The Erotic Imagination Active And At Rest

It is all too profoundly depressing when Facebook pulled a representation of the iconic photo of the little naked Vietnamese girl fleeing the napalm because it was pornographic or rather appealed, or so Facebook imagined, to pornographic sensibilities, thus denying to the American public the right to read the photo another way.  My son took his newly minted pre-teen nephew-in-law to the St Louis Museum in effort to bond with the lad, who immediately upon entering the building where incidentally he had never been before, shied and covered his eyes, shouting out Uncle Willis: "there's statue of a naked man."  So much for the  teachings of his brand of Christian church, no reproductions of Renaissance paintings of Christ on the Cross, or Saints in Agony, no Mothers baring their breasts to feed the Holy Infant in his nakedness.  When I was a kid, we boys all swam naked at the municipal pool or the school gym.  Masculine nudity was a normal event of my young life, causing only the natural interest and anxiety that any small boy would feel in a gym with grown up men who were able to brandish considerably larger equipment than what I saw attached to me and my friends.  Later on as a teenager self consciously aware of my sexual desire for males, I did not confound casual public masculine nudity with sexual provocation . My son's children got used to the disparity because he habitually took a bath with the four of them, two boys and two girls, in which sessions his extraordinary wit and their responses had them in gales of laughter which made the waves of bath water ever higher in the tub into the good woman of the house intervened to stop the flood.  So for several years the children grew used to the notion that boys had wieners and girls had slits, and Daddy had a much bigger wiener, and nudity in the bathtub was a time for high hilarity not nervous titters.  When I swam at Harvard's Blodgett Pool in the seventies I marveled at the insouciance of the students and faculty who moved around from locker room to shower room in the company of friends without the least self consciousness, but what was more impressive was the clear eyes awareness of the many, many knockout looking guys in that setting that there were eyes fastened upon them of men who found them sexually attractive.  They knew it and did not care.  it was a natural phenomenon in that setting.  I cannot end this walk down memory lane without a glance back to my first year at Andover where, when we boys lined up for a doctor's examination of whatever sort, and one penis faced a rosy cheeked ass as the line stood and moved, and the masculine imagination in that kind of proximity set off erections, there was a school nurse monitoring us, shiny in the starched white uniform, who wielded a pencil, and brought it down sharply on the extending length of the offending member, the pain of which gesture caused it to sink down, shrivel, and ignominiously become limp again.