So Be Nude For Goodness' Sake

Some of the links in this post contain artistic expressions of nudity. If you'd prefer to avoid them, I've made them pretty obvious.

If you haven't heard about this yet, there's a fund raising push within the secular community for Light The Night. The Foundation Beyond Belief is aiming to raise $1,000,000 to help win the fight against blood cancers. There are very few things that everyone agrees on, but finding cures for cancer and improving access to existing treatments and counseling for patients and their families is one of them. Please click the picture below if you want to learn more or donate to our team.

So what, you may ask, does walking a few miles with fellow humanitarians have to do with nudity or goodness? Well, the goodness part should be obvious. It's a good and worthy cause to support. But doing that nude or partially nude? October in the Windy City is a time for layers and hoodies, not bare skin!

No, my thoughts on nudity have to to do with a project that Secular Woman has in the works. Atheists Breaking Through: The Reveal 2013 Nude Calendar will be sold to raise money for our women's travel fund and for the Foundation Beyond Belief's contribution to Light the Night (see, I told you there was a connection). Actually, this is the second nude calendar project I've seen promoted this year. The first was a direct critique of patriarchal repression and outright oppression of women, inspired by Egyptian blogger *NSFW*Aliaa Magda Elmahdy. You can read more about that project and download or buy the Nude Photo Revolutionary calendar *NSFW*here. It's worth a look. Just not at work.

This calendar is a little different, though. (Although I still wouldn't bring it to work.) For one thing, women and men are participating. The scope is wider, and the intent to include a broad cross-section of humanity is more, well, explicit. Also, whereas the first project was very much an exercise in solidarity with a very brave woman that made perfect sense to me, this one got me thinking a bit more deeply about marketing, target audiences, and overall messaging. What does a nude calendar have to do with the fight against cancer or helping women who couldn't otherwise meet with other activists in their community come together at conferences? Does the content need to be connected to the causes it supports?

First and foremost, there's the question of why all the nekkidness? If you have kids school aged or above, it's not like you're going to hang that on your wall without killing your child's inclination to have anyone over for the next year or so. The same thing holds true for the coffee table or the end tables. While it certainly wouldn't scar your child anymore than having a tasteful piece of sculpture on the liquor cabinet, you're probably going to hear about it. So, it's a calendar, and it needs to hide in a drawer if you're a parent and don't like it when your kids nag you. Not exactly practical. Then again, I remember being all about the National Geographic magazines as a grade school kid, so that argument is probably erring on the side of forgetting just how naturally curious kids are. Keep it with the other artsy books, and let the kids look if they want to. Let them know it's there so they don't freak out if they run across it, and let them know that you're open to any questions they might have. Surely, that's a lot healthier than letting their only exposure to nudity be through the wonders of cable television and other media outlets less focused on dignity and more focused on making a buck. As a parent, I can see the value in a calendar that presents nudity in an artistic and meaningful context. Sold.

As a feminist and a humanist, I can see the value, too. While I don't actually think a fundraising item needs to be connected to the cause it supports, it helps when it is. In this case, one of the reasons women have trouble getting to events is that we are paid less than men for the same skills in many fields. (For anyone who disagrees, please get back to me after you've read this.) Regardless of your gender, you have to trust your community to help you find your place in society, and to make sure that the deck isn't stacked against you. By including pictures of women and men in the calendar, it underscores the fact that we are all vulnerable, even when empowered. We need each other to thrive, for practical matters like survival and for emotional connections that make survival meaningful and joyful. This is true in general, but it's particularly obvious when someone falls deathly ill and the cure hasn't been found yet, or is financially out of reach. There is nothing quite so naked as raw need, and nothing quite so fulfilling as being able to help.

So this is why I'm going for a walk in the park next month, and why I'll have some tasteful art in my home that isn't buried in a desk drawer to shelter my daughter from nudity.

Although, from a practical standpoint, I'd also like to ask, "Will there be an app for that?"

Bless her Little Heart

It's one of those phrases that can mean so many things-- kind of like "praying for you".

Had an interesting discussion this morning with someone who just really, really failed to get it. It began, as most warm mornings with a clear blue sky when the calendar reads 9/11 do, with a discussion of how we reacted on that day. One person said it was her last day as a Christian. Another chimed in quickly to say she would pray for her.

