Pornography A Product Of Puritan Principles

By: Josh Blodgett

Posted: 10/24/07

Many have seen National Geographic Magazine and thus are well-accustomed to the nude photographs of native people so often found amidst its pages. Some were even exposed to this publication in grammar school. Yet modern culture has separated National Geographic from Playboy, and drawn a line between anthropology and pornography. It is disingenuous to allow one publication to be educational reading material in an elementary school classroom, while the other is to be concealed behind plastic wrapping or regulated it to the shelves of an adult bookstore. Modern culture has perverted the naked body.

When children are very young, you will often see them running around without any clothing. Not only do they play in the nude, but they do so without fear of reproach. As the brother of a 5-year-old sister, I have experienced this first-hand on many occasions. In high school when friends came to visit my house, they would be both humored and embarrassed as my baby sister would remove her clothes and jump around from room to room. They would make remarks such as "Your sister is crazy," or, "I can't believe she runs around without any clothes on." Yet I thought to myself that my sister was not crazy. She is only doing what comes naturally - which is to be without clothing. When humans are born, they do not come out of their mothers fully dressed in a cute outfit from Babies R' Us. They are taught to clothe themselves through enculturation and even then, many still fight this societal pressure.

In modern culture, society tells its children that it is not acceptable to show a large portion of their bodies. As they grow older, societal mores quickly shape these children's thinking. They learn that to be naked is something one should share with a romantic partner in only the most intimate of settings. For example, strict fundamentalist Muslim tradition women are forbidden to reveal any part of their body with exception to their eyes. Any woman found to be in violation of this code is subject to severe punishment. A less extreme example can be drawn from Hasidic Judaism in which women are required to completely hide their hair with a hat, or else wear a wig. This is because in their tradition only a woman's husband is allowed to see her real hair.

Modern cultures have forgotten that the invention of clothing arose from the necessity for humans to protect themselves from harsh environmental conditions. It is not clear when - or why - clothing began to be perceived as a means of hiding one's body, rather than a source of protection. In some cultures the prejudice against nudity may have arisen by way of religion, in which case reversing it would be extremely difficult. All that can be said with absolute certainty is that modern cultures have made the naked body into something shameful and provocative.

It is this prejudice that gives nude photography such a forbidden allure. The profitability of the entire pornographic industry rests upon the common modern belief that the naked body is something to hide. Humans want what they are told they cannot have. Humans want to do what they are told they cannot do. They want to see what they are told we cannot see. But this is not the case with nude photos in a National Geographic magazine, which society is taught to perceive as an exploration of world culture. People are taught to see them as educational, and they learn to see these depictions as an exception to the rule because they are set apart from ourselves, because the beings in the pictures do not live in our modern world. To modern humans, these people are relics of our past. These native people allegedly show modern people what they have "evolved" from, and they live with minimal or no clothing because they do not know any better. The Western ideology is that it is modern man's duty to aid these natives in their evolution, and it is a dangerous ideology at best. It reinforces in our youth the conception that Western culture is somehow better than that of the native peoples viewed in an anthropological magazine. Somewhere in translation, clothing as protection is lost, and Westerners adopt the fallacy that because modern humans wear clothing, clothing must be better than nudity. This common belief is an example of the ethnocentrism that has always been, and continues to be, the cause of countless problems faced by humanity. Furthermore, it is strong evidence that humans have only scratched the surface in our ongoing evolution.

Josh Blodgett is a 5th-semester English and business double major. He can be reached at Joshua.Blodgett@UConn.edu.