"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."

For September’s Naked Girls Reading event, “So You Wanna Be A Naked Girl,” I read the Chicago Tribune’s article covering our August event which told us to “put [our] clothes back on.”  I just want to say that beauty and brains, sexuality and art, nudity and literature, are not mutually exclusive.  Combining these socially construed opposites is what makes Naked Girls Reading so wonderful.  It pushed us and the audience to conceptualize differently, to examine the unexpected, to analylize our perception, and to look past stereotypes.   “[We're] naked AND [we] read” (!!) is NOT what Naked Girls Reading is about.  It’s about Beauty; beauty in literature, beauty in the spoken word, and beauty in the female form.  Although our culture is, as the Tribune states, oversaturated with “nakedness” what it is lacking is the open acceptance and revelry in such natural, vulnerable, exposed beauty.  Our nakedness enhances the natural, vulnerable, and exposed beauty of the literature we read.  Nothing is hidden and what is displayed is the beauty in laughter, beauty in sensuality, beauty in sadness, beauty in rage, beauty in everything that is expressed in writing, everything that is expressed in reading, and everything that is expressed in the instrument of our body.  As Anais Nin wrote, “It is the function of art to renew our perception.  What we are familiar with we cease to see.  The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”  So, no Chicago Tribune, we will not put our clothes back on.  Especially when reading. 

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