Ulff Lehmann's Blog: Blogging Lot - Posts Tagged "nudity"

or stop being stuck in your puritanical shit ways!

I admit, sometimes I do take shit too seriously... right now a meme containing abysmal prose, obviously written by a man from a woman's perspective... she marvels at her nipples, that sort of shit.

Having been raised by a feminist mother, there are very few ways that can make me go into a angry rage this easily.

Objectifying women is, in my opinion, a symptom of our christianized, patriarchal society. In the middle ages, women were there to breed heirs and be adored on their pedestal, provided they were noble; common women were there to breed offspring and do a lot of shitty work in and around the house without the added adoration on a pedestal.

Granted it is a simplified interpretation, and women in antiquity were not much better off.

Or were they?

For starters there were a bunch of female deities, some pretty much equal to the greatest gods around. Zeus could do a lot of pompously stupid things outside his home, but once he hung the ole lightning bolts on the wall above the fireplace, Hera was his boss. Women ran the household, and while there certainly were exceptions, a man would not run about with muddy shoes in his home, at least not more than once.

Come christianity and all this is fucked up because of a bunch of old dudes deciding what is right and proper, come to think of it, they still do... in certain pre-enlightened societies here, now.

This will not be a rant concerning religion, but a lot of our preconceptions are tied to in which region we were raised. Whether its the courtly bard professing his love to the lady of the court via poetry or the rapper asking a woman to shake her ass... style has changed, certainly, but in the end either song is directed at the woman on the pedestal. In movies, more often than not, we see women being the damsels in distress, barely able to hold their own in rush hour London. In essence it's another case of courtly love, the pedestal, and the idiot crooning his heroics, only done by ILM.

We see hinted sex-scenes, from which, after presumably a night of boinking, the man pushes the covers away to stand up already wearing his boxers, and the woman stands up, already wearing her bra and panties and yet still clinging to the sheet to cover her already covered lady parts, her hair is perfect, her make up too, as if sex was something that is effort and motionless. Once again we glean the courtly vision of love, from afar and not too direct.

Why not direct? Sure, it's cool to say one wants to caress her quivering lips, leaving everything else up to the mind of the listener and how far to the ... lips they are ready to go. But the reason why we have such an unnatural relationship with our bodies in the first place is religion. I don't need to point out whatever passages in the bible or that in Victorian England table cloth was used to prevent men from seeing naked legs (why men would get aroused by seeing a stiff wooden appendage in the first place is beyond me, but okay). People do strange shit because of religion.

Even now we read that some practitioners of faith view women as unclean due to the original sin, Eve eating an apple and all that nonsense. (I shan't apologize for making fun of this crap... for it is shit, and anyone clinging to this thing as truth, ask yourself this, if Adam and Eve were the first humans, and Eve was basically a transsexual clone of Adam, and they only had two sons... how the fuck did they people the Earth without us all looking like Deliverance rejects?!)

So, women bad, but sadly man can't do without them, procreation without female involvement is either gay sex or masturbation, stuff religions also have a problem with, unless it's with children. So we worship women, put them on pedestals, like Mary the virgin... women were worshiped from afar, rarely being treated as human much less equal. Sure, there are exceptions, but that we have to point out these exceptions at all, that women are still treated as dolls we can modify with photoshop or word to fit our male ideals, that is the abomination and far too few people, far too few men actually point it out.

Centuries of patriarchal indoctrination, paired with lusting from afar, paired with dream images of the perfect woman, without ever fucking asking women what they want, is what has created a society of men incapable of handling female nudity without getting excited and a society of women that gets trampled on because of the shit some goat fuckers invented millennia ago!

If you write people, write people dammit! Stop jerking off to the titties of your imagined characters, stop worshiping from afar, and treat your female characters with the same respect you treat your male characters with!

I'd be remiss to not point out the covers of romance novels and shit like Twilight which do the reverse, putting males on pedestals because women need strong protectors... fuck this shit. Women, and men, need partners, equals. In literature and in life!

Religion has fucked us up, nudity is seen as wicked, and women are seen as objects... and while one could argue to reflect that, in historical fiction that actually is the case, it should have nothing to do with fantasy and science fiction. If you get giddy just thinking about two people having sex, give yourself a helping hand, then wash up and write without this infantile stupidity religion has beat into you.

Oh, and look at yourself, naked, get used to it, otherwise you'll be lending a hand to yourself more often than not!