After ninth grade I spent a month in France. One day I was watching television there and I saw an advertisement for soap. It was pretty much the same as here: a shot of a woman in the shower looking like that soap has just filled her with limitless joy and fulfillment, a shot of the soap itself, etc. But one shot was not like our soap ads. The woman is wrapped in a towel. She begins to unwrap the towel. My instincts, honed from a decade and half of watching Canadian and American television, tell me the image will switch to another shot right at the crucial moment of towel removal, just before nudity is incurred. But horror of horrors! My moral foundations are shaken to the core as... Gasp! The shot doesn't change! The towel comes off and the woman's breasts are shown, as if this were totally natural! Shameful, really.

Of course, the reality is that this not shameful at all, and it actually is natural. Women have breasts. They also have ears, hands, knees, and fingernails. But it's those mammary glands, those damn baby-feeders that are so shamfeul that we must go to great lengths to edit them out of soap commercials.

Now consider this: Two young boys of about seven years of age are playing in the back yard. They're doing all those cute little ninja martial arts moves, boxing punches, and wrestling holds that they see on TV and in movies. You look more closely and see, in their faces, that they seem quite focused on the intent of hurting and subduing each other, and proving his inferiority. There are no smiles. No laughter. When one boy falls, the other does not stop, pick him up, and pat him on the back. Instead, he raises his hands and cheers, if he does not continue to beat the fallen boy. This is not an invented scenario. It is my neighbours' daily routine. A little odd, don't you think? If "boys will be boys", what kind of "boys" do we have on our hands here? Boys that dress in camouflage and snipe fellow students as they exit their school?

My point is that as a culture, we seem to choose what to condone and what to condemn in a counterproductive manner. If there's sexuality or even just nudity on the screen, we cover the kids' eyes, or change the channel. If there's gunplay, explosions, or people hurting each other, then we sit back and relax. No wonder we have so much juvenile crime. Our culture praises images of destruction and condemns images of affection. We hate the idea of getting along, and love the idea of not getting along.

Where is the inherent wrongness in our bodies? Are we truly afraid that if children see naked bodies other than their own, they're going to become freakish dysfunctional outcasts like, I don't know, Madonna or Sue Johannson? Maybe if we allow images of sex and bodies into our culture, children might think sex is okay. Maybe we'll drop everything and just sit around all day having sex. And these would be bad things?

Okay, a rampantly sexual lifestyle is in most cases not a healthy thing, because of consequences like preganancy, disease, broken friendships and relationships, job loss, etc. But does that mean we have to be paranoid about the body and physical affection? Is it really a good idea to exclude the mere thought of touching each other nicely from our collective cultural psyche?

If two men hug each other, some call them gay. If two women kiss each other, most call them lesbians. If a man and women kiss, most say they're flirting. I know this to be untrue as a blanket generalization. I know that many people who like each other say it, and show it, and don't feel bad about it. In any case, it is obvious that our passion for violence and our violence against passion is not doing anyone any good.