by Cedars of Overburden » Sat Jun 15, 2013 7:38 am
Sometime very soon after having just barely learned about sex, I read a standard issue Cold War story in the Readers Digest by a Chinese refugee who wrote about escaping from a Cultural Revolution re-education camp. She and her husband were sent there and when they'd behaved well enough for long enough they were permitted conjugal visits. In fact, conjugal visits were kind of demanded of them. They were allowed to be together in a bunk bed screened by a curtain observed by a guard. They were expected to have sex and chit chat. They were, apparently, being expected to demonstrate that they would not have counter revolutionary conversations when they got together in bed. She wrote that this was the worst thing that happened to her during the entire Cultural Revolution. She and her husband were upper middle class professors and they weren't treated very well but being expected to have sex with that curtain the only privacy was the worst thing that happened. Her story stuck in my mind as something that I think is, in fact, one of the very worst things that could happen to a person.
If you have nothing to hide, it means you have no intimacy. It means you have no heart or tenderness. It means you have no true connection with another human being. It means you are on the road to no longer being human. It violates marriage. It violates family. It violates friendship. It violates all human ties except the state and that violates the very idea of humanity itself.
This brings up some interesting thoughts about modesty, but I know better than to go there on this board. I'll leave it at if you have nothing to hide, you no longer have any modesty. I'll leave it at this: for the past 12 months I've been haunted by a new strange longing to go veiled. Though I am a hick feminist Protestant, I want a mantilla, a chapel veil, a Mennonite cap, something, I don't know what....