I Couldn’t Believe My Own Eyes

I guess it’s no rare event when you see a movie or TV show and think, “Well that wouldn’t happen in real life.” I guess that’s often okay. But then again, and especially for kids, certain movies and TV shows become permanent fixtures in your head. Some of them inevitably become significant data in your gut feeling for what normal people do, think, or believe. Now that’s scary.

Okay, I just introduced a topic which could fill a book, but my focus today is to sound off on some short clips of three TV shows and a movie. In these clips, children about 10 to 12 years old are discussing or viewing  or acting out material that, for me, would have been very sexually charged. In all these cases, the material is used as a throwaway comedy bit. That is, the presence of these sexually-charged materials or behaviors has zero impact beyond the short scene that contains each of them. It’s that sort of denial of personhood in others that helped to empower my sexual fantasies and enjoyment of pornography. (There, I tied this into the overall theme of this blog site! Moving on…)

Undressing Nudity, Part Three

In the first two parts of this essay, I explored how seeing nudity and being seen nude are sometimes quite appropriate. Yet, I’ve hung onto my childish thinking that to be seen naked is like being cut open and eyes upon you are the blood draining from your body. It’s that life-changing and earth-shattering. In this essay, I’m trying to unpack my thinking and rewire my brain to make the mere state of nudity less of a hot button. That should help me put pornography and sexual fantasy in their proper perspectives.

As an adolescent, I was the boy least likely to have sexual intercourse. If I’d learned nothing else from Sunday School, I was pretty sure I was not allowed to go all the way with a girl. So, one of my fantasies to masturbate to was that I was stripped and forced into a small room with a girl whom my classmates used as the butt of ugly jokes. Of course, she was naked, too. In my thinking, male and female naked in a room together necessarily meant there would be sexual intercourse. It was a given and I’d have no choice about it. I didn’t have to imagine threats from my captors or weapons aimed at my head. Boys weren’t supposed to see vaginas. Girls weren’t supposed to see penises. If such a thing happens (a boner is a given), we have liftoff.

Undressing Nudity, Part Two

Continuing from Part One…

In the years before my 11th birthday, I was very comfortable with my understanding of nudity: it’s a bad thing to be and a bad thing to see. When I was nine-turning-ten, my family drove to Mexico City for a convention. We we were with a large group of RVers and had a government guide. In the little villages along the way, I saw poverty conditions I hadn’t witnessed before or since. I saw half-naked kids (the lower half!). I know I saw at least one squatting in the street to take a dump. You don’t forget that. When I entered seventh grade, nudity became a part of my life, but only because donning jockstraps for PE and showering afterward in a square, partionless room was forced upon me. I coped with it as well as anyone else seemed to, but I almost daily got a boner thinking about how embarrassing it was going to be. A year later, I saw Superman: The Movie and witnessed the unconscionable: voluntary nudity. Now I read that Superman was about some visitor from a distant planet capable of saving Earth from disaster and such, but at the time it was the “movie with the naked boy in it.” I grant you he was only four (or nearly four), but the young Superman standing in the crater that his escape pod had made was wearing only a smile. That floored me. Screenwriter, parents, director, producer, theater owner, and I don’t know who else all decided that it was okay to put a penis on the movie screen. I saw no justification for it.