WelcomeInnocence
"Sex is a normal part of life" (New York City Department of Public Health)
"Thou shalt not be aware" → "For you own good" (Alice Miller)
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In my (BMcC) social surround of origin, the word "innocence" meant preventing a child from knowing about sex and sexuality, that premenopausal women bleed each month, etc., but also assuring the child does know about other things such as barber's chairs and the NFL. (They succeeded quite well with myself.) Therefore innocence was anything but innocent, because it was willful suppression of awareness of life by persons who knew more than they were letting on. Liars! Or maybe they didn't? As has been said: Never attribute to malice anything that can be explained by simple stupidity. But I don't think my prigs really believed babies came by StorkExpress (where is that freight forwarding company's main hub? Amsterdam, Schiphol airport? I'll take Narita or Zaventem). Rrose Sélavy!
Here's how you motherprude could have been 100% certain your child did not find out about the obscene act: You should Not have done the obscene act in the first place. Then there would be no child vulnerable to having its innocence violated (nor would you have to be ashamed of yourself for having done the obscene act; or is the real secret that you can only get sexually aroused by hiding sex from children?
). Q.E.F.
"Oh sweetie, isn't the little baby cute? Ootchie! Coochie! Coo-oo! What a sweet little baby sister [brother, other] you have! Ootchie! Coochie! Cooo...." So why not equally share with the kid how that sweet little baby got there from between your external labia after daddy stuck his hot wee-wee inside and it squirted out sticky whitish oozy liquid?
"...the world of adults, who guarded the secrets of sexuality and death....
"I was suspected of knowing only too well the real facts masked behind the offending allegory. That alone was shame enough. Even worse, I had credited my own pure mother wih being capable of the debased act....
"I would have kept my innocence much longer had I not been suspected so early of having lost it." (pp. 24,27)
Complementarity: "the concept that two contrasted theories, such as the wave and particle theories of light, may be able to explain a set of phenomena, although each separately only accounts for some aspects." (Google search) Similarly: romantic love for a pure maiden (or mother) and the bestial act of copulation.
So "innocence" is the child not knowing that his parents have sex, because doing it or even knowing about it is shameful. This is sick. "Sex is a normal part of life and should always be with the consent of all parties." (NYC Health, "Safer Sex and COVID-19)
My (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) notion of "innocence" would be for the child to not know that persons can be mean to and hurt one another. Not knowing that people don't always play nicely together, for, as Mr. Plato said, friends have all things in common, don't they?
As for sexuality, children are curious about everything. If there is anything frightening as opposed to curious about parents' sex acts (Sigmund Freud's "primal scene"?), then shouldn't they not do such things, but only have gentle sexual relations which would be curious but not frightening to the child, just like nobody should do anything that would frighten anybody?
Or, turning it around the other way, it's hard to imagine consensual sex being more violent than things kids are intentionally exposed to like tackle football, yes? ("You are taking the fun out of our lives: underneath our polite public hypocritical social exteriors we are bulls in a china shopbed, not connoisseurs! Uuh! Uuh! Get lost, you killjoy! We just wanna do what we wnana do and don't ask us to think about anything because then we might no be able to stand ourselves. What's wrong with you?")
There is a quite offensive and fairly inane film which is harmless because it's just celluloid or computer bits, not sticks and stones which can break a person's bones: "The Innocence of Islam". Buildings have been burned because of that film. So much for innocence.
I would define innocence differently than the prunes(sic): I would define innocence as (1) a person being unaware that persons get raped instead of enjoying erotic love, (2) a person being unaware that persons are low paid wage slaves instead of independent master craftspersons, (3) a person being unaware that people do not live surrounded by Handel's and Bach's music, (4) a person being unaware that persons do not all speak at least three native languages, (5) a person being unaware that military conscription exists and young males are sent to be slaughtered in battle, (6) a person being unaware that human bodies get cancer, (7) a person being unaware that some persons do not have Richebourg with dinner each nite... This is an infinite set. That kind of unwillful ignorance, to me, would be innocence.
