Thoughts on Cultural Constructs

I have always thought that our society has too many hang-ups about sex and the naked body. With pornography flourishing, the naked body had become taboo and something that shouldn't be seen, which is just ridiculous. Everyone male has the same parts just as every female has the same parts so what the big worry here. This ridiculousness might have came to a high point when a TV network was fined millions of dollars for obscenity because of Janet Jackson's nipple showing a split second during a Superbowl performance. Who has never seen a nipple before and why is this obscene?

Although aware of these things that are natural to all humans beings, sex and anatomy, and knowing that some unnaturally think that these things are crude and shouldn’t be seen or discussed I have never been able to articulate our society’s hang-ups in a way that Michel Foucault does in “The History of Sexuality.” Foucault bases his ideas around constructivism. He says that sexuality and sexual conduct is not a natural category. Rather these ideas have been constructed by a particular culture and given their meaning. Just as the words “homosexuality” and “coming out of the closet” have recently been constructed to describe the behaviors of a particular group of people many ideas about sexuality have been constructed by our culture.

So nipples, as seen by tribes that live in the jungle and do not wear clothes, is just part of everyday life. It is American culture that has made sex forbidden and taboo. Just as many hold hatred towards homosexual behavior because it is a preference different than theirs, this too is just a construct of our society. I really wish our society could progress a little faster and try to get away from the ideas stemming from the Victorian ages that talking about sex and seeing nipples is forbidden.