I honestly think that the lack of non-sexual nudity in public spaces has done horrific damage to American society.
We deeply struggle to understand the natural diversity of bodies because we only see naked bodies in a sexual context. We are taught that seeing nudity is somehow inherently harmful, especially to children. We struggle to differentiate between sexually suggestive and sexually explicit material.
It fucks up the way people think about and talk about sex ed. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about breast feeding. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about queer folks. It feeds into fatphobia and ableism and is all rooted in this deeply harmful puritanism.
Like, I need people to understand that seeing a bare titty in public is not going to hurt a child. Seeing a man in a banana hammock isn’t inherently traumatizing. I would argue, in fact, that adults treating those things as dangerous and gross and scary is going to do way more damage to a kid’s psychology than seeing the nudity in the first place.
Imagine an alien sharing a cool human fact they just learned like ”hey guys did you know that the silvery markings on humans actually aren’t true stripes? They’re called stretch marks, they happen when the human is growing fast enough to actually outgrow their skin, which is apparently something that just fucking happens to almost all of them at some point of their life.”
and another one is like ”wait so you’re saying humans don’t have stripes.”
”actually they do, but the stripes are invisible. There’s genetic code that’d give them stripes but they’re just the same colour as the rest of the skin. So the visible stripes are not real stripes and the real stripes are invisible.”
”I swear if you tell me one more weird human thing today I’m beating your ass.”
The human in the room looks up and goes “Wait I have stripes?”
“what do you mean cats can see them, but I can’t?”
what do you fucking mean cats can see them
I WENT THROUGH THE SAME THOUGHT PROCESS
MY CAT THINKS I HAVE STRIPES?!?!?!?
NO NO ITS NOT “IT THINKS I HAVE THEM”
BECAUSE WE DOAPPARENTLY
SO ITS ACTUALLY A VERY DISTRESSED “MY CAT THINKS I KNOW I HAVE STRIPES?!?!?!”
AND I THINK THATS A BIT WORSE TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST
apparently there’s a disease where they become visable, and these are the most common kind??
Ngl it looks cool but???? I’m still in shock tbh
I NEED TO KNOW WHAT PATTERN OF STRIPES I HAVE AND THE CATS WON’T TELL ME
I COULD HAVE A CHECKERBOARD ON MY BACK AND NO ONE WOULD KNOW???
They’re called Blaschko’s lines!!!
The reverse can also be true … kinda.
I remember reading somehwre the human eye can see more shades of green than any other colour. I just googled it and the human eye can see 10 Million different shades of green.
So human could see stripes and patterns on, say, a reptillian race who maybe can’t see as many colours as we do, and think they’re just one boring shade of green.
Human: We have stripes?! I wish I could see them. I hope they look like yours.
humans don’t have enough ornamentation. where’s the plumage, the antlers
i could go for a good vibrant throat sac i could display as i sing in the mating season
Humans have some of the most extreme hair variation over their bodies in the animal kingdom, with hair on some parts of our body a few millimetres long and fine enough to be almost invisible, and hair in other parts a good metre long if not artificially trimmed. Part of the inside of our mouths are turned out to make our lips bright red, we have comically oversized breasts and lack penis bones to make erections more indicative of impressive circulation, and have some of the most complex behavioural adaptations to self-ornamentation for courtship seen in anything that doesn’t spend half its life collecting blue bottle caps. How much ornamentation do you want?
ALT
