Ask the Experts

"We are working up a fever making new laws against touching, and we're more scandalized by a photograph pr painting showing a nipple or a penis than by the image of a starving child on a dry, dusty road."

-Thomas Moore, Mother Jones, September/October 1997

Author of the New York Times best seller "Care of the Soul"

"Beautiful nude images can have the power to simultaneously repel and fascinate us. Nudes that incite sexual feelings can frighten with their power. Sexual impulses are not as controllable as the impulse of appreciating beauty."

-Dennis McNally

Jesuit priest, Chairman of the department of fine and performing arts at St. Joseph's University

"Many people ins naturist (or nudist) families simply don't like wearing clothes, or find that the naked body isn't shameful or immoral. Their personal physical disarmament brings many benefits, such as better hygiene, relief of stress, and removal of sexual obsession, without any nudge-nudge innuendoes."

-Paul Rapoport

Professor Emeritus in the School of the Arts at McMaster University, Editor of "Going Natural", a Canadian naturist magazine

"Shame and modesty, though, did not give rise to clothing; more likely, they were byproducts of clothing."

-Anthony Layng, USA Today, March 1998

Professor of anthropology at Wake Forest University

"Some people fear that our society will turn into a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah if we allow people to be nude in public. This is far from the truth. You know who should really worry about public nudity? The peddlers of pornography— for if we became inured to nudity in everyday life, then there would be little or no market for their wares."

-Robert Denker, Newsweek, June 18, 2007

"I've always been such a fan of the European filmmakers and the way they deal with sexuality, which is real people and real bodies and it's just a part of life and a part of human nature, and I find in this country we've desexualized sex. We've taken it out of the realm of a day-to-day function and something that is implicit in just being a human being because we're so afraid of it."

-Maria Bello, American Actress

In "The Cooler", a scene had to be edited in order to receive an R rating rather than an NC-17 by removing footage showing Bello's pubic hair

"There was always a fear that sex, in some ways, would absolve the social bonds. That sex more than violence, unleashed sex, will take this society apart."

-Mary Harron, Film Director of "American Psycho"

"The Europeans have always found America very odd in sexual matters. They've always found us strangely Puritanical."

-David Ansen, Reviewer and Senior Editor for Newsweek

"Nudity—frontal or otherwise—involving sexual activity or otherwise has always offended a certain number of people. But shifting standards of what is acceptable for family viewing and of what is "harmful to minors" has lowered the threshold so that today it seems as if the body itself has become taboo. Nudity has been sexualized."

-Joan E. Bertin, Executive Director at National Coaltion Against Censorship and Marilyn C. Mazur, an attorney for the NCAC