Apparently Valmonte Sprout was a bit conflicted when someone told her that, "nudity in art is sooo passe and unshocking and immature." And it led her to question how she whether she could be a civilized art person without wearing a t-shirt. To which a friend of hers asked
"What does wearing clothing have to do with being civilized? The rest of the general population needs to be deprogrammed from these absurd ideas of nudity that have cropped up over the years."
Which I thought was a very good question.
A question that made me think about how much more sexualized parts of the body are in the US than in other countries. I've thought about it before. but it seemed a bit coherent todayso this is what I offered the following in response.
FKK or Freikörperkultur is pretty big in many parts of Germany. If your hanging out in nature by lake, sea, trail, forest or field and its generally accepted that you can and probably should decide to take your clothes off.
A lot of clothes seem to be designed to provoke voyeuristic fascination by transmitting the possibility of broken taboos while generally allowing the taboo coverage to stand (except of course for intrepid celebrity photographers who live and die from catching fleeting wardrobe malfunctions).
But the taboos themselves seem to be what makes people eroticize/exoticize/fetishize the body so much. In europe you go to the beach and you see naked people in their variegated glory. You may or may not find some of them fascinating, but the important thing is that you can watch them and create memories of how people live in their bodies. In the US you are hard pressed to see the human body unless you are having a sexual encounter, paying for a sexual encounter, or paying to watch an objectified sexual encounter. Is it any wonder therefore that many people can't think of several areas of the body without it immediately conjuring up memories/fantasies/anxieties about sexual objectification.
Anyway, no real answers here. I havent done the research to offer up anything more than just anecdotes.
Personally I understand the body as a magnificent vehicle for our senses to interact with the world around us. Whether that interaction is a sharing of consciousness, creating, nurturing, growing, intimacy, grieving, expressing, receiving, adapting or any of the beautiful things that people do with their bodies, I feel it is much healthier to understand the role the entire human form plays in all of these actions, than thinking that parts of our bodies only exist to share, sell or trade sex.
