Three Naked People

There are a whole bunch of stories about nudity today, so I am going to cover three different ones:

Firstly, the ESPN magazine body issue apparently features sports stars tastefully posing naked. I’ve read about this, but never seen the magazine. I think the body issue is something they do annually. In any case, Polish tennis star Agnieszka Radwanska, world number 4, and quarter finalist at Wimbledon this year, was chosen for the cover photo. Pretty girl, lovely photo, not so much as a nipple showing, even the Daily Mail has run the picture.

However, turns out she’s a good catholic girl and was something of a poster girl for happy-clappy youth group Krucjata Mlodych (Youth Crusade), and they have taken a very dim view of the photo. She’s not allowed to play with them any more, and they have dropped her from their ad campaigns.

Father Marek Dziewiecki said, amongst other things, “If she meets a man who she can truly love and establish a happy family and raise Catholic children, then she would probably have to hide these pictures from relatives.” That remark is so bizarre that I really don’t know how to comment. What does he care what her relatives think? What does that have to do with anything?

And frankly, I firmly believe that it’s totally immoral to “raise catholic children”, or raise children in any faith. A parent should give children as much information as they can, and then let them decide what to believe themselves. You can’t tell your child what to believe, that’s child abuse. Something the catholic church has a shameful history of.

Why do so many religious organisations try so hard to regulate other people’s genitals? This question fascinates me. Why are they so obsessed? I could go on for hours about this story.

Story number two is more light hearted, and it concerns the Daily Mail again. I had never heard of “Cult Singer, Amanda Palmer” until I read this article, but apparently she did a set at Glastonbury and a nipple slipped into view while she was on stage. It was a well covered performance and pictures of the escaped nipple apparently got as far as the Daily Mail who wrote a review which I haven’t read, but which apparently failed to mention anything other than the wardrobe malfunction. The review understandably annoyed Ms Palmer.

Ms Palmer however did something very clever in response to the review. She wrote a song mocking the Daily Mail with scathing lyrics, which she then performed completely naked on stage in London. Now that lady is a class act.

Finally, a stupid story, a forty year old Chinese woman has been arrested in Singapore for boarding a bus naked. If that had happened in UK, it would be seen as a stupid prank or stunt. The chances are, we’d have had a laugh about it and that would be it. It’s a little different in Singapore. I wonder what will happen to her. It could be that she has a mental condition, or I suppose it could have been a protest. In any case, I am not going to poke fun at her. Just an odd story I came across and another example of how some people are obsessed with other people’s genitals.