American Conservatism...

America never ceases to amaze me when it comes to its conservatism. This especially rings true when it comes to the viewing of the human body in its most natural form: nude. While searching for books illustrated by Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things are, this wonderful illustration of a young boy riding in a bread-dough airplane came up. This illustration is obviously not the controversial image to which this blog refers; but in the book, the young boy is awakened in the middle of the night and begins to float. While floating, his pajamas fall off and he remains nude for the vast majority of the story. When this book was first published in the 1970s, after the sexual revolution, librarians were painting diapers and drawing shorts on the boy in the book because some found a nude child to be obscene. According to Wikipedia, this book later went on to become #25 on the list of the most 100 most controversial books list because of the nudity. Now, I don't have a problem with people finding a nude child in a children's book as offensive. However, anyone with children know that most children enjoy the freedom of being clothes-free at any given moment in time. As a country that claims to have moved past the Victorian era view of the human form, I find that few Americans embrace how beautiful and innocent a child, in his most natural state, can be.