Nudity needs to become the new normal
Normalizing and desexualizing a woman's body can't happen if we never see one.
Put it away. Take it out. Cover it up. Show me more.
When it comes to a woman’s body, and how much of it she should be able to reveal, the hypocrisy is endless. The prevailing attitude in our patriarchal, consumer-driven society seems to be that if a woman’s body is within the very narrow boundaries of what is considered to be beautiful and sexy, and is on display for a man’s enjoyment, or to sell a product, it is acceptable. But if a woman is revealing a part of her body to feed a child, or simply because she is proud of that body and she wants to reveal it, and if that body is not defined by our parameters of beauty and attractiveness, well, then it’s indecent and ugly.
But of course the hypocrisy does not end there: reveal too much and look too sexy and you could be blamed for your own rape. Cover yourself too completely and you will be accused of being manipulated and oppressed.
It would be great to never have to have this debate again; for women to not be constantly objectified and scrutinized; for the human body to not be so degraded as to have its worth only be judged in degrees of attraction and perfection. And there is a way we can help this happen. In fact there, are two ways:
Normalize and desensitize. We need more nudity, not less.
But by more nudity, I don’t just mean more perfection, more sanitization, more photoshopped, starving, plastic models. The sight of a breast should neither offend us nor rile us up into a sexualized frenzy. Enjoy them privately with your consensual sexual partner if you’d like, but there is really no reason why a glance at a breast outside of that situation should reduce women to little more than a sexual commodity, to be judged and dehumanized. Nor should we assume that men are incapable of seeing women beyond that scope.
Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO hit, Girls, is harshly criticized for her character’s excessive nudity on the show. The problem, of course, is not the peddling of flesh – it’s a safe bet that there is no more or less nudity on Girls than on most other HBO programs. The problem is that Lena Dunham’s body does not conform to the ridiculous standards of perfection that we prefer our celebrities live up to. The unapologetic Dunham shrugs off her detractors time and time again, and has said, “It’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive, I think, and I totally get it. If you are not into me, that’s your problem.”
Perhaps in time the critics will lay off Dunham, and perhaps we’ll stop decreeing a woman’s naked body to either perfect or ugly. Perhaps the strange dance we North Americans do between being highly-sexualized yet completely repressed could be tempered, and we could begin to see the female body – all bodies – for what they really are, regardless of size, shape or use: a vessel to provide us with the means of growing, nurturing and feeding ourselves and our offspring. Pretty sexy, huh?
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