Sex, eating, drinking and sleeping form a kind of Holy Quartet of what psychologists call “needs-based cognitions,” but the first of those is by far the most complicated in human life. For all its nearly non-stop saturation in our media, we remain profoundly conflicted about sex, not the least of those conflicts reflecting the vulnerability inherent to nakedness and our suspicion that surely other people—probably everyone else—gets more sex and is less conflicted about it than we are. (Aren’t you?)
These questions and conflicts (and their silliness) are brought into sharp relief with the issue of body image, that intense exposure of our “imperfections” to the gaze of another. (Halle Berry, you can stop reading now.) These imperfections, of course, involve more than just our physical selves but reach down to the core of our emotional imperfections as well...
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