Hard Questions part 2.

Sometimes the answers are hard.

A Facebook member referred ruefully to having checked out Lupita Lyong’o’s ‘ass’ even during a whipping scene in the movie, “12 Years A Slave”.  I haven’t seen the movie, but I understand where he’s coming from.

Some years ago, in a History classroom, the teacher was disturbed as kids laughed during a scene in a documentary video where Nazi Sonderkommando operatives executed Jewish women on the brink of a pit into which the bodies fell. The women were naked, and that was the source of the laughter – not because the kids thought there was anything humorous about it, but because they were startled and embarrassed.  Of high school age, it is likely they have seen nude images, even pornographic images, but these are not images of what they perceive to be ordinary, everyday life, they’re images contrived for a purpose.  The documentary served a different purpose, and the woman dying and waiting to die could have been their mothers, their aunts, their sisters, and it threw them.  These are people that they don’t see naked.

I have responded fleetingly at times to images where such a response was entirely inappropriate on any intellectual level.  It is a part of my nature and one I regret, but it is still there and probably always will be.

Among the hard questions are; “why does this occur?  What, if anything, can be done about it? What, if anything, should be done about it?

More, later.