I take for my theme today, an ancient and insidious evil – one that has spread its suppurating tentacles down from the misty dawn of time and planted its seeds of chaos deep in every one of us! The destruction and pain it has caused is incalculable – the rot to the soul is profound. The ignoring and blind eyes turned to it, unending and eternal. But there is no such a phrase as ‘too late’ – so take heart and repent ye now before you also are consumed in the burning fires. Cast off the mantle of one of earth’s true sins. Your ills can also be cured and you also can spread yourself open to the light . . .
People can get in trouble for a lot of things – and some are quite destructive. You kill someone – you get arrested and jailed. I suppose people occasionally deserve that. You assault or rape someone with violence – you also get arrested. Yes yes – though I would prefer a clause in the legal system that permits the victim to retaliate with appropriate cathartic violence, if desired. But when you can be arrested, fined or jailed for just being what we are – people, homo sapiens, the most confused animal on the planet – then something must be very wrong. At the end of the day, that’s what prudery, censorship and the so called ‘decency’ laws are attacking. There’s no two ways about that. People can argue until they are blue in the face, but when you follow the arguments to their conclusion, you are left with nothing at all. Blank. A great big echoing empty space. Instead this is all about humanity’s self-consciousness and its tendency to want to hide what we actually are – including those things called our bodies. Yes – we do have them. You do to – somewhere under those clothes and that makeup you have something that is original and very real. But that reality is always the last thing you show – as though that reality is somehow the guilty secret and everything you have piled on top is somehow the truth.
Which is strange, because reality seems to me to be worth far more than any number of illusions.
Ok – it ain’t a glamorous thing to protest about. It ain’t a big and grand activist’s stamping ground. It ain’t like torture, oppression or absence of free speech, cruelty to animals, saving the planet or banning big brother – things that create a big glow and glitter inside you accompanied by mild feelings of turn-on and self-righteousness. In comparison to the big, howled about wrongs of the world, it is almost ignored. People who say “hey, surely all people should be treated the same regardless of which part of this chaotic planet they come from” – they are applauded. Of course they should be. But people who insist that all parts of the body should be treated equally and that people should shrug off the immature self-spun pointless chains of prudery, censorship, self-consciousness etc. are just shrugged off as crackpots – as no doubt I already have been. Long ago. Perhaps that is because this particular oppression doesn’t lead to mangled corpses and genocide. Because it doesn’t . . . hurt people. Insult people . . . Because it . . . doesn’t really harm people . . . err . . . because it is not really important . . .
Errrr – yes? The fact that all of the above are wrong seems to have been overlooked.
There are two manifestations of this. Both unhealthy – both causing misery, insulting everybody, sometimes causing persecution and, together, are almost universal.
Firstly, there is the self-consciousness bourn though your lack of self-worth. The feeling that your body is too inferior to be displayed. These days, it may be that we are being taught to be more afraid of ourselves than ever before in this way. In this day when we are surrounded by impossible ideals in our imagery and also by an ever more hyper-precise health-consciousness regime which hammers it home continually that if you are not quite the willowy, glittery example of that same impossible ideal then you are defective and basically worthless. You may hate yourself for not being it. You also want the people you interact with to be it. You develop impossible ideals for people you want to meet/screw/work with. Ordinary people are suddenly not quite good enough any more. Then you think to yourself “well – if I was perhaps a few pounds lighter, then I would be able to feel confident about my body. Or, if I can just get rid of that floppy bit there then fine, THEN I could put on a swimsuit or try a bit of nude sunbathing.
The other is even more distressing and, frankly, more irrational. The other side is the people who may well be nicely self-confident. Who don’t mind baring most in a swimsuit (eg.) – are reasonably comfortable with their bodies, but then stumble over the problem that there are still CERTAIN BITS that they cant expose. This one drives me nuts! The notion that some parts of the body are somehow different than others – that they are ‘bad’ – that we basically wish we didn’t have them – seems so self-evidently ludicrous that I shouldn’t even have to say it here. Just as no one should really have to say that hey, people from [insert location of choice] are not actually fundamentally inferior to people from [insert second location of choice]. And yet it is one of the most universal things there is. Probably more universal than the racism I am using as a comparison. It is a self-perpetuating myth as well because the more people think it exists, the more it actually exists and therefore the more you will upset people if you go against it, the more attention you will draw, and the more guts you will need to face down that attention.
In reality of course, the two usually co-exist to varying degrees.
The arguments against all this prudery and shame are classic and have been around for a long time. We are all just the same under our clothes – we are what we are. Even the Americans can’t alter that. So why must that be hidden? Why the hell do these silly things called clothes make such a difference to us poor souls – and, far worse, why do some people feel the need to inflict this on everyone else and the world in general? Just what is WRONG with what we are underneath? It makes no sense. We all seem to know it makes no sense. I imagine a fairly high majority of people reading this – younger people especially – will have at least agreed with this point. But even so, somehow the general mass of humanity with all its momentum pays no attention. Our intelligence is still insulted by stories of people arrested for going naked in their garden (sued by a neighbour I think) – arrested for organising naked art stunts (dear old Spencer Tunik) or for just playing around and having fun (the nude hiker). All of which just serve to make a mockery of the justice system and insult people who are victims of real trouble.
