With apologies, to Mom, Ice-T, and Coco

While looking in my journals and reviewing what I've published on my blog, I found that I have written quite a few pieces that include fictional characters or famous people. I decided that it probably means that either 1. I need to get out more, or 2. I missed my calling as some sort of celebrity commentator or movie reviewer. I'm not willing to dwell on theory #1, but I thought I'd share one of my (hopefully) less political commentaries. This will be a "re-run" for some of you....

One night, I saw this show called “Awesomely Bad Fashion Moments.” Among the prizewinners in this show was Ice-T’s wife, Coco. They were at some awards ceremony, and she was basically wearing a large black fishnet stocking over underpants, and shoes. No bra, nothing else to hide her body. And yes, her nipples (which were “discreetly” covered by the television show with large green blotches) were on display for all the awards shows attendees to see. Coco One and Coco Two, coming at ya! My conservative mother rose up inside of me. Oh-my-God, what would possess someone to put herself on display like that? And that platinum –blonde hair—how tacky! I was embarrassed for her, and also for Ice-T, who dared to be seen with her—to “let” his wife go out dressed like some sort of fishnet dominatrix, AND show her nipples in PUBLIC! For the record, Ice-T didn’t seem to mind the attention one bit. Anyway…

Suddenly, I remembered John Ashcroft. My mind whipped back to about four years ago, to a story that John Ashcroft actually spent $8,000 of the taxpayers’ money to have the female statues in the Hall of Justice draped: so their naked boobs didn’t show. Now, I am reluctant to admit that I share any commonality with John Ashcroft beyond the fact that we are both carbon-based life forms. So it irritated me to no end that I was having a “John Ashcroft” moment. So I told the conservative mother inside of me to shut up, and allowed the wilder, primal, and fierce part of me out of that small, tight box in which I usually kept her. That part of me kept asking, “So what if she shows off her nipples? What are you afraid of?” And I remembered moments of pure, natural body joy as I watch Coco and her green-blotched boobs on the screen:

Taking off all of my clothes after a long hike, and diving into a cold, cold lake that is so clean that I can drink the water as I swim,
Lying on a wolfskin in a spiritual journey, cheek to fur, arms and legs pressed on the body of the Mother Earth.
Running my hands through my damp hair in a Sweatlodge, feeling the hot, moist air flow across my naked skin.

And I start to wonder, what if it was perfectly okay for Coco to show her breasts in public? Now, I am not advocating that everyone strip off their clothes and show up naked at the next meeting with their boss. But Coco’s display made me think about all of the body taboos that our culture has, especially about women. From an early age, many of us are taught (even in this post “sexual revolution” time) to be sweet, kind, demure. Often, the wild, sexual energy that exists in all of us is truncated and shoved so far down inside that we don’t even know what it is. And out of all of this suppression of what is, after all, a very natural drive, comes the stories:

Only “bad girls” are sexual. Good girls are virginal, innocent.
Only bad girls show off their bodies. Nobody wants to be a bad girl, because bad girls come to bad ends.

I probably don’t need to remind anyone of these stories, or others. They are woven as deeply into the fabric of our society as the threads are woven into the cloths that drape the statues in the Hall of Justice.

But back to the boobs.

It occurs to me that Coco was a walking taboo challenge in that outfit. Ice-T said something very interesting as he stood beside her. First of all, he said, “Coco do what she do.” Then he said—I don’t remember the exact words—“Coco makes people do what they do.”

And, unintentionally or not, that was a profound statement. The mischievously humorous side of me can imagine people’s reactions:

“Honey, are those her…”
“Yes. Let’s go. It’s not polite to stare…”

But the other part of me can acknowledge the way a woman displaying her body, with no shame for all to see, can shake those of us who are willing to allow it to. It can shake us right to the core of our minds, our belief systems and yes, the sexual parts of ourselves that have no names in this culture beyond the scientific and the slang.

Okay, I lied. So it's political. Oh, well. I am sure that only a few people read this blog, but I still have the occasional nightmare about finding angry conservatives picketing my front yard.