potificate intr.v.
1. to express opinions or judgments in a dogmatic way.
2. to administer the office of a pontiff.
it's a good word.
other favorite words of the week: exhort, piranha
To continue my discussion on male and female nudity, which I hadn't planned to do, I found this really great article on CNN.com that says a lot of what I was trying to say in my last entry. Strange stuff, nudity, but stranger is people's reaction to it. Elayne (now how can you take yourself seriously with a name like "Elayne") Rapping says here that the current attitudes toward male and female nudity have been "a constant in Western culture for centuries." I think in the Renaissance artists were pretty enamoured with the male body, but then at some point (around Rubens) the female body began to be popular as well. I don't know where Rapping is getting all these ideas of fully clothed men. There aren't many, really. Film is the main place where there seems to be more female than male nudity. I think this probably is because female nudity is more aesthetically pleasing than male nudity when it is photographed. Realism has never seemed to go in much for nudity until the photograph (okay, I'm kind of BSing here, feel free to correct me). I know there is probably some kind of sexism here, but I don't think that's the main issue.
Another thing this article points out that I really agree with is the fact that "Americans are much more comfortable with extreme violence in their movies than any sexuality." The probable fact that most American parents prefer their children to watch violence over sex is really rather shocking. For most of my life, at least as long as I've been thinking about this, I've unknowingly held to the attitude that Bertolucci expresses here that "after all, an orgasm is better than a bomb." Okay, sure, nudity doesn't have to be everywhere, but I think Americans need to be less prudish here, because their prudishness, at this point, is only helping everyone to feel more perverted about something that should be healthy and good. And, I know the subject is getting old, but I just want to say that a country that has to make such a big deal over a woman's breast on national television really needs to lighten up.
I received Perelandra mysteriously in the mail the other day so now I'm going to put up the quote I made an allusion to in my post of February 2:
"What Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. One the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity."
Last weekend I watched Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and I now find myself rather confused about movie ratings. I wouldn't think a movie with a woman sitting naked in a bathtub as well as a man kissing multiple topless women would be rated PG.
I went to the MPAA website to try to figure this out, but of course they were very unhelpful. They wouldn't even tell me why they consider the naked male body to be graphic enough to merit an "NC-17" rating. I had thought about this a little bit before, just noticing that full frontal female nudity is almost common compared to full frontal male nudity. In fact, the only movie I could think of with full frontal male nudity was A Room with a View. Then I noticed the other day that it is not rated. Okay, well, the MPAA website didn't say that it rated all movies with male full frontal nudity as NC-17 (no, it wasn't even that helpful), but I'm pretty sure.
Going to a lot of an art museums as a child, I noticed that while the naked male body was very popular with the ancient artists, while the naked female body is usually only partially seen. This latter observation makes me wonder why our society (in the form of the MPAA) has decided that male nudity is worse than female nudity. This seems to go against many cultural ideas, some of which Josiah was discussing the other day on his blog.
Oh, and for anyone who cares, I didn't enjoy Barry Lyndon much. The main actor had an appallingly bad Irish accent and there were very scary children in the film. I could go into more detail, but I've been over this too many times as it is. There was, however, a nice view of Dunrobin Castle. Dunrobin is in Sutherland in Scotland and not too far from where I used to live. It's like a family icon.
I got sidetracked this morning in my search for the facts on what really happened at last night's halftime show (I didn't watch it and I heard upsetting stories). I actually went to Fox News, something I never, ever, ever do. I'm glad I went today, though, because I found this article. This made my life so much happier. I can't believe Fox almost didn't print it. Read the first article, then read the story about the pet fish. I love news like this.
One thing that is really beginning to irritate me again is the feminine generic pronoun. I first encountered this phenomenon in the book Covenant sent me to read before I came here, The Idea of a Christian College. The author was continuously refering to the student as "she" and this got really annoying. Now the idea of a generic pronoun is to give the idea of a neutral gender. When people use the feminine pronoun, she, as generic it catches me off guard. The feminine pronouns have definate female connotations, while the masculine, he, is traditionally used as generic and makes far more sense. Next thing they'll be trying to tell us that "womankind" means the same thing as "mankind" and they'll be re-editing Bambi to talk about "Woman." Although, and this is an idea that I am still in the midst of contemplating. I think that "Man" isn't as masculine as most people take it for. This is not an original idea. I was reading Madeleine L'Engle's The Irrational Season over Christmas and in the first chapter she writes, "One of the most pusillanimous things we of the female sex have done throughout the centuries is to have allowed the male sex to assume that mankind is masculine. It is not. It takes both male and female to make the image of God." She talks about how the word "man" has gone so far it is probably not redeemable. A long time ago the familiar word for male was wer, like in werwolf (and the familiar for female was wif). L'Engle goes on to say that it is "the more thoughtless members of the female sex who do not realize that they are not more free by insisting on falling down personholes, but are blindly relinquishing their true identity." C. S. Lewis dwells on the difference between masculine and feminine and male and female at the end of Perelandra, which I sadly do not own and cannot quote, but those who have read it probably know the part I mean. Lewis also talks about this in That Hideous Strength, now that I think about it. There is a great freedom in the diversity of male and female.