Dear Domai

Part of my reason for writing is because a friend recently forwarded me a website (wholesomewear.com) that I would have thought was a great idea had I come across it a few years back. The site is so much the opposite of Domai it is rather scary. It is a rather small website apparently devoted to selling 'modest' swimwear, which means it tries the best it can to cover up a woman's body and conceal her curves. And from the way it looks in the pictures, I can only imagine a person trying to actually swim in one of those contraptions!

In hopes that this will be helpful to others who may be in a similar position to the one I was in, let me try to explain my own experiences regarding the nudity=sex lie. I was raised in a very conservative religious setting, and so naturally I was taught that a man should never allow himself to see another woman naked unless that woman was his wife. Together with the fact that any nudity or partial nudity was considered to be 'pornography', I came to strongly associate nudity in my mind with sex.

Since I had never seen a woman nude I was of course very curious what one would look like, and this led me to secretly view pornography, especially after I went away to college. This was always associated with feelings of guilt, since I had been taught that viewing the female form nude and liking it constituted lust. At one point I even joined a devotional group to free myself from what I saw as a sexual addiction. It was centered around a book titled "Every Man's Battle", which was based upon the premise that: 1) All men are engaged in a constant battle against sexual temptation, and 2) The solution to this is to stop looking at attractive women. The authors even had a behavior modification technique they called "bouncing the eyes", which meant you were supposed to develop the habit of looking away whenever you saw an attractive woman, especially a scantily clad one.

The problem with either avoiding looking at nudity, or covering women with more and more clothing, is that this only serves to increase the curiosity among the men. Except for the very strong willed, many men will find nude pictures to look at. But since they are taught from day one that nudity=sex, their natural curiosity quickly degenerates into sexual obsession. This in turn confirms the belief that men are raging sexual beasts to be controlled (and often these same men also believe this about themselves), and thus the mandate against nudity (to prevent sexual impurity of course) is preached with greater and greater fervor.

And as for those who are strong willed enough not to look, this obsession merely takes a different form - avoidance. When those types of people do crash they often crash hard. Is it any wonder that the people who screw up the worst sexually are often times ministers? While it is true that for a small number of people, they may be so entrenched in sexual addiction they cannot look at a nude woman without an intense desire to have sex with them, I would hardly say this is true of all men.

This is much like the alcoholic who can't have the least bit of alcohol without going overboard. But does this mean that all of us are alcoholics, or that we should all avoid alcohol altogether? Of course not. To be honest I think that many men are not actually as sex crazed as they think they are, but are simply caught up in this mistaken idea that nudity=sex.

Might I propose a novel idea? If a man finds himself becoming aroused every time he gets even a small glimpse of a woman's body in public, and if because of this he believes he is being constantly bombarded with sexual temptation, then maybe what he needs to see is more female nudity, not less, and especially non-sexual nudity such as Domai.

If a person is accustomed to seeing the female body for what it is - a beautiful work of art, another human being, but not a sex object - than perhaps he will also see that the temptation to lust is really not so strong. That, at least, is what happened in my case.

-- Nate B