Real Nudity

WAY, way back when it was considered risqué to even show part of a stocking... kind of a fun thought experiment to think about social media back then and people sending in ankle pictures. Now, sending pictures of penises over text, SnapChat, and Twitter appears to be some bizarre norm.

My, how far we have fallen.

I am really disturbed that no secular biology or psychology bothers to uphold the greatness of the human person for its intrinsic value - the value something holds simply for existing, focusing rather ruthlessly on extrinsic value - the value we place on a thing. It is no surprise, then, that the human person has lost intrinsic value and we now focus on the value we place on the body.

More accurately, says the person reading as I type, the value we place on specific parts of the body.

May 19 was the first National Send Nudes Day basically meaning that yesterday was the day that social media moderators got their fill of teen and young adult genitals. For those unaware, SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook, other social media networks, internet service providers, cell phone providers, and telecommunications service providers all log what goes through their feeds. Doesn't take a great stretch of logic to figure out that these images were logged and organized by an employee that we only hope is nice enough not to take a few home for their own enjoyment.

And don't kid yourself, parents. It is youth and young adults between 15 and 21 that make up a solid 80% of these images. Even though it is pictures of themselves they could be charged with distributing child pornography and the person asking, even if underage, is also guilty of multiple criminal offenses.

Which begs the question, "What the hell is wrong with us?" There is a blatant hypocrisy, I find, when it comes to media and the body in that these always focus on women and this is a 5000 year old problem starting with the first recorded contraceptives (concoctions placed in the woman's vagina in Egypt and China) to genital mutilation (Africa and South America) to pessaries (Western Europe) and then pornography and various forms of sexual contact electronically took over with men blackmailing, coercing, or (less often than the other two) kindly asking for women to bare themselves in pixels.

Empowerment through obedience?

We understand ourselves first and foremost through our bodies. Psychologists have been saying this for decades. Understanding ourselves as male or female physically is our first glance at who we can and will be later in life. Simple fact is that (A) the gender binary is both necessary and sufficient for early development and (B) there are complimentary differences between the sexes that must be respected in order to achieve sex and gender equality. I will submit that men have disrespected the differences for centuries if today's neo-feminists submit that their ideal form of equality and education is neither.

Our bodies, however, are not a sufficient understanding of our self. Funny how early religious and non-religious philosophers called out the separation of body and self (soul/spirit) as borderline heretical because they knew that body and self are intricately connected. What happens to one happens effects the other regardless of the physicality of one and the immaterialism of the other.

This post is getting long and I think I covered the main points so I can get to where I am going.