(Id LOVE to have been the judge in that naked neighbor case! I would award the plaintiff psychological help and the defendant a weekend holiday on the Adriatic!)
I have tried to isolate some of the basic laws that operate in this area. This is what I came up with –
1 – It is the act of hiding something that most draws attention and interest to that something. To spell out: You try to hide or crush your sexuality/ what you are – instantly you just attract attention to it. Which is probably unwelcome as you were trying to squash it in the first place. *warning* *warning* Vicious cycle ahead and I have met enough of the paranoid, bitter man/woman-hating people this produces to last me a lifetime, thankyou and get out!
2 – It is the act of prudery and censorship itself that creates the dirt that it thinks it is censoring:? nothing is dirtier than the act of censoring it. *warning* *warning* SECOND vicious cycle ahead. More self-perpetuating myths fluttering over the horizon with ragged wings. Dirt doesn’t exist. Obscene doesn’t exist. All are false constructs of the mind – like pus produced to heal a wound.
3 – Ergo: There are no absolutes that stand up to investigation. None. Zero. All reasons for the existence of prudery turn out to be purely constructed illusions with no real foundation – and no positive advantages either. A self-replicating pointlessness. Isn’t it marvellous.
It seems to me to be a major psychological flaw of modern life (hell, life from any period, probably) how terrified people are of themselves and what they are – and, secondarily, what the people around them are. To my mind, this whole area contributes to the vast culture of hiding from the truth and from reality, hiding behind labels and wrappings and the ‘personal fortress’ syndrome – all of which are basically nasty and disabling and reducing phenomena. Leading directly to the ‘devilment’ of the body, leaving vast numbers of people terrified of themselves and of other people – of people’s hidden and mysterious sexuality – of what they stand for beneath their clothes. I am also sure it contributes to the negative aspects of our lecherous and flesh-crazed society. Obsession anyone? Sex obsession? The grand old annoyance of lechery? Small-minded cock/cunt-centred dopes who just want to get inside a man’s/woman’s pants to find out what is there!! Maybe if the body wasn’t such a stifled thing then people would take it all for grated more and look for other things beyond glimpses and teases and lecherous obsessions. Then we would treat each other with more respect and sheer good sense and pretty little bluebirds would flutter round our heads singing ‘tweet’, filled with the joy of life.
[Insert angelic-sounding violin music here] Wouldn’t it be rather nice to live in a world where we aren’t forced to be ashamed of what we are? Where a vast culture of hiding isn’t flung in our faces, ruining our relationships? Our interactions with people? Our own personalities? Wouldn’t it be nice to be free?
I am not suggesting it is the complete cause of all the worlds problems. It is just one small contributing part to the general psychological degeneration of humanity. It might not even be a cause exactly – it might be more of a symptom for all i know. But that does not vindicate it! Does not make it any less worth getting cross about. Likewise, I am not suggesting a ban on clothes. I am not suggesting that we all get naked and fill the streets in a massive ‘happening’ (well ok, I would LOVE it if we all got naked and filled the streets in a massive happening – wouldn’t that be great and healthy and uplifting and blah blah? But no one would pay any attention if I said that! I have to keep my arguments moderate and not follow them through to their conclusion in order to get them through your thick skulls!!) – but I am suggesting that the people who enforce these ridiculous notions, who would go nuts if someone walked through Camden Town market naked or persecute neighbours who like to sunbathe should be locked naked in a small room, filled with icy water spray and then barraged with peashooters until they cant walk. Then, most importantly of all, be fucking IGNORED for the dumb brain-dead primitive morons they are!!! *pant* pant* *simmer*
*ahem* Humanity has accomplished a lot in a way – but it is all rather let down by stupid failings like this.
Remember that ridiculous ‘wardrobe malfunction’ incident in the US? (Where else?) That was blown up until it shared media ranking with small wars and foreign earthquakes. I mean – correct me if I am missing something here but – well – was that incident not just about the stupidest thing to have come along in what someone for a joke has called the civilised world for a very long time? But I can see it now. All across America, thousands of men, women and children sitting up in unison and crying in shock “Oh my god – what IS that thing?” Then, when the men have finished consulting the encyclopaedia and the women have come out of the cupboard and been calmed down with a drink – that’s when the phone lines are jammed . . .
That’s not what happened . . . but you can bet your rosy pink arse that that is what the collective US consciousness WISHED had happened. Thought SHOULD have happened.
[Insert strident protest song music here] So yes – stand up, people. Stand up ya’ lazy buggers and cast off this oppression and this dark and smothering sin that we are all rooted in. Throw off the chains and stride forward to something new and clean – and your bodies shall be washed in sunlight and sprinkled by dew. You shall feel the world again as it is supposed to be felt and you will be at one with nature. You will learn respect and dignity. This pulpit-thumping tone is of course, pure satire and an attempt to hide from general view that I myself am just as incapable of following these ideas as you are. I too am a hopeless shrinking coward, lost in a mess of ruined self-worth and embarrassment. So why the hell am I bothering. The doom is total and eternal. But anyway, yes. Throw off the chains, people. Rise up and overthrow. Truth always has a power if people care to wield it and together we can see falsehood trampled and bleeding in the dust where it should be. And then all hail a new era of simplicity and truth . . .
Or not . . .
Who’s the hell’s going to listen to this ranting?
I’m going to bed.
