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After seeing MIDSOMMAR in the theater, I have a few Thoughts.

Bodies don’t bother me.

Oh, my body bothers me, but that’s different. I’m not talking about attractiveness. I’m talking about the very idea that we have flesh instead of silicone and Botox.

Wrinkles. Stretch marks. Cellulite. Sagging. Freckles. Scars. Zits. Mucus. These things don’t bother me.

I don’t understand why, when someone old or fat or conventionally undesirable wears something that shows their skin or takes off their clothes for a role, people say ‘God, I did not want to see that.’ I’m noticing a lot of old men and old women going naked in horror movies, and I think it’s supposed to incite the fear of mortality, the repulsion of ageing bodies.

When I see naked bodies, I’m not scared of my own unattractiveness, nor does it trigger the fear of my own mortality. If anything, full frontal of average bodies is a relief, and the nakedness of the old is comforting. Because it’s not as bad as people say it’s going to be. A little more flesh, a little less collagen. That’s it.

It’s not like we don’t already know what bodies look like. Our own. Other people’s by the shapes under and against their clothes.

It’s not scary at all.

We need to confront the fear of our own bodies, associated with sex and separate from it. Because let’s face it, most of our experience with our own nakedness have nothing to do with sex. I think we’d be less afraid of nudity if we had more of it divorced from sex and divorced from attractiveness. It’s sad that this thing we all have is so repulsive in our own sight that we rate ourselves out of ever seeing it. The rest of what we have access to is overwhelmingly young or surgically sculpted.

Confront your reactions, and look again.