We still have this prudish, puritanical culture, but we also have so little exposure to a diversity of bodies. Bodies are beautiful and great and compelling.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.
Our cultural discussion of fat bodies and how we clothe them has nothing to do with health concerns, the obesity epidemic, or the comfort of fat people. It has everything to do with what we expect from women, what we've been told by the fashion industry, and the value we place on 'perfect' bodies.
I think the human body is beautiful, and I don't really have a huge problem in dealing with it, but it's the context, the environment and what I feel about it that that makes the difference for me.
We are, at almost every point of our day, immersed in cultural diversity: faces, clothes, smells, attitudes, values, traditions, behaviours, beliefs, rituals.
Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual.
I don't like how women's bodies are Page 3 news. I just don't think that's big news. Women's bodies are women's bodies, and that's that. And I love to see beautiful - the female form in great art and great photography.
But we're still in somewhat a Puritanical society in a lot of ways.
And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.
Bodies are becoming our personal mission to tame, extend and perfect.
We only have one body, and you have to show respect for it.