It was an unusually warm day for this time of year in my city, so I decided to pay a visit to a well known 'clothing optional' beach. It's a bit of a party beach too, where people of all ages and gender bare all indiscriminately. The culture of a beach like this is really a bit overwhelming for me. I couldn't put my finger on it earlier but there was just too much of something at that beach for me to feel right. But it wasn't too much skin - although there was plenty of that.

I loved the line, "a jumbled Picasso of bellybuttons", in the article. And I think it's great that people get out there for some good beach fun, no matter what. It isn't gross. But when ALL the clothes come off, I find there is this weird mental switch that happens. The vibe turns from being one about the body to one about the brain. Without the clothing, our similar humanity becomes so real, that all there is left to share is inside our own mind.

I take so much issue with this article. It's not only wrong, it reminds me heavily of Christian doctrine and reads like a close-minded bronze age review of the body, but he understands the complexities of the body. It's a willing attempt to ignore all that occurs because of a phobia-- instead of recognizing the vast amount of calculations and intricacies of the body's functions, much like computers, he chooses to see it as a jumbled, squishy, gushing and pulsating mess.

First of all, I believe it's fairly accepted in science that you, as yourself, your personality, your being, is intrinsically linked between your body and mind. Everything does not simply occur in the brain, so if you were to have a "brain transplant" from one body to another, you would not simply be as you are now in another body. There's so much we simply do not understand about the mind and consciousness. Thankfully our knowledge grows daily.

I suppose I'm angry (is angry a good word? I suppose not) about this piece because it just reads so much like what we've been hearing for hundreds of years. The body is shameful. The body is gross. The body needs to be hidden. Humans should be heard, not seen. I can't believe I'm going to quote Family Guy, but there was a scene that was parodying American Beauty, where Peter's entranced by the plastic bag like in the film, and the shot jumps to a traditional avatar of a God figure who yells down to him, "A PLASTIC BAG?! DO YOU REALIZE HOW GODDAMN COMPLEX YOUR CIRCULATORY SYSTEM IS?!"

The human body is a self servicing machine. Eveything runs, maintains, lubricates, grows, expands on its own. We have cells in our body that find foreign objects, determine if they are viruses, and create goddamn specialized systems to deactivate the foreign bodies. Our bones create within them, from marrow, cells capable of passing oxygen to every cell throw a series of thousands of miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries through a single engine in the center of our chest. If something literally breaks, our bodies are capable of repairing it. The skin itself is a massive organ protecting you from all external factors that could possibly enter you. We find that young stem cells are capable of forming to any kind of cell to cure... fuck, everything. They can fix virtually anything in your body. This all works in your sleep. Nothing stops. It's absolutely astounding. The mind itself will probably never be fully understood, and it's still a computer a magnitude of orders more complex and efficient that any human made computer today, but to write off the body as a seperate, alien entity is downright ignorant, and dangerous. I don't want to go into the psychological side of it, the body positive and love your body side, because that's a whole other argument that needs to be had, but purely from the scientific side of it like the article reads. The body is a godamn testament to what millions of years of evolution have achieved, and we're certainly not at any endgame.

I wanted to like it, and I can definitely identify with the weirdness of how easily the physical overwhelms the mental. But all that insistence that the body is shameful and repulsive read like some overwrought attempt at seeming intellectual. Is anyone really ashamed of their X-rays?