Third On The List

I used to tell people that the way to thwart terrorists on airliners was to fly naked. It makes it very difficult and perhaps painful to hide weapons. I thought I was original in this thought until I saw a NY Times column by Thomas Friedman dated December 26, 2001. It was titled ‘Naked Air’. I was doing a little research on writings that occurred immediately post 911 and ran across the column. It pre-dates my thought but I don’t remember reading the column at the time. Friedman proposes it, but laughs it off as a tongue-in-cheek suggestion as the column rolls along. Today the news is of the new x-ray scan machine that looks through your clothes. It appears the public is in a gigantic panic about the ‘see-through’ x-ray machine.

I am a rebel about clothes. My feelings about clothes go all the way back to my childhood. I can remember as a young boy, 7 or 8 years old, wondering to myself what the great secrecy was all about. I was raised in a fundamentalist religious family. Fighting and thinking my way out of that triple-layered bag has taken a lifetime, but the thing about clothes pre-dates my religious rebellion.

I used to stand at the bathroom window as a child after a bath. I was maybe 4 feet tall, but if I stood on my tip toes I could, wearing only my birthday clothes, peer out the window into the Texas summer heat. I used to stand there and wish I could go outside, but it was totally unacceptable in my childhood household to emerge from behind the locked bathroom door less than fully dressed.

I have been a bit of a rebellious and inquisitive soul from the first moments I can actually remember. My mother spent many years massaging her forehead and giving me that ‘look’ of genuine perplexity. I am curious by nature and also questioning by nature.

I question the necessity of 24/7 clothes.

Nudity is a subject that generates a plethora of reactions in our society. The reactions can be levity, shame, blushing, horror, panic, stupidity, pornography, jokes and all the ones you can think of on your own.

It seems that airline passengers are now horrified that scanners can see through their clothes. I’m wondering what will happen? Will they spontaneously combust? Will God banish them to hell because someone has seen them in their birthday suit? Possible jail time?

I have a contrarian view on all of this. I think our culture’s insistence on clothes 24/7 in all situations actually facilitates sex crimes and unnatural leering. I think our inordinate preoccupation with nudity is founded on the fact that we are not ‘supposed’ to be nude by command of those composing cultural law even as they stand far outside the harmony and simplicity of natural law. What could be more natural and innocent than being nude? Would we put clothes on an apple? On a waterfall? On a tiger? On an antelope? That idea is sophomoric at fist read I confess, but could any truth be more self apparent to even a casual Saturday afternoon philosopher or thinker?

I also hold the view that it is a control mechanism placed on mankind and womankind. It is a puritan and unnatural restriction on the natural beauty of man and woman. Those of you that read here regularly know that I talk often about a world or ‘order’ of natural good. I find nudity perfectly natural and even normal. However, we all willingly accept these restrictions, if not willingly we are generally compliant with little fuss. In doing so we set into motion all of the unnatural behaviors that our society is plagued with. We have ‘strip joints’. We have weird television and movie preoccupations with the subject. We have tittering little jokes about nudity. We have Brazilian women wearing strings on the beach instead of simply going nude. We have Madison Avenue advertising that distorts this cultural repression to the n-th degree and uses it to sell, sell, sell.

All unnatural.

If I consider going to the curb in the morning to collect my newspaper in my god given clothes, I will be summoned straight to jail for being obscene. Obscene? One of the breathless reporters on the x-ray story today said many people feel the see-through machines are generating pornographic images. Pornographic?

Children being massacred in Darfur is pornographic. Television shows and movies with senseless violence as their staple are pornographic. Despite the rave over "Kill Bill', I found it pornographic, and yes, I understand the genre and the implications of the genre of Kill Bill.

I doubt I’ll see the day when my culture owns any semblance of an idea about the innocence of the skin God gave us. I think it’s an intellectual and philosophical shame.

Maybe we all actually understand this, but can we find the courage to overcome it? What do you think? Is nudity pornographic or obscene? And before you answer, no I'm not talking about nudity that is within the framework of sex with animals or bondage or all the mixed up things that occur around sexual activity that involves nudity. To answer nudity "is pornographic if it involves sex with children" is not the discussion I am looking for here. That type answer is readily apparent. I am asking about simple everyday nudity. I am talking about sunning on the ocean's shore, for example. Pornographic or obscene?

If I owned the magic cultural hammer, its the third thing I would change in our 'culture'.