Why aren't kids sheltered from knowing bad things until they are old enough to be able to handle them? Does a 5 year old really need to have their innocence spoiled by opening a bedroom door and seeing mommy put a bullet thru daddy' skull, or just seeing mommy and daddy in bed watching such violence on their bedroom TV?
Innocence, for me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), is not naked little putti flying around on aerodynamically unworkable wings and showing their cutsie little asexual penises for the delectation of dirty young or old crypto-pornographers whose perverted sex act of choice is getting hormonally saturated teenagers to: "Just say no!" Innocence would be kids not seeing grown men being obscene going around on public beaches with their nipples exposed[2], and fathers not taking their sons to promiscuously expose their little wee-wees in public "rest rooms" where nobody ever rests, or subjecting their sons to medically unnecessary genital mutilation (aka: circumcision), a crime sufficiently bad that people get self-righteously indignant if they are told it is a crime and that they themselves are criminals for being perpetrators, and/or that they are victims for having had it been done to them, or to being haircutted, as if the little boys were adult women who had been caught for copulating with Wehrmacht soldiers in Vichy France....
Dear prigs! As far as I am concerned, you can have your birds and bees, because it may not be advisable to reproduce species life on an earth that may soon turn Venusian, not in a Roman pantheon but a meterological sense. I want you to teach the kids Donatello's David (above, right)! Man (or woman or other) up!
I recently heard Cat Stevens (aka: Yusef) sing: "Why am I dying to live when I am only living to die?" Answer, please.
Purgatory
I (BMcC) have no idea what the above picture is a picture of or where it is was taken or anything else about what it is a picture of. It was shot by an entirely respectable middling-upper middle class male senior citizen who had erectile dysfunction, during an otherwise frivolous vacation with his also senior citizen wife, to Europe (2012'ish). The man, in his daily life, took lots of often rather technically good photographs of all sorts of socially respectable things. This picture is not from some pornography website; it is a photograph of a putative art object on display in a public museum of contemporary "art", presumably, somewhere in either London or Western Europe.
I (BMcC) find this picture close to horrific, maybe a 2021 rendition of Purgatory by a Hieronymus Bosch wannabe, or a scene from a mixed gender concentration camp barracks where everybody was SStripped(sic) naked? What could have motivated this guy, who for years took The Metro North New Haven Line commuter train to and from Manhattan five days each week, and was mesmerized by his second wife to serve her her afternoon cocktail as if her deigning to let him serve her was being transported to Heaven, and who was chronically sentimental over his step-grandchildren, to shoot this picture of variegated pose mixed gender naked mannikins (or are some or all of them living human bodies, after all?) slotted into industrial storage shelving racks? Also: Where's Waldo? (Celebrity on earth is not likely redeemable for sentence time reduction in Purgatory or reduced eternal torments in Hell.)
No pain no gain and other nonsense
Petty people with social power have lots of highfalutin cliches about life: "No pain, no gain", "You have to pay your dues" and other such shibboleths. When everybody's matinee idol United States President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, said we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard, that was no skin off his ass, was it? The Apollo engineers sweated that one out. "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Volunteers are the cheapest labor they can hire.
The royal we [subjects of discourse], as always, being served by the we they rule [objects of their discourse]. If working class people stopped having children, their rulers would soon enough have to wipe their own asses (or stop making a mess). As George Wallace did not say: "Purgatory today . . . Purgatory tomorrow . . . Purgatory forever". Smile for the camera, Jack! You have a photogenic face.
"Foreign films"
When I wa in "high school", a pubseent starting to have sex hormones even though I had a high "IQ", in the early 1960s, "foreign films" was a codeword the adults — i.e.: the prudes who were ashamed of and tried to hide and pretend did not exist where blessed events (aka: babies) came from — used to refer to movies that came from morally suspect Europe (sexually degenerate Italy and France) and had or at least they feared had scenes showing or even just obliquely suggesting copulation. These movies were inappropriate for persons under the age of 21 years or whatever. They wre shown in small specialty theaters where [normal] middle class Americans mothers and fathers did not go. But there were some people who did or else they would have not survived in business.
