On the heels of my last post on modesty, this article was just published on Focus on the Family's entertainment review site (yes, I am unafraid to say that I enjoy a lot of FOTF's stuff, even if I don't agree with all of it). It's about society's ever-changing perspective on nudity, and whether it's too risque for entertainment. Should it be censored on TV and Youtube? Or is it time to stop being prudes about our bodies already?
Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that nudity is not inherently a bad thing; we were born naked, after all. To me, the issue isn't nudity itself, but the exploitation of it. The definition of what qualifies as "art" is rather subjective, but somehow I don't think that's Justin Timberlake's intent. Exploiting nudity means taking away one's personhood, and reducing him or her to a sex object. Art, on the other hand, says "I am more than a pair of breasts." There is an exponential difference between celebrating the body and cheapening it. I have to consider Timberlake's new music video to fall into the latter category, but I'm open to any arguments suggesting otherwise.
One of the comments on the article fell into the timeless Christian stereotype: the one that suggests our bodies are somehow shameful. "Adam and Eve covered up after they ate the fruit," this person says. Yes, they did...but my amateur attempt at biblical exegesis suggests that Adam and Eve covered up because they were vulnerable, not because they were naked. Physical vulnerability is connected to emotional vulnerability: if we were never insecure, if we never struggled with lust, if we never had a tendency to take something intended for beauty and wreck it for selfish purposes, there would never be anything wrong with nakedness.
I think American culture's biggest problem with nudity is not knowing how to appreciate and value it well. Our bodies were made for more than just sex. At the same time, Youtube should maintain its policy that one must be 18 or older to view certain videos, and movies should still keep their ratings in check. For the safety of those who don't know how to see the human body as anything but a means to a self-gratifying end.
Nudity in art pleases the eye of the viewer; beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? Not all art works of painting are of nudes, there are still life paintings, landscapes, portraits, all the variations of what can be pictured through the eye of the artist.
ReplyDeleteA music video has sound, pictures, subject matter all viewed through the team that produced it. Nudity in movies and music videos is subjected to the ratings system which uses an "objective" criteria for applying the letter rating (such a 'G' or 'PG') and then there are the television ratings, only since, I think, 1998, with the digital broadcast signal change. Ask anyone old enough to remember. Plausibly the question is not of censorship of nudity on TV and in media, but REGULATION of nudity....why regulate nudity?....Signed, Second Reader