Mats Gustafson: Nude

The nude body may still be the most dangerous image in western culture.

Decades after the sexual revolution, society's discomfort with the human form is alive and well, as it develops new versions of the same puritanical or infantile responses that have always sought to censor or stigmatize it.

The nude self may no longer be XXX, but it's certainly NSFW; we may have stopped draping classical statues, but we are desperate to contain our gender identities to two hyper-minimal pictograms for bathroom options.

Arguably, this repudiation of human sexuality shares a root with society's other bodily horror: our collective fear and shame over sickness, deterioration and death.

We have come to see our genitals as sites of weakness, just as we have our eventual decay: both must be covered, hidden, left unspoken, treated as a source of humiliation.