The world naked bike ride is coming up this weekend in Portland, Oregon, and no matter if you like or not, at least 10,000 human beings will be tearing through through public streets with their goodies spinning and bouncing freely.
Some locals, however, feel that this is a sign we are all going to hell.
And Portland local, Jake Zimmerman, is starting a campaign to save us all, to SavePortlandFromHell.
To do so, he ask that you, “Join us and hundreds of Christian volunteers, as we take Exodus 28:42 to the streets. Armed with bed sheets and teamed up in two’s, we’ll minister to the community by covering the bike-streakers as they peddle through our neighborhoods.”
That’s right, they will carry bedsheets along the ride so that people can’t see nudity. Because as any good Christian knows, you should be ashamed of how you were born. God wants you to wear name-brand clothing that hides how he made you in his image.
(note: Jake Zimmerman does not appear to really be a Christian, nor does he actually seem offended. This satire mostly just looks like a good way to get a bunch of people carrying bedsheets around the city in silliness.)
Okay, so this parody isn’t normally the type of story I’d cover here at CA. However, it got me thinking about rape and the dangers of this continued type of thought in our society.
You see, growing up in Ohio I was surrounded by many a Christian, many of whom were raised in the fire-and-brimstone, fear-mongering kind-of-way you can only find in places where sports mean more than respecting women and people of color. And these fire-and-brimstone Christians were intriguing to me, because they were often the most wild and crazy bastards at every party. And even from that young, niave age I wondered why?
But I quickly realized it’s for the same reason kids do most things: because someone told them not to. You see, when you tell someone they can’t do something, that thing becomes mysterious, alluring, exciting. Even worse, when you deprive someone of a thing, then they’ll over-indulge when they get the chance. Hence the reason these devoutly-raised peers of mine turned into coked-up stock-brokers once they got freedom. They knew access to such a mysterious and alluring lifestyle was rare for them, and it made them want to immerse themselves in it as much as possible while they had the chance.
At a more psychological level, their shadows were lashing out. Carl Jung often spoke upon the idea of repression, the idea of rejecting parts of oneself that we felt society didn’t accept and placing them in what he called the shadow; in other words, we ignore what we truly feel so others will like us. This has always been the ultimate bargaining chip of religion: do as I say, regardless of what you think, or you’re exiled from your family, your friends, and your community; proving that if there was one thing religions did know, it was that fear was the greatest weapon they had.
But repression is a dangerous thing. Though you may ignore it with your ego, your subconscious is building and building and building with this energy that it wants to act upon but that you refuse to let out. And overtime, eventually, the shadow reacts, overwhelming the ego with it’s lust for attention, and thus bad decisions ensue as your rational mind is dwarfed by the strength of years of repression.
This is the likely trigger for all those saintly priest who molested small boys. After years and years and years of repressing sexual energy, eventually that energy takes over the rational mind of the priest and they channel that sexual energy onto the easiest target they can find. This, my friends, is what we call rape. And it is brought upon by the repression of sex, by the need of conservatives to censor our eyes from the beauty of our naked forms and the truly divine connection that comes from two bodies resonating with each other in the throes of mindless, here-and-now passion.
And just like religions knew fear was their most powerful weapon, they also knew women were their most dangerous threat. And why is this? Well, beyond the fact that women make men weak in the knees, women are the protectors of life, the givers of life, they are the chalice which without the blade would have no purpose. Hell, Christian’s didn’t even let Mother Mary consent; they just stuck the holy spirit inside of her. And in time where namesakes and birthrights were everything, to let woman hold the power over sex meant giving them control over society.
[quote_center]making [women] inferior by making the ultimate power of the universe a male who made another male who was followed by 12 males as they passed on their names to only the males…[/quote_center]
And because the early christians were hungry for the patriarchy, they simply could not let this happen. They couldn’t let woman rule. So they set out to steal the power from woman by demonizing them as temptresses and whores, making them inferior by making the ultimate power of the universe a male who made another male who was followed by 12 males as they passed on their names to only the males…
But I digress…
The point I’m trying to arrive at here is that what the christians and conservatives have done is set a ridiculous precedent that taught us to fear sex, mostly in attempt to belittle the power woman had to undermine their phallic fairytale. And in doing so, these C&Cs created a culture that made sex mysterious, alluring, and exciting. And also unbelievably repressed.
Now we have a society of men who were raised to be conquerors, told to “win”(whatever the fuck that means) in order to be successful, told to take woman and power however and whenever they wanted it. Told that a true man bathes in wealth then fucks princesses.
And then at the same time, that same society hides from the man the very thing he is most naturally desires: the female body.
(Note: I’m not mentioning homosexuality here because, in my personal experiences, I don’t run into many–if any–homosexuals who are afraid of a little nudity).
But men can’t see this thing they want to conquer, because we clothed the body, made it sinful to show skin, made sex taboo. And now we have these testorone-fueled meatheads who think theyre vikings who have the right to conquer woman like they’re the inferior prizes their christian and conservative morals have raised them to believe. Luckily, thanks to some progress in our society, woman are still legally given the right to say no. But this only furthers the men’s repressed sexual energy they feel towards women, women who they were told were supposed to be easy to conquer if they were true men.
And luckily, overtime, most men eventually realize that woman are in fact NOT objects to be conquered, but are (not surprisingly) human beings to be respected and treated as equals, and that those old myths we were raised on are, arguably, quite stupid.
But some men, some men keep repressing, keep seeing clothing as a guard to the naked form that somehow belongs to them.
[quote_center]But would they feel like they were missing out on so much if we hadn’t put the female figure on a pedestal by hiding it? [/quote_center]
But would they feel like they were missing out on so much if we hadn’t put the female figure on a pedestal by hiding it? Perhaps these men who don’t feel like they’re getting lucky wouldn’t be bothered as much if we all walked around naked, for there wouldn’t be the big mystery, the intrigue, the excitement, the sense that they were missing out on a hidden treasure. But we’ve censored it so much that it’s like my fire-and-brimstone friends and their party habits: once they get a chance to do they thing they’re told they can’t do, they go all out. And our sexually-repressed men are the same.
[quote_center]So when you tell a woman “she’s asking for it,” what you really should be doing is thanking her for having the courage to turn against a culture that has made her an object rather than a human. [/quote_center]
So when you tell a woman “she’s asking for it,” what you really should be doing is thanking her for having the courage to turn against a culture that has made her an object rather than a human. If anything, we should promote nudity to take away it’s mystery. Hell, if nothing else we should do it so we can all see what REAL bodies look like and put an end to the body shaming that is the result of this unrealistic, photoshop-heavy culture that is brainwashing the minds of our youth. Using, guess what, FEAR to make people believe they need to buy products that will make them look like made-up woman on that magazine cover.
So, steps to reduce rape?…
*shrug*
Who really knows? But if I’m going to guess, I’d say a good first step would be to stop demonizing sex in the first place. Let’s make sex commonplace, make it fun to talk about, make nudity acceptable. And then you know will likely happen? Those few crazy bastards who flip out and perform one of the most desecrated acts a human can perform will likely feel less inclined to “discover” what’s beneath the clothing, less inclined to conquer the hidden objects of their natural desire. And you know why?–Because for some odd reason it’s human nature that we are less excited about things that are easily attainable, and if we make sex less taboo, then more men will likely be less insecure about it, feel less of a need to get it without consent.
Empower women, empower sex, empower nudity, and I bet we’ll see men finally realize they were not born to conquer.