GoldbergBlog

I Like The Way You’re Put Together

I was reading A.J. Jacobs The Year of Living Biblically and as he attempts to follow the rules of the Bible as strictly as possible, he comes upon the problem of lust. As all good books do (and this one is great), it got me thinking: Yes, our culture is inundated with sexual imagery. But at the same time, am I not allowed to appreciate it? Jacobs, attempting to follow his massively researched understanding of the Bible, tries to avoid sexual imagery whenever possible (which is especially difficult considering his job at Esquire magazine) and I just don’t understand this kind of sexual avoidance. I don’t understand why lust is necessarily a bad thing.

I do think it’s a bad thing when, in the presence of someone you find sexually attractive, you don’t look at them, but you leer at them (concept totally stolen from ViolentAcres). You’re not appreciating what turns you on about them but rather how what turns you on about them serves your sexual needs. And in the presence of a flesh and blood human being, when so much more than their looks is available for you to discover, you’re really just shortchanging yourself and the other person by only considering the physical.

But there is something to be said for the physical. I frequent sites that showcase naked women and I stopped feeling creepy about it when I realized that I wasn’t filing this material way in a spank bank but that I could appreciate and discern what was attractive about these women. They were models and they were naked and as a modern, mature adult, I didn’t giggle or slobber but decided which ones were too plastic and which ones had that most crucial element in their photos: personality. My heart beats faster at the faintest glimpse that this woman isn’t a statue but a three-dimensional person who will forever hold her secrets within the photo (these photos tend not to be the of the sexually explicit variety; sexually explicit photographs usually don’t have a lot of secrets).

Now you’re probably already gagging and enraged because I’ve referred to women as “ones”. I’ve sexually objectified them. To that I simply respond, “You’re absolutely right.” When it comes to photographs, everything is an object. The photographer and the subject can go to great lengths to create a sense of personality, but it’s incredibly difficult to have a conversation with a photo. When looking at a photo, it’s difficult to understand the depth of a model’s hopes, dreams, likes, and dislike and why she’s not just a still life. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a woman’s physical beauty. Not define her by it or reduce her solely to it, but to simply appreciate it. And women can feel the same way towards an image of an attractive man. However, they probably don’t because while men initially respond to the physical, women are more stimulated by the mental/emotional. That’s why you can see some schlub on the arm of a beautiful woman but a woman considered to be generally unattractive will stay at home eating a pint of Haggen-Dazs and watching the Lifetime network (and hey, the only thing wrong with that is the Lifetime network; crappy TV isn’t going to make you feel any better).

So I don’t understand why we feel like we have to turn away. I don’t understand why fundamentalist religions like Judaism and Islam feel the need to hide the beauty of their women. Does it make the men feel weak? Does it make the women feel powerful? Or does constant sexual repression require the need for further repression lest a drop of sexuality leads to a torrent of uncontrollable lust? I don’t get it. And I don’t think anyone should feel ashamed for appreciating the beauty of anyone or anything. Whether you go overboard and become a slobbering monkey is entirely dependent on the individual, not the model.

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