Now, there are quite a few kinds of prayers. Some are grounded in empathy or grief. They are an expression of the deepest wishes a human being could possibly have that a bad situation will improve, that pain will be healed, and that good things will happen in the wake of horror. They are the silent agonizing thoughts that desperately hope for intervention from some force outside of the natural world to make things better, like the ones I and every other even remotely "spiritual" person in the world had as they watched the twin towers crashing down into rubble eleven years ago. They are usually private. When they are shared, they are often shared from a position of humility in the face of something huge, not knowing if they will be answered, or even heard.

I may take some flack for this, but atheists have them, too. We are tiny clusters of very old and well organized stardust, and our lives are over in a brief flash in human history. They don't even register in the long view of time. The ultimately inconsequential truth of our fleeting existence does not mean that we don't hurt for humanity as a whole when we see suffering on the scale that we saw it eleven years ago, or that we do not want to make the world a better place.

When tragedy strikes, we bypass the supernatural part. We talk with our friends. We write to leave a record of what we feel, not always knowing if anyone will hear or care, and not always in the public eye. I don't think it's too far off to say our blogs and our journals and our hopes to be that change we want to see in the world are our secular prayers. I recognize these things for what they are-- our hopes, our dreams, and (when we act on them) our legacy to future generations. They are the glue that holds society together and causes us to reach out to one another for support and comfort when we need it, and to give it when and where we can. We are, in a very real sense, little more than what we share with one another. We grow when we confront what we might otherwise hide from ourselves.

Some prayers, on the other hand, are less noble. Call them "selfish prayers": the prayer of an exasperated mother that an overtired child will go to sleep; the prayer that a sticky work situation will be go away after a good night's sleep; or the prayer that an unexpected windfall or the kindness of others will help solve financial problems. (More on that later.) Atheists have these thoughts too, but tend to handle the day-to-day trials and tribulations from a strictly pragmatic approach. We look for advice from our friends, family, social networks, doctors, and lawyers. We bring meals to our sick friends. We argue for what's right and hope it finds a receptive audience. I'm not saying that people who appeal to a supernatural power do these things any more or less than atheists do. We just cut out the thoughts directed towards the middle man when we do them.

But there is that final kind of prayer... the kind of prayer that atheists get from believers who are sad to hear that we have "lost" our faith. Call it a "pity prayer", or an evangelical prayer. It's the kind of prayer that asserts one Truth, and flatly rejects the possibility that this truth may be wrong. It's the kind of prayer that assumes those "other" belief systems are wrong, and many if not all of the world's problems would be solved if only everyone would convert to the True way of thinking. It's the kind of prayer that condescends, while simultaneously demanding respect.

Atheists have these sorts of sentimental wishes, too, when it comes to religion. In the past, we were sometimes silent out of fear we would be killed, beaten, burned as witches, or simply cast aside by society. To be very clear, that's still a risk today. We are social animals, and callous rejection and judgment based on religious beliefs or lack thereof can cause real pain. Or, you know, risk of death if enough people don't react to actual persecution loudly enough. I'm going to call it what it is, self-righteous garbage of the most dangerous sort. We mourn the atheists in foxholes who have died protecting the people who cause that pain, and we get angry when their very existence is denied, belittled, or ignored. This attempt to claim a monopoly on the moral high ground is base tribalism, and does not play well with others.

Don't like it when we deliver a dose of reality? Then, please, hear our "prayer".

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As an important aside, if you like the pendant, and you want one, click the pic. The proceeds are being used by the artist to help fund a custody battle for his daughter, after being totally cut off from all contact for far too long. Earlier this year, he had to fight against a move to terminate his parental rights. Why? Because he's an atheist, and the grandparents didn't want their grandchild exposed to that. That little girl who loves her daddy is who I think of when I hear the phrase "attacks on religious freedom", and the back story here might help explain my particularly strident mood today. The discussion I mentioned at the beginning of the post? Yeah, it happened on his Facebook page. Please feel free to share with your friends. At $10 a piece, they won't pay off the lawyer, but every little bit helps.