THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
(apologies to Keith Olbermann)
Clay Yarborough
Jacksonville City Council President Clay Yarborough objected Wednesday to a photo of a nude pregnant woman at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, saying it “works against our efforts to promote a family-friendly Jacksonville and downtown.”…. Yarborough asked Mayor Alvin Brown’s office to pull $230,000 of taxpayer money that was awarded to the downtown museum through the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville, which screened grant applications for the money. Yarborough said he objected in part because the image could be seen by anyone, including children, coming to the museum, which is in a city-owned building.
Today’s Hero of the People comes to us from Jacksonville, Floriduh, where City Council President Clay Yarborough is standing up for community morality and the threat posed to it by…wait for it…art. More specifically, Yarborough is incensed that the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville is displaying a portrait of a nude pregnant woman reclining on a couch (NSFW version here).
If you proceed from the premise that the naked female body is dirty, nasty, prurient, and/or distressingly erotic, then yes, I suppose the image is potentially harmful. Why does it have to be that way, though? Why do we teach our children that the human body is something to be ashamed of? Why do we perpetuate the corruption of our attitude towards one of the things that uniquely defines each and every one of us? The human body is as sinful and dangerous as we choose to make it…and we’ve chosen to define the body as dirty and licentious to our collective detriment. We tend to fall back on the idea that women are overtly sexual and dangerous, designed to deceive men into falling for their feminine wiles. Rather than take responsibility for their collective failure to keep it in their pants, they blame women for the moral shortcomings they refuse to own…and by that standard, the female human body is the worst, most dangerous temptation of all.
Never mind that there’s absolutely nothing erotic or licentious about the photo in question. It’s a nude pregnant woman reclining on a couch. The inherent prurient value is what the observer chooses to make of it. If you believe the unclothed female body to be dangerous, erotically charged, and dangerous to the moral health of your poor, impressionable snowflakes, then that’s what you’ll see. Clay Yarborough seems to live in a Conservative bubble of fear, in which women’s sexuality and our perception of it must be tightly controlled…or our moral world will spin out of control, with untold collateral damage likely to be done.
It’s been said that art should upset the observer and push them outside their comfort zone. If that’s true, then art has certainly held up its end with Yarborough. Even if the art in question upsets Yarborough, he shouldn’t be allowed to force his moral standards on the Jacksonville community, many of whom don’t subscribe to his flavor of morality. Politicians should be allowed to censor art in the same way artists should be allowed to make policy.
Art and sexuality are not the enemy…unless you choose to define them that way, which Yarborough has clearly decided to do. That shouldn’t mean he gets to determine moral standards for the community as a whole. If he’s so upset about a photo of a nude pregnant woman reclining on a couch, he has the right to avoid the exhibit, but he shouldn’t have the right to bully the mayor and the museum in to conforming to his Puritan morality. That’s the very definition of censorship, and it has no place in a free society.
