Winst,
I LOVED your exploration of nudity. Thanks for my encouragement. ” Now it’s my turn to take the exploration a step further and flesh it out. I cannot believe I waited a week or so do to this … but (deep breath).
I’m ready now.
I just typed in Winston Hoy nude, and this is what I found:
You wrote a few days ago about our society’s exploitation of natural bodies. I completely agree. I sat next to my uncle at my MeMe and Papi’s (grandmother et grandfather) house a few weeks ago for breakfast and listened to him describe why he thought KateWinslet was not attractive. I was completely dumbfounded. I thought she was so natural. I think she is completely wonderful. If you’ve seen The Reader, she puts on a wonderful performance. She is nude through the better half of it (and according to some, it is the better-half of the film). But according to my uncle, whose opinion I do not share, her body needs a plastic tune-up. This could just be a geographic feature: the Los Angeles affair with plastic surgery – or it could just make him into women with big breasts, permanently pursed lips and serious inability to express emotion.
What I’m after is just how stark perceptions of nude are. There is a sense that people should be fixed, or that everyone needs some alteration. I prescribe to it, too. I indulge in a few self-help books now and again. However, when it comes the scalpel, that scares me. It should. There are women and men out there who don’t buy in to this cut and paste rubbish. I almost lost hope for some time, until I learned of a Brit named Sue Tilly.
In May 2008, BBC reported on a woman named Sue Tilly, who admitted to being the voluptuous body sprawled on Lucien Freud’s portrait titled Benefits Supervisor Sleeping.
At the time, this painting was the most expensive selling painting in the world at $33.6 million. IMAGINE THAT! I felt like I won the a huge prize, even though I was not painted on canvas (a la Titanic – another nude Kate Winslet reference!). I felt like I was winning for all the women who visit the beach and yearn to remove their tops or breast feed their babies in public. So often women, and men, feel uncomfortable with their legs, thighs, etc. – but Sue Tilly proves that everyone is beautiful. There is no standard for beauty, although people often believe there is. No one can design the perfect nude. No one can measure or calculate just how unreal it is to see something so natural and, cool. If you’re as cool as Sue Tilly, you might even find your place worldwide, as a spokesperson for your own beauty.
Oh hey, and I think you’re pretty great. I hope you enjoyed this rant. Let’s be naked soon.
March 22, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Googling has become a verb in our language. This shows the deep impact of Google on our culture and our lives. But Google is not primarily about searching. Google is an information shovel selling adds. As to prominent linguists like Arbib and Lakoff mirror neurons explain the adaptive evolution of the human language faculty and the development of conceptual knowledge (Arbib, 2005; Gallese, Lakoff, 2007). The problem is our easy and accepting relationship with Google. We are geesing at Google and engage with it more and more every day, uncritically unthinkingly.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is concerned about the fact that:
The thesis I want to develop here is that by using Google we stop developing our conceptual knowledge. Googling is not an intelligent information search strategy. But we are always communicating something. In using Google we express our intentions and the cleverness of Google is to incorporate our intentions in its advertising system and giving us the feel we are finding what we are looking for, but we aren’t. This is what Google wants us to look at.
See my article Google’s one way Mirror