Sunday, December 6, 2009

No one looks as good naked as they should. The really skinny girls are full of bones. The old women are saggy. Everyone else has odd areas of accumulated fat.

Except then I thought about most of the people I've seen naked in an intimate setting and I have found most of their bodies to look better naked than anyone should ever look.

Thinking about bodies always makes me lonely.

6 comments:

Colin Welch said...

When I look at people objectively, I think they probably won't look good naked. When one is naked with people, sexual arousal is usually at play, which helps blind us a bit. What's odd here is that when I do see people naked, and I'm not in a sexual frame of mind, I can see their beauty, where before, clothed, I filled in the worst possible substitutions.

Tasha said...

I think the gym makes me conscious about bodies in all the worst ways.

I agree with the part about beauty, but only with male bodies. I usually assume female bodies will look better then they do, but I think this is only because of cultural perceptions of what the naked female body is supposed to look like and misconceptions about the nature of skin.

Carolyn said...

Ditto Tasha. Whenever I see women naked in movies I am surprised- I almost always figure they'll be slimmer and perkier than they actually are.

Clearly I'm a bad feminist.

Julia said...

I think bras make us think women will be perkier than they often are. Plus, women's bodies are so so different from each other, it is nearly impossible to predict what, for example, a woman's nipples will look like--because there are so many options...yet we probably generally all imagine an idealized nipple.

Regardless, I think many many people are beautiful naked and I like skin.

Colin Welch said...

When I was younger (read: before I was sexual), I thought everyone's nipples were the same, because guy's nipples are all very similar. That was an interesting discovery. =P

Tasha said...

I find childhood misconceptions of the body and sex to be really interesting.

For example: I used to think that sex was where the man just lay on top of the woman and I couldn't figure out how she didn't get crushed.