The first "foreign film" I saw, probably in 11th grade, at The Charles theater (on Charles Street in Blatimore Maryland, a block north of the Pennsylvania train station and nextdoor to a fully respectable surf-'n-turf restaurant (The Chesapeake?)), was Federico Fellini's "8-1/2". I don't remambe much of it and I problaby did not make much of it at the time since I was so comprehensively ignoranced by the prudes that I didn't make much of anything.
There was a young, virginal-pretty female actress, Claudia Cardinale, who maybe did not menstruate (I was not aware females did that dirty thing), and I seem to recall she played an attendant in a white nurse-like uniform in a health spa, not a bad woman who would spread her naked legs for a closeup. There was a very gross female in the movie which I think is where the title comes from: a real life encounter Mr. Fellini had when he was 8-1/2 years old, but I don't clearly remember that.
What I have always remembered is the opening scene, where Marcello Marstroiani, a very handsome man wearing dark glasses, is trapped in his car in an enormous and hopeless traffic jam. He crawls out the window of the car and makes his escape by walking over the hoods of adjacent cars. I think iw as wearing a black Stetson hat, so maybe that and the dark glasses made him unfit to be seen by "minors"? Of course to me it meant escaping from the them who were always impinging on me from all sides: my parents and school teachers.
How I would like to have rolled down the window of my less-then-life and walked away from all of it, all of them!
So I was naughty and saw what must have been deemed a naughty film and as you can see here, it did not turn me into a sex monster. The adults, of course, would have been very pleased to turn me into a violence monster: a varsity lacrosse / tackle football player who engagged in public pubic gender apartheid nudity in "the boys' locker room"; Perverts?
8-1/2 was not really on the prudes' radar. There was another movie by Mr. Fellini that was: "La Dolce Vita". Oh my god! It was in the newspaper. I doubt I saw it then. I don't know what it's problem was. I do know that what I hve always been interested in in this film is an upper middle-class deeply intellectual man who kills his two children and then himself with a revolver because he despairs of life in the contemporary world and wants to save his children from it. That's full frontal female nudity, yes? Full frontal same gender nudity for testosterone soaked pubsecent males in the locker room was daily practice, literally: what they did after football or lacrosse practice. Again: Perverts?
And ther was one other obscene thing they protected me from knowing about: that the "beauty mark" on my chest might kill me do to another thing it wa apparently bad for me to have learned about: melanoma. hey kept me innocent, and thereby they ruined my life. Bu applying the principle that one should never atribute to malice what can be adequately explained by simple stupidity, maybe they didnot know any better, less-than-living themselves, in the Ameridan Dream.
Footnotes
- ↑ Your Comment on Are There Any Rules About Going Braless?
The New York Times
10:48 AM (16 minutes ago) [+20230830]
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Bradford McCormick | New York
I have a different "beef": Males going around exposig their boobs.. It's the same physiology male or female or other, just different howmonal trajectories. And we know some males seek breast reduction surgery for whatever reasons. I am not a prude. There was an old Sesame Street song "My body's my body, no one's but mine. You've got your own body, let me run mine." Amen. Perosns should be free to do whatever they want especially if it does not risk a visit to the hospital Emergency Room – discreetly in private. But the public space, be it the office or the beach, should be decorous. Ladies playing sick sex games like "look don't touch" are not being respectful of others. Males going around like beached whales ditto. Now who am I to speak? A male who as a kid my parents would occasionally threaten to put me in hospital for not weiging enough, so you would not have found my iikes except on the funnies page of your local nwspaper. And as an adult, at a resort for "old communists", once I received a real compliment (seriously): the gentleman said I looked like I had come out of a Nazi concentration camp. Needless to say, I dress modestly. If you've got it don't flaunt it. If you don't, don't either. Let the public space be one of mutually rspectful modestyand dignity for all.
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