Onanists take note: I've got links to pix this time!
Yesterday, I hypothesized a tenuous link between naked bicyclists in a Seattle parade last month and political consciousness. I thought I was being off-the-wall and flip. It was supposed to be a puff piece about vicarious thrills. Links in comments to that diary entry showed me that nudity with a political message is a more well-established, world-wide phenomenon than I had thought.
If you just want to see over 500 pictures of nude bicyclists, skaters and solstice parade marchers, without any political clutter, just go here...
http://www.photos-naturistes.fr/...
...and click through 26 pages of thumbnails for "Fremont Summer Solstice d'été 2008". It's a French site, but you're not there for the prose, are you? The guys who took these shots just wanted to record images of beautiful, naked women, and didn't appear to give a rat's ass about politics. Still, if you look closely, you will see a political statement here and there.
Now that we're reduced to those of you who might want to do a bit more than take the matter in hand and come to grips with your own sexuality, let's take a look at some pix of naked people with a message. Open the link in another tab or browser instance and keep reading here on this page.
http://www.nudismlife.com/...
This site has a lot of ads. Check out "berkeley nude protest 2007" and "nude against war" for starters. (Oh, Berkeley, Berkeley, Berkeley! How I miss you! Cal, my beloved alma mater is as controversial as ever!)
You may notice that the protesting women are not generally as attractive by conventional standards as those in the the solstice parade. However, these women are all beautiful to me because I love them as sincerely as I agree with their political stand. They are using their bodies to cut through the execrable distractions of media hype and government propaganda to get to the truth: War is evil. Their nakedness underscores the total honesty and genuineness of their message.
I accept and applaud their position instinctively, without hesitation, because I worship them. They are goddesses, the objects of adoration and veneration in the cult of life. My subconscious, non-intellectual, lizard brain beckons me to them so that we might join together and defeat the forces of evil and death. Their procreative and nurturing power makes me a joyous and willing thrall to their cause. How could I possibly spurn their siren's song?
Before you bridle at my straight male bias and point out that there are at least as many naked men in these pictures, take note. I, and my lesbian sisters respond to what speaks to us at the deepest, least contrived level of our minds. Straight women and gay men might have similar notions when looking at the naked men in the protest pictures. I don't know. You tell me. I've been in a lot of locker rooms and don't pay much attention to naked men. If I saw naked women as often I might be less obsessed by them. Comment as you will, but please consider the issue I'm desperately trying to raise: How much does nudity and sexuality affect a political message?
Socio-political reform is easily conflated with erotic desire, especially those who are not shackled by cultural and religious inhibition. Bodily freedom is emblematic of political freedom. I got an incredible rush viewing a larger than life sized painting in the Louvre by Jacques Louis David of a bare-breasted woman carrying the tricolor and leading French revolutionaries at a barricade. It got me hot. I would have whipped it out and flogged it right there if I could have gotten away with it.
I stumbled onto the nexus between sex and politics earlier, while a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960's. I discovered early during that academic sojourn that radical political chicks were much more likely to have sex with me than more serious, academically-oriented women. (It was OK to say "chick" then, you know.) Not only that, but the closer to being a Marxist-Leninist you could appear, the more you could get laid. At least two girlfriends dumped me for the purported reason that I wasn't "committed enough to the movement". In truth, I wasn't, but if they were enthusiastic participants in the initial passionate coupling solely because they were under the delusion that our ardent shtupping was some sort of revolutionary act, then they were as delusional as I was deceitful.
Alas, they saw through my guise. I was a disingenuous poseur, a shallow, fainthearted phony who raised a clenched fist at rallies and chanted slogans, but would cleverly avoid arrest by watching for police in riot gear and slyly withdraw before they closed ranks and charged,
encircling the unwary in an impenetrable cordon. The hard-core activists and those lacking in my ghetto-bred "street smarts" were beaten with truncheons, placed under arrest and dragged off to jail. I would escape, occasionally running full tilt with exploding, swirling canisters of tear gas dancing around my feet, all the way home to my humble student hovel. Ah, those were the days!
Again, I'm overcome by nostalgia and am in danger of losing focus on my own topic. I started on this thread of speculation yesterday by noting that topical political messages were rampant in the midst of a lot of naked and half-clad people in a parade. My thesis is that nudity and implied sexuality amplify political messages.
This concept was also injected into my consciousness at Cal. The big epiphany was delivered while viewing a really horrid film, Jean-Luc Godard's See You At Mao. The famous French "new wave" director had just renounced bourgeois commercial movie making and joined a radical, Maoist-oriented communist collective. This was his first film after he associated himself with that band of nut ball ideologues. The entire movie was a relentless, non-stop communist rant. The narrator droned on with the standard Marxist-Leninist claptrap to the point that it became almost funny. It would have been if it had been less boring.
At one point, though, I sat up and started paying attention. The visual image cut to a loop, barely a few seconds long, that was repeated again and again for what seemed like several minutes. A beautiful young woman, totally nude, ascended a staircase. My gaze was riveted to her meaty, Gallic buttocks and the full roundness of her slightly drooping breasts. The shot was mostly from the back and I can't recall if we were even shown a clear frontal shot. Whether we were or not is immaterial. I was transfixed by the real or imagined image of the supple curve of her belly above the luxuriant, unshorn delta of Venus. The film was in black and white, so her hair appeared to be jet black. I imagined, or briefly glimpsed, an untrimmed, thick, matted thatch of black pubic hair. (Women especially in Europe did not generally trim, let alone shave off their pubic hair in the 1960's. A lot of them had hairy armpits and legs as well.) All the while, as I longed to see more of the naked woman, the off-camera voice droned on about capitalist oppressors and the inevitable uprising of the proletariat.
That one scene is the only part of the film I remember now, 40 years later. If there had been no naked woman, I might not have remembered the title, what it was about or even having seen it. Walking out of the theater, I realized that Godard had consciously used the woman's nude body to get my attention and listen to his commie rant. It worked. I never joined the party, but I have to admit that I never again dismissed Marxist dialectic out of hand. After that incident, it was not just hyperbolic rot, but a viable political philosophy that I had to ponder.
Has sex or nudity ever influenced your political thought?