Sperm Count: Shameful Delights

Shame is a much maligned feeling or emotion. There is too much mollycoddling about shame and too many helpful Cassandras who warn us about the danger of feeling ashamed of our bodies and our desires. The message, of course, is there’s nothing to be ashamed of, particularly if you have one proclivity or another. Well let’s start with nudity. Sure you can go to a beach where everyone is naked and you probably won’t experience an iota of shame, but if you go to an elegant Broadway opening totally in the nude, you’re likely to experience some shame and the desire to cover up your so-called private parts. If this weren’t the case then things like streaking and mooning would be no fun at all. Enlightenment rationality concerning bodily fluids and functions may have dealt the shame  an almost mortal wound, but shame is not totally dead. There are still things to be ashamed about which add a little sizzle to life. If everyone talked freely about their anxieties, inhibitions and problems, their shame might be eradicated say like Polio was with the advent of the Salk vaccine. However, luckily they don’t. In terms of paradigms you’re more likely to find yourself as the nude person at the Broadway opening with all camera lights flashing then as the sunbather on the nude beach. There's nothing worse than being male and expressing the fact that you’re the only one who isn’t getting it up. And what about farting? If there wasn’t shame, the word “strip” would become an anachronism. You blanch when someone tells you to “strip,” since the connotation wrongly or rightly is that you're being forced to undress in front of a stranger and show that stranger those hidden orifices with their surrounding follicles that they wouldn’t ordinarily have access to. Some people hate having to take their clothes off even for a doctor's exam, but sometimes a future stripper finds his or her calling during a casual examination in a proctologist orurologist's office.