Genitals, the Bible, and you

Are you a fig-leafer? Do you consider your genitals “privates” to be seen by nobody except your self, your doctor and maybe your lover? Are you frightened by the thought of hanging out at a nude beach?

If so, you have a lot of company. The vast majority of Canadians are uncomfortable almost anywhere in the nude.

This fear of normal and natural body parts is no trivial condition. A good deal of the most important text ever written in the Western World deals with this bizarre discomfort with the self.

I speak of course of the story of Adam and Eve.

The Book of Genesis in the Old Testament distills into a few pithy paragraphs thousands of years of insight into the human condition. And it focuses on genitals and the fear of same.

The very first reference in the Bible to human psychology, to our emotional life, involves the reaction of Adam and Eve to the sight of each other’s genitals: “Now they were both naked, the man and his wife, but had no feeling of shame towards one another.”

The Scriptures could have examined many other features about the human psyche in Eden, such as how Adam and Eve felt about God, or the beauty of the Garden. Instead, in a critically important passage the Bible focuses on negative attitudes towards genitals and tells us that in paradise such anxiety is unknown.

Genital fear figures prominently a few lines later, in the dramatic events involving the serpent and the Tree of Knowledge. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit and acquire a new consciousness: “The eyes of both of them were opened.” What did they see? “They discovered that they were naked.”

Their world was full of fascinating things to attract their notice, but instead the Bible informs us that their attention was pulled immediately to their erotic organs. Adam and Eve now feel shame and hide their genitals behind fig leaves.

Genital fear thus appears twice in the western world’s creation story. The Bible consumes precious mythological resources to prominently emphasize only one aspect of the human psyche: its attitude toward sex organs.

This focus of the creation myth of western civilization is no poetic accident. The repeated reference to negative feelings about genitals conveys a clear message: that such attitudes are profoundly important.

Yet this message has been largely ignored.

While Genesis has been exhaustively studied and re-studied for centuries, the fact that it repeatedly focuses on attitudes toward erotic organs and pays no similar attention to any other feature of human psychology or anatomy has been almost overlooked.

Bibliographies of books and periodical ar¬ticles dealing with the story of Adam and Eve contain hundreds of publications. Yet not one explores why the Bible’s creation story should give such key attention to genital shame, and not to love or hope or aesthetic beauty.

Not only does the Bible express the idea that attitudes to geni¬tals are profoundly important, it goes further and suggests why. The Bible shows that while genital shame is unknown in paradise, it does occur in an environment of conflict and fear. Its cryptic language tells us that inner erotic attitudes correlate with specific external conditions.

The harmony of Eden is associated with the absence of shame and no urge to don fig leaves. The hierarchic world of conflict, of dis¬obedience and punishment, pain and anxiety, is associated with the existence of genital fear and the impulse to hide pubic organs. Genital fear tends to be absent from social environments that are harmonious and peaceful.

So listen to the wisdom in this part of the bible: how you feel about your genitals says lots about you, and your culture.