Nudity and Censorship

Picture by Chunie.

 Hi everyone.  I am LDS, I grew up in a culture where nudity always equaled sex.  Predominately.  Thus, when my father went to Italy, he came home with three miniature sculptures.  These sculptures were the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Michelangelo's David, and a sculpture of Diana.  In my early teenaged years, I perved on the sculpture of Diana.   And I'd have this problem for ten years, because nudity equaled sex in my eyes.  Only when I was twenty-four did I break the cycle.  So, what's the point about this?  We live in a culture where nudity is both reviled and admired.  All for the wrong reasons.

How did we get here?

Easy, I'll have to take you back about two hundred years. A certain sculpture was unearthed in Pompeii.  It's below.  It's a sculpture of Pan having sex with a nanny goat.

Naples National Archaeological Museum, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

SCANDAL!  Many people thought that it was wrong, and classical art was depicting Pan having sex.  With a nanny goat by all things!  Children must not see this!  So they locked it away, censored it, to protect the children.  What happened is irrational to say the least.  But it did happen.  Why?  Because Victorian society believed that the body must be hidden.  That nudity equaled sex, and it's something that happened in private.  Behind closed doors.  And that was the day that Pornography was invented.

Now, don't get me wrong, the Victorians did a lot for us.  There were a lot of invention and incentive that went on.  However, the culture repressed anything that had to do with nudity. In fact, they had clothes for grand pianos, lest the legs of pianos would be perved on. Yes, Victorian culture was repressive. And the effects of such echoed down through the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. Irrational attitudes about the human body will persist.  And Madison Avenue exploits them.

Censorship

The response is to censor the body. And how that has become a problem. In a Nation where Freedom of the Press is enshrined with our Constitution, the response to censorship is overwhelming.  To this day, the body had been censored in America.  Although now this has been challenged where the nude body of a woman is in every fashion magazine. And the nude body of a man is viewed with revile.  Naked women sell, that's for sure.  Both to men and women.  However, as we get more Authoritarian, we have censored nudity every where, since nudity equals sex in our culture.  No where do I see this as apparent as in Roleplaying Games.

In the Beginning . . .

I was there when the OGL came out.  And it was a Wild West as far as RPGs came out.  Of course, Wizards of the Coast put out the STL guide for products using the d20 logo.  But there was products that featured nudity.  Female nudity, of course, but nudity was there.  Then Wizards played the censorship game and one of their employees published a book called The Book of Erotic Fantasy that dealt with sex in the game.

Still the ban was there, and if you published a book you better not have nudity in the art or have the license revoked.  It's to protect the children.  And Thomas Jefferson advocated that there won't be censorship in a free society.

Pornography and Censorship

I know you who are parents that are reading this, that you want your children to be protected.  But Pornography depends on two things to thrive: censorship and shame.  Censorship of nudity, because the body must be hidden -- especially the penis of the male.  Shame, because through shame, pornography must thrive.  Can we as a culture get rid of Pornography?

The answer is a resounding yes!  But it would take some changes to our culture. One must come to accept that our fear and anger at the naked human body is irrational.  Both male and female.  We must throw off this irrationality towards our own bodies.  We must look at the naked human body as good, not evil.  Read Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land.  Go to nude beaches, and leave behind your swimsuit.  Take your kids with you, and show them pieces of art from the Renaissance.  Teach them the body is good, and natural.  Be nude around your children.  Fight against censorship.  Show your children that the nude body is a good body to look at.