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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels July 23, 2004 I'll Shut Up - Right After This John Darling Emerging from the cheesecake A funny thing happened on the way to the city council meeting the other night. I'm interviewing a couple dozen people who are about to take off their clothes on the city hall lawn to protest the council's new nudity ban. I'm munching plums with them and listening to this young woman talk very thoughtfully about shrinking civil liberties and about how the only legitimate nudity in our society is the cheesy kind used to sell stuff. What does that do to women? It makes them crazy. It makes them dislike and be ashamed of their bodies. Why? Because the glossy cheesecake we see in every slot in the magazine rack in the Safeway checkout line is a sleek, perfect 10, no cottage cheese thighs, no dimpled butts, no pulling of gravity on protuberances. What they see in the magazine rack is "not me." I'm not that. I'm not a babe. I couldn't be used to sell a 20-year-old Geo Metro. Guess I'll go home and, in my unacknowledged grief, stuff down these groceries I'm buying. What does it do to men? Well, take my reaction. It plays me like a viola. My interview subject is wearing clothes, although I know that's about to change. She's 25. The midriff shows. The cleavage moves in and out of view in her low-cut top. The eye follows it, entranced. The mind imagines what she must look like in all her naked glory. How many man hours have been spent in this pursuit? Conservatively, it must be in the low hundreds of thousands. If these lovely shapes, shades, textures are used in an ad, will I watch that ad? Yes, I will. It's called conditioning. Just like the depressed woman at the magazine rack, I can't control my reactions, even after decades of reading, group discussions and seminars on automatic, imprinted behaviors. I have to catch myself and say, wake up, man. This is how it works. We're conditioned to want what we don't have, to always be reaching, struggling and strategizing to get it. But we never get there. It's this sense of disconnection from source, supply, fulfillment (bred in disconnection from the tribe we evolved in) that's at the heart of civilization and which makes it go round. Without isolated, disempowered, self-rejecting individuals, capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism and patriarchy don't work. But then, something happens. She takes off her clothes. And guess what happens? Nothing. She keeps on talking. I glance over her body and within 10 seconds at most, the great mystery, the allure, the sell, the distance between us - it all evaporates. All her "naughty parts" become supremely not naughty or any more interesting than a foot or forearm. The game halts. As Whitman wrote ... this is the soul. That's the great puzzle about nudity, so feared, hated even. The body is not a big deal. It's only a big deal as we dress it in class, flash and mystery - which is kind of fun sometimes - and tease ourselves with its distance, unattainability and questions of our worthiness for it. Or, much worse, if we make laws that say bad things will happen if its generative organs get loose in the sunlight. Bad things won't happen. It's like making rules that Johnny can't chew gum in class, pick his nose, play doctor or look at girlie Web sites. What's the first thing Johnny is going to do? He's going to check it out and learn that nothing bad happens - except he feels inexplicably guilty, not only now but for the rest of his life. How do we handle guilt? By stuffing it. That's the whole meaning of shame - it's that naughty, no-no shadowland we mustn't go to. Result: depression, alcoholism, religiosity and other external fixes. My favorite interview is Susan, 58, a clothed passerby. She danced naked in the '60s musical "Hair." I did too, in a theater in downtown Ashland, now in the nude-free zone. But you have to keep doing it or the conditioning closes over and makes you afraid. She calls the law sad, nasty and underhanded, part of the "death machine" growing in our culture. Again, the awareness, she says, of how the ban tunes her into the feeling her body "isn't good enough." We gaze on the playful, picnicking crowd, tossing frisbees with their naked kids in the warm, slanting sunset. Smiling drivers (mostly) honk and wave. Whitman, my favorite poet, said it. These partying protesters are singing the body and the reason it's electric is not because it's sexy - though it is that. It's because, right here on Main Street, they're showing us what we're really afraid of - the soul. John Darling is an Ashland writer and counselor. 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