A conundrum of our times
I watch music videos that are soft porn, hear lyrics that are violent, and see Instagram feeds of young people posing almost naked, imagining that once upon a time lived between the covers of Playboy magazine.
I do want to see the shame of the human body and sex be removed from the straight jacket of religious and cultural taboo.
I also hold sex as sacred. An intimate sharing of beauty and pleasure.
Not an itch to be scratched and forgotten. Human collision without any connection.
I have always been comfortable with nudity. However, when that comes with highly provocative poses I do wonder what the intent is behind this. The intent appears to be to attract attention. Yet if that attention comes from someone undesirable to the attention seeker, that can easily become harassment. (But if the attention seeker desires the person giving the attention that is not harassment?)
In our super sensitive politically correct world, as we attempt to recalibrate from a history of exploitation of women, I wonder how we have managed to make women the always victim. Able to blame men in entirety, never accepting some level of their own responsibility.
Unrequested touch is never appropriate. Saying no to that is possible. And the no should be definitive and clear, getting the response needed. This applies to all humans.
If women put themselves into the public sphere of social media in such a provocative and suggestive way, if they act and talk with overt sexual innuendo, do they take any responsibility for being approached by people in the same way?
This conundrum has become so fraught with political correctness that the conversation is almost impossible to have, particularly in the workplace. And men are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. It’s a minefield.
So instead we tiptoe around the issue, and the behaviour of ‘all rights and no responsibilities’ just gets more entrenched.
To almost every issue we might ask the question…how have we contributed to this situation? Our true power lies not in blaming the other, for the moment we do that we reduce ourselves to victims, but rather to how we can learn from this and change.
Rights and responsibilities are a pair. The more rights, the greater the responsibility. Yet this is not the world we live in.
I remain in this conundrum, seeking to understand the younger generation, yet only seeing a deep desire for genuine love, genuine connection and full acceptance poorly expressed in the attention-seeking economy.
Photo taken February 23rd 2021
