it may well bee

I cannot say what my fascination with nudity is. Perhaps it's Western Civilization's fascination. I remember when I would look in the painting article of my World Book encyclopedia: Manet's Dejenuer Sur L'Herbe stoked a fire. I don't know how young I was. The Life Drawing article in mom's childhood Britannica Jr, with  its delicate modeling of the derriere drew me in. The covers of science fiction and mystery novels beckoned. And the advertising - cars, cigarettes, all the lifting and separating, movie posters, travel posters; Time magazine's reproduction of photos for Martha Clarke's Vienna Lusthaus.  The cannon of Western art and the Cannon of Western advertising - the sheer ubiquity of it.

 I really turned out OK. I would have been better off without the puritanical message that our bodies are evil. All these attempts at creating a pre-lapsarian consciousness among individuals and in the culture - that's the problem. Puritanism is an attempt at infantile regression: hence the way it manifests in extreme authoritarian patriarchy - a person or group will safeguard the morals of society. The thing is, people know well enough for themselves. That explains how rabid these authoritarians become. On the radio, on the news, in casual society, they bully their way into conversations and attempt to connect with the larger group's childhood emotions.

Nudity seems such an obvious temptation. Puritanism is the real temptation: it propounds that the conditions of 'the fall' may be reversed - not by grace, not by saving faith in Christ - but by individual and societal restraint. Puritanism is a denial of grace. 

I will have to make this leg odder and even more uncomfortable. The figure is so much fun to draw, even when I get a bit "off the road." Everything can be fixed - as it were, resolved, or re-engineered.