixth day, to the effect that, with the creation of human beings, creation was "very good". Oh, yeah, Adam and Eve went around naked and unashamed. It seems to me that as a mark of the New Creation - something we Christians proclaim with joy, especially in the aftermath of last Sunday - a return to that idyll is not unwarranted. Having said that, I will also say that I will not ever put an image here I find inappropriate, deliberately salacious or sexually provocative, or downright pornographic. Since I don't think nudity in and of itself is either bad or inherently sexual, however, there might, on occasion, be the image of an unclothed individual.
My governing philosophy for this blog is that of what Wynton Marsalis called, in an interview in Ken Burns' Jazz documentary a "certain adult sensibility". That is, this is for grown-ups. I firmly believe that there is and should always remain a distinction between what is appropriate for children and what is appropriate for adults. The latter include serious discussions of issues of grave importance, serious discussions of culture, and accompanying images and sounds that might (or might not) contain images or words that children have no business being exposed to. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, why should everything we produce be viewed or listened to by your average eight-year-old? That's just a silly idea, not just a "dumbing down" of our culture, but the active infantilizing of us all. As a parent myself, I live this out in a number of ways, not the least of which is that my children are not allowed to view my blog. After all, why should they?
In the final analysis, this is my blog, governed by my rules as to what is appropriate and what is not appropriate (as I said to Neon Prime Time, as this is my blog, here, at least, it is all about me). Should you be one of those who just can't handle seeing the unclothed human form, I suggest you glance with one eye just barely open in the future to make sure you don't see anything that might offend or unnecessarily arouse. As with profanity, I certainly will not set out to be provocative, but if something fits, I will not shy away from it just because someone, somewhere might be offended. I can only do what I do the way I know how to do it. I will not apologize for any unwarranted offense, because the offense is in the eye of the beholder, and to my mind says so much more about them - and our weird, repressive, hyper-sexual culture - than it does about me.
