Has anybody given Tim Graham the birds-and-the-bees talk yet? Because I'm not seeing any sex -- at all -- in this commercial that so aroused his puritanical dander.
More seriously, Graham's post offers a nice reveal on the weird mash-up conservatives have made of nudity and sex. Obviously, certain representations of nudity are sexual in nature. They tend to have soft lighting, chiseled subjects, and lots of pop-ups (I mean the advertising kind, you gutter-dwellers). But nudity is not inherently sexual. Take the commercial Graham wants taken off morning television: two women staring at a mostly-nude male neighbor, "naughty" bits tastefully obscured by well-placed fencing. "Look at that!" Exclaims one of them. "His socks are so clean!"
The commercial advertises detergent. I'm not certain what sort of messages Graham thinks it'll give his kids, but the worst I can imagine involves an unhealthful anal-retentiveness concerning laundry. But whatever slippery, heavily-oiled, well-lubed slope Graham thinks this'll put us on, all that's really emerging is an inexplicable fear of the human body and a desire to protect his children -- presumably homo sapiens themselves -- from visual contact with it. And call me a negligent parent (or a childless twenty-something), but that seems a lot more harmful than "wash your socks with Purex."
