bumming and carved chicken mentality

Having pondered (or maybe ranted is a better word) on the exhibitionism of spirit - in the form of gut spilling of detail and trivia - I sorta naturally moved to another kind of exhibitionism that is perhaps a counterpart to it?

I am thinking of exhibitionism of body. Well have you noticed how flesh is the in thing - well actually the out thing. I might be a bit oldfashioned but I can't help flinching with a shudder when I see someone's (male or female) jeans hanging merely by a thread of imagination with their derriere and its cleavage visible. WHY would I want to see that? "Excuse me...its a free world but I don't really want to see your bum". That's what freedom is, is it?

And then there's the matter of the cleavage of the upper regions. Ever notice that bending is now a precarious business...I hold my breath thinking something that shouldn't fall out will.

I am quite gobsmacked by the amount of bare flesh paraded around. "Why" is the question that haunts me. Why do we want to reveal all? Don't get me wrong I am not a prude and prism person but somehow I have this distinct unease with what I have now come to label exhibitionism. Be it spilling your guts, your derriere or your cleavage for general view and consumption - I find that worrying.

Yeah ok. So there is this ancient dynamic of the attraction of the sexes, and the physical does mattter (bit unrealistic to think it doesn't). But let's also face it - we have lost a sense of owning our bodies, or for that matter letting someone who has the right to it own it. Where does the intimacy of sex come in - if the body you relate to is one that hundreds have eyeballed, looked, fantasised about. Yeah sure it makes you feel sexy but I think there is a high degree of fall out in the loss of "privacy" in the body.

As a Christian, there is almost a holiness to the intimacy of sex. It's such a profound mystery this thing we call sex. For instance we are the only living creatures for whom sex actually has something more than procreation involved...its for pleasure, for love, for intimacy. We don't mate during the reproductive cycle like the rest of the animal kingdom, we take pleasure in the body of a mate. But now we seem to be detiorating and becoming like a herd of animals where sex is flaunted and acquired at random, and part of that flaunting is letting everyone see your "goods".

We are now living in an era of "carved chicken mentality". Have you realised that we rarely buy a whole chicken - or deal with the messy bits. Everything is cleared, cleaned, and packed into little packages of "thighs" or "wings" or "breasts". A whole chicken is a bit of a nuisance...we only want to savour the delicacy of the breasts.

Well sex and bodies have become like that. I can safely presume that most men and women now eye one another in terms of body parts. "She has gorgeous breasts" or "he has sexy shoulders" or "she has fantastic legs" or "he has a delightful bum". We don't really look at "people" anymore...we look at bodies. We are TUNED to look first at the bodies, and often that is all we will see. Our hormones are too inflamed to look beyond. And obviously this leads to dissatisfaction for exhibitionism doesn't help the situation...it's basically saying "here is a body part - sample it". Here is a breast or a thing or a bum.

I have nothing against nakedness. But I have a deep distrust of a social trend that is reducing sexuality to body parts, and reducing people to displayed flesh. Something is wrong. Maybe it's time we respected each other as people and stopped promoting the "body culture". Our bodies are PART of who we are...and that is something that is slowly and surely being forgotten.

Exhibition of body or soul. Scary