Naked Lunch Anyone?

I just caught today's Globe article entitled "Naked Lunch," after a friend called to alert me to the piece. I find it curious, our fascination and repulsion around nudity. I think it's dangerous and, much like our conditioned preference towards packaged meat products, we'll soon find ourselves totally removed from a physical connection with our humanity. So fickle is our trained aesthetic that we can only tolerate to look at naked babies and 'perfect' youths. Not only are we the only species who drinks another species milk; we are also the only species who holds shame about our physical appearance.

To paraphrase Dan Savage from a column a while ago, (in which a reader complained about the mess and smell of anal sex), "sex smells." Add to that people smell and our bodies are hysterical works of physical art in which their beauty truly lies in the eyes of the beholder. And speaking of our eyes - they are so enslaved to our egos that they merely observe and report rather than distinguish what they see. It is our egos which place us above, below or against another person - it is our egos which see another body as attractive, repulsive, out of context, offensive, or alluring. It is our egos which project their jumbled, fragmented stories outward and make us see another naked individual as a moral confrontation.

If you want to understand the human body, yours, for what it truly is - spend some time naked in front of others of your gender. Nakedness is the great evener - in nakedness we are truly equal - which is why we come into this world naked and some of us exit our world naked.