Under the skin

When is nude crude? Depends on how you look at it

- Bijoy Venugopal

A MALE BOLLYWOOD star's nude pictures are the butt of internet jokes. Memes follow. Stewards of sanskaar are outraged. This is 2022. I'm bummed.

Celebrity nudity has so much nuisance value that it unfailingly hijacks the news cycle. Whisk it up with religion or morality and you have a potent, toxic cocktail to sustain sensational headlines and fatten lawyers' purses. The swell of litigation probably gives our honourable milords a breather from trying weightier cases. But media trials and kangaroo courts are leaps ahead, screaming hoarse about obscenity and hurt sentiments.

Man, wrote Mark Twain, is the only animal that blushes, or needs to. We use our bodies for sport, combat, toil, courtship, pleasure, comfort, shelter and nurturing, but we differ from animals in one crucial aspect. Shame has not spared even the last uncontacted human tribes on the planet. The fig-leaf stands between us and being ourselves. No matter how fair or dark our skin, how thick or sparse our hair, how flat our bellies, or how round our bottoms, we are never happy with ourselves in the buff. Ergo, we are never complete.

When our ilk disrobes, we react with shock or awe. Privacy turned inside out is at first voyeurism, then pornography; add religion and it's blasphemy. Body-envy and body-shame coexist in a perpetual mating dance.