Repressiveness taken to a whole new level
The other day I was channel surfing and ran across some medical show where a surgeon was doing breast reconstruction and commenting on some surgical technique. What struck me was that the breasts were blurred out in that way that television stations do to protect themselves from contravening obscenity laws. It made me wonder why they bothered airing the show at all - if the show is about a topic that can’t be shown, is there a point in showing it?
Of course, there are other, more fundamental questions, suc has why are breasts considered obscene at all? What is it that’s so terrible about showing the body that television stations could get fined for it? What have we become, as a society, that on the one hand, we obsess about the body (exalting extremely thin models, fashion that shows lots of the body) but at the same time, fetishing the body (blurring body parts, etc.)?
A number of years ago, someone asked of an orthodox rabbi whether it was OK to look upon nudity, and the rabbi’s answer was fabulous: it depends on the purpose. His take was that as long as the purpose was noble - which I would argue range from studying for medical school, bathing your kids, making out with your sweetie, and walking along a nudist beach - there’s no problem with it.
When the body is fetishized, then the decisions made around how to control the fetishes become irrational. When we see this in other cultures, we see it clearly because it seems strange to us. For example, in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, there is a passage describing how a young man claimed that a small, exposed patch of skin so inflamed his passion that he reported it, and the young woman was thrown in jail. Covering up is supposed to be the only remedy to such “indecency.” In North American culture, the cover-up is done with pixels on the screen. Either way, the idea is that the body is indecent. Not any act of the body, but the body itself.
Looking at this from another perspective. Let’s agree that the Judeo-Christian modesty continuum has become the global standard, and sex organs are considered private and always kept under wraps. Never mind that the breast is technically not sex organs, I won’t get into that argument right now - let’s just include them in the modesty taboo for the moment. Now what happens if someone decides that foot fetishes mean that feet should always remain covered? And then what happens if someone else decides that hands are really, really sexy and should remain covered? How far away are we from being covered by a burka? So what makes us different from the people that we consider “different?”
A friend told me that when he was a kid - so this must have been about 35 years ago - a woman chastized his mother for having him and his brother in the women’s changing room with her, and she replied to her children, “Don’t pay attention to her. She’s Canadian.” Meaning, she’s a prude. I never thought of us being prudish, and never really thought of Americans being prudes, either - well, except for the “banned in Boston” part, but that was connected to having a Puritan heritage, and that was supposed to be relatively raree - so when did slide start down the slippery slope? When did North America develop this hysteria over the physical bodies that God gave us? Do we really want to pass this type of shame and hysteria along to the next generations? I know I don’t. If I’m going to blur anything, it’s scenes of violence; I’ll leave the body intact.