Thin Skins

Oy friggin vey! I’m growing tired of the media’s exploitation-obsession with celebrity women in bikini’s or less in almost every publication’s headlines of late.

Okay. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t tout “Kim Kardashian In a Bikini!” (horrors!) or fill-in-the-blank-faced-blank in a bikini, but it’s out there and is becoming redundant.

I’d feel and write/say the same sentiment were I to see “George Clooney Goes Shirtless” (again, fill-in-the-blank name) several times a week as a recurring headline. To me, it’s boring. Vapid. So what? Someone famous is half-clothed. As if that’s a new concept or view.

Yes, some of these people have fabulous bodies. A few (or more than a few) will pose quasi-nude on a magazine cover, too. Others will have nude or somewhat nude scenes in a film…without using a body double. Fans will salivate, others may virtually hate. Either way, it’s not what’s under the skin but what is the depth and texture of ripples and size of the nipples.

So, why is the so-called “everyone” to care about these pictures? Oh, that’s right. We are a sexualized race – even Osama bin Laden had a porn stash in his “compound.” You can hide a woman’s face with a veil, throw her in jail (or slap her around) if she takes it off in certain countries and cultures, but the underlying gist of both the in-your-face or don’t-show-your-face sexual fascination or assassination of women’s bodies is shockingly alive and unwell in 2011.

Why have I used the word “unwell”? Well, if people didn’t make such a big deal out of seeing parts of the body of either sex because from birth onward no stigma had been attached to unveiling the natural skin we all wear and who should or should not see this or that part without a blush or hush, then no one would care, thus repression wouldn’t rule our thinking or mental dinking (as it were).
 
What is my point beyond flogging the afore-mentioned increasingly obnoxious headlines? Once more, I return to religion as the primary culprit. (Again, I do believe in a Higher Power – just not The One of traditional history’s Babel Tower.)

The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis of the Christian bible’s Old Testament directly states that when those two little rebels began frolicking in the Garden of Eden after Eve (the woman, of course), fell into temptation by eating a forbidden fruit (!), they were suddenly, inexplicably “ashamed” of their genitalia.

What? Did something rise to the surface that hadn’t done so before? Cause for pause? And, if so, what was the problem with that if one is at least part animal, eh? Wasn’t the point of creating humans to “go forth and multiply”?

All right, then. Do tell me why the supposed former “innocents” would suddenly feel an immediate need to cover their “stuff” if someone/thing had not already planted the idea that looking upon one another in the most natural way was akin to bad garden manners? Isn’t the very concept of this part of the biblical story of how the human race began a bit strange if you think about it beyond literal terms?

Ah, you “see” where I have been heading of late: Religion. The root of all decency and inconsistency with regard to moral standards, values. And thus, therefore, evermore (and said the Raven, “Nevermore”) – the complexity of sorting-out what lies beneath the world’s defeat, yet without basic guidelines, from the varying religions of the world, would the human race be here – today – at all?

Therein lies the usual rub: what to keep and what to scrub?