You are in a movie, buttered popcorn in your lap, kernels stuck between your teeth. The movie you are seeing seems playful and innocent at first. The guy and the girl on screen begin to strip down together. Your face becomes rosy and flushed. You feel ashamed, nervous, restless. It continues for some time—the moans and groans, the heavy breathing. Your palms are sweaty and you concentrate extra hard on your popcorn, trying not to make eye contact with the charged, hot, steamy bodies in front of you. You feel anxious. And why is that?
For a progressive country like the United States, it’s a shame that it has continually sheltered the public from sex in media and the arts. Sex is never on TV and is censored across many social media platforms. It is something we fear, something we come to believe is evil and wrong. It is because of this attitude towards sex that when we encounter sex in our day-to-day lives, we naturally feel uneasy and unnerved by it.
It has become overwhelmingly clear that this attitude is regressive—highly problematic and dangerous for our society. It is 2016, a year of great intellectual and ideological progress, and yet, sex is still taboo. We are pushed to label movies for fear that audiences will be opposed to being exposed to sex. Photographers are forced to photoshop male nipples onto female breasts in order to conform to censorship restrictions on Instagram. Your social media accounts will be banned if you show the slightest bit of nudity on your page. It seems as if there have been very few strides for censorship and sex in our society. Even sex education is discouraged in certain states. And yet, how much longer will it take for people to realize sex is something important and necessary to our existence? We need to embrace sex in the arts and in media instead of feeling ashamed and embarrassed about it.
If we continue to stigmatize sex and nudity as evils in this world, we are only creating more problems for our society. The desire for sex is widespread, something many of us can’t control. When we are taught that sex is wrong, we begin to feel ashamed about these natural feelings we have. We are taught that these uncontrollable desires need to be repressed, forgotten about or kept secret. This is dangerous. Whether we want to admit it or not, each one of us can trace our origin back to two people who had sex with each other. It is about time that human sexuality is spoken about and embraced more freely in our society. It is about time we stop censoring nudity and start encouraging artists and entertainers to explore it. Sexuality is a powerful element in our society and should be supported as such. It isn’t something to be ashamed of, for sexuality and the human form are far too important to our existence to be suppressed any longer.
