Body Break

Why are people ashamed of their bodies?

Nudity is taboo, body hair is unfeminine, sex organs are dirty, et cetera. Why?

In my humble opinion, it’s all beyond ridiculous. But let me tell you why…

Nudity

Human beings have bodies. We are born with them. And, as church and Bible both teach, they are the very pinnacle of God’s creation. Why would God give us these beautiful, blessed bodies and then demand that we cover them up? Your body is the way you are, it is your authentic self, it is you. It is the purest, truest and most simple expression of you.

A person in his or her natural state is a person unbound. Freed of instant indentification of class and personality from proto- and stereotypes based on clothing, we can express our authentic selves through genuine interpersonal communication. Freed of irrational taboos against seeing bodies and artifical standards of attractiveness we can share ourselves with others. Freed from sexualization of the human form we can enjoy true intimacy with others. Freedom from the need for clothing is freedom not just of body, but of mind and spirit.

One’s body is nothing to be ashamed of. Of course, societal standards of physical attractiveness and manliness/femminity don’t help. People who are overweight, who think their breasts or penis may be too small, or whatever, may be particularly unwilling to be seen naturally. They say fewer young men are willing to go natural because of fear of spontaneous erection (more on that later). People fear that their bodies won’t live up to some artificial and entirely transparent standard that no one fully understands but most people with strive vehemently to uphold – even at the expense of good sense and the feelings of others.

Of particular ire to me are Christian groups that teach that the human body is inherently sinful, and that to go about in your natural state is a sin. I think a good word for that would be blasphemy, or maybe heresy. Well maybe those are a little strong, but the point is that such teachings are incompatible with the Gospel. In the great words of one of the many Liberation theologians I read in Ethics and the Human Person last semester (I think it may have been Dorothee Sölle): “Christ came to save every part of us.” Christ never mentioned anything about only being interested in the spiritual aspect of humanity (sorry neo-Gnostics), Christ was and is interested in whole human beings. The physical and spiritual human being are inseperable, your body is part of your spirituality, and spirituality informs the way you treat and regard your body. Hell, Christ had a body didn’t He? If Christ was without sin, then how could He have had a human body if the body if the human body is inherently sinful? 

Of course there is nothing intrinsincally wrong with clothing, it’s just far less necessary than we seem to think, and has far more negative potential than we care to admit. We don’t need to impose clothing upon ourselves, we can be free.

Body hair

Women have body hair. Some women have more, some women have less, but all women have it – and there is nothing wrong with that. And if it is the natural state of woman to have body hair, how can body hair be unfeminine? If women should be hairless but for the top of their heads, wouldn’t they be born that way?

Women naturally have hair in their armpits, on their arms and legs, around their vaginas, even on their buttocks. Every time a woman shaves any of those areas, she is altering her body from her natural state. I’m not saying that shaving (or body modification in general) is wrong or inherently bad, i’m saying that it needs to be recognized for what it is. There is nothing wrong with a woman’s body hair, nothing. The idea that to be truly feminine a woman must remove her body hair is, just like the ideas we have of how thin and how young women should be, an unnatural standard of beauty.

If a woman really wants to live to that standard, particularly if she agrees with it (however bizarre and silly some of us may think it is), then that is entirely her business. But no woman should feel that in order to be feminine, she must shave her natural, God-given body hair. The way a woman is born and develops naturally is the truest expression of feminity possible. A healthy female body, at a weight and appearance proper to the individual, is the way a woman should be – and she should never be made to feel less of a woman for being that way.

Sex Organs

Eeek, a penis! I commented earlier on how young men are often wary of going natural for fear of spontaneous erections. This is beyond me. Why is a man’s penis becoming erect considered obscene and embarassing? It’s one of those things that happens, it happens several times a day, and it’s supposed to. When your penis stops becoming spontaneously erect, then there is a problem. Spontaneous erections is a natural function of the male body as much as breathing, and in no way is it dirty or obscence.

Why do we have warning for “parental discretion” before movies and tv shows where a penis or a vagina or breasts may be seen? What is it about these parts of our bodies that we must shield our children from them? Children have them you know, they touch them too. The problem isn’t that we sexualize these parts of our bodies (though that sexualization is largely erroneous, they do in fact exist outside the context of sex), the problem is that we regard sex as a bad thing. The fact that we negatively sexualize our reproductive organs is indicative of a whole pile of problems with our society. Yes, penises and vaginas are for sex, huzzah, they’re also for urinating, woop-de-do.

We see everything through sex-tinted glasses, and yet we regard sex itself as dirty. A natural, beautiful human activity in which most, if not all, of us partake and enjoy, with a good and important purpose, is regarded as bad. And yet we see the world in the light of this activity. We need to move beyond our negative views of sex and our tendency to sexualize everything. Then perhaps our society as a whole will come to understand that penises and vaginas are perfectly normal and perfectly fine – there is nothing dirty about them.

Originally posted to Flickr as naked on munros. This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License (cc-by-sa-2.0). In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it under this or a similar cc-by-sa license.