Editorial: No harm in showing skin

The human body is a work of art — just one that, for many Americans, merits… The human body is a work of art — just one that, for many Americans, merits censorship.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that a woman at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., attacked a Gauguin painting titled “Two Tahitian Women.” The painting features two women with uncovered breasts standing side by side.

As foolish as it sounds, this act of body-bashing was no isolated incident: In late February, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that a bare-chested Venus on a Minneapolis Institute of Art billboard was spraypainted over with red clothing. The goddess’s new uniform was accompanied by the word “Brrr!”

Paul Rosenblatt, a family social science professor at the University of Minnesota, noted in the article that such an act isn’t entirely inexplicable.

“I can really understand why there are plenty of people who, from their own cultural perspective, would really be uncomfortable,” Rosenblatt said.

This “cultural perspective” — favoring modesty at all costs — is, of course, hardly an anomaly in a mainstream society that takes its roots from Puritanism: many Americans seem wary to approve risque clothing and even less likely to tolerate full-frontal nudity. In some situations, this is understandable — who would want constant exposure to naked body images? — but sometimes, we think this reticence goes a little far.

We understand it’s natural for Americans to feel uncomfortable around naked bodies. For most of our lives, we’re conditioned to dress modestly, keep contact to a minimum and keep our eyes to ourselves.

Unfortunately, this conditioning often renders us unable to cope with natural images of the body. The key to this to remedying this, we think, is addressing the subject of human sexuality early and tactfully. Otherwise, taste wars will persist.

Take the case of Shady Grove Elementary School in Henrico, Va., for example. On career day, a plastic surgeon visited a group of fourth-graders, as he did every year, the town’s local NBC affiliate reports. His student-friendly activity? Allowing the students to feel breast implants. Predictably, some parents became irate and took to Facebook to vent their frustration.

“That should have been discussed before presenting to the children!!” one parent wrote.

Regardless of what you think of the price or the safety of implants placed in the body, the object in itself —just sitting on display in a classroom — isn’t harmful.

Nevertheless, we agree with the parent: A dialogue with preteens is long overdue. That way, we think, relatively innocuous depictions of every-day objects that just happen to have sexual implications — be they paintings or implants — won’t engender a fierce backlash.

In any case, we at The Pitt News are perfectly comfortable with the human body: Just look at our most recent Sex Edition.