Desperate skin displays

I was walking from the Student Union to Knox this Halloween when I saw her coming. She was walking quickly, with long strides. As she grew closer, I realized why.

This young woman was wearing less than some wear to the beach. Before she marched by me, she glanced furtively in my direction.

The feeling that resides within that nervous peripheral peek is a strange paradox that seems to occupy many of our young minds. We want the attention, but it makes us uncomfortable.

Of course, Halloween isn't the only day of the year people are compelled to grab attention with a skin show.

The Myspace, Burning Angel and Suicide Girls sites are forums in which this tension is exploited, and people are making money on it. More power to them. It's just pathetic that people will offer themselves up to that sort of manipulation.

Young women may be trying to demonstrate their defiance of social constraints, but they're really adhering to them in the strictest fashion. Objectification is nothing new. It's the eagerness on the part of young women to become an object that wasn't there before.

What does a person gain from posting a nude or semi-nude self-portrait? One receives compliments from strangers and friends, sexual offers and maybe a little bit of cash, though plenty do it for free on Myspace. Getting paid for it is an affirmation that someone would pay to see that person's body, and probably for the opportunity to do a lot more.

People who lack self-confidence want all of those things. Putting greater emphasis on one's body than one's mind shows that one believes that with which they were naturally endowed is the best they have to offer.

I can hear the guns-, knives-, hearts- and stars-tattooed chorus moaning, telling me that it's just for fun, to chill out and enjoy the nudity.

No, thank you. You make me sick.

How these people manage to place themselves above strippers and porn stars is beyond me. It's not 30 people looking at you in a bar. It's thousands from the comfort of their homes. Is one better than the other?

I think of those hotel-room photo shoots and have to wonder what it is the participants get out of it. Most of those girls don't look happy to be bending over the footboard in their childish undies. But there's something ineffable, perhaps falsely glamorous within that sexual tension keeps them posing.

I've never been one to denounce sex or sexuality. I think they're fine reasons to go on living. But shedding all recognizable forms of modesty and shoving a false sense of confidence in our faces isn't sexual, it's psychological. There's no intimacy, no contact and certainly no implication of trust.

Computer screens have become this generation's Narcissistic pools, appropriately presenting only the images we choose that they show. Those who bare it all, often with the help of an amateur photographer, pretend to be models for a day and cover the tracks left by their own uncertainties.

I can't say I'm completely innocent. I've got livejournal and Myspace accounts, and when I'm feeling confident in the way I look, I sometimes wear less or tighter clothing to show it.

But some of us are able to pull our gazes away from the pixilated vortex and get on with our lives.

Many proclaim themselves to be proud of their vanity. They put it in their profiles and joke about it like it's not a character flaw. Mentioning it in such a way, kids are capable of never really thinking about the possibility that it's something they should work to change.

There's nothing funny about self-absorption. It can be as damaging as any other vice. It lends itself to an inability to focus on other people's concerns and problems.

In ten years, many of these amateur pseudo-porn stars are going to need to examine why they did it. Most of them won't, and they will go on damaging themselves and the people who rely on them with their lack of concern for everything that doesn't directly influence them.