The Full Monty

September 6, 2023

Athens

Never before have I seen so many naked young men in public. Everywhere I go in Greece there are handsome faces and beautifully shaped muscles, buttocks, and genitals. But none of them are alive – they’re outdoor statues and indoor museum pieces from Greece’s classic period.

I’ve been told by tour guides that the ancient Greeks considered the human body to be beautiful, so they sculpted and painted young men and women in their physical prime in order to portray idealized masculine and feminine figures. And because young male athletes were naked when they competed in the Olympics and other contests, and naked when they trained for those competitions, public nudity was socially acceptable for men. Not so for women, however.

How times have changed. Now, as I walk around Athens (and other cities and towns in the Western world), it is men who are covered up and women who show the most skin. The weather on this trip has been warm to hot, but I don’t think that’s why I’m seeing so much cleavage and so many butt cheeks peeking out from short shorts. Most women, especially young women, seem to enjoy flaunting their curves in public, and I enjoy the show in the same way that I appreciate the naked muscle studs from ancient times. Beauty is beauty.

Yet perhaps because of male insecurities around homosexuality, we no longer see the masculine form celebrated as the Greeks once did. And because of puritanical religious oppression, women’s bodies are concealed and controlled in many societies, especially in places such as Iran, and Afghanistan under the Taliban. And Texas.

I’m sitting at a rooftop cafe facing the stately Parliament building, and nearby are the graceful, elegant columns of the Parthenon. But not everything is lovely in Athens. It’s a clean city, but except for the giant slum known as São Paulo, I’ve never seen so much graffiti. I hate graffiti wherever I encounter it, because I find it ugly, and indicative of chaotic and negative energy and selfish egoism. I don’t understand why Athenians tolerate it, unless they just can’t afford the massive cleanup costs.

On a recent tour of the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, also plagued by hideous desecrations of public and private spaces, I asked our guide about the nature and causes of these spray-painted scrawls. He said that some of it is considered art, but most of it is socio/political commentary by anarchists and other opinionated people, or else it is tagging (people, mostly young men, expressing their egos through symbols).

I suppose that beauty will always coexist with ugliness, so maybe I need to learn to tolerate a certain amount of disrespect toward the common good. Still, I wish that anarchists and egomaniacs would confine their negativity and destructive impulses to their private spaces and leave the rest of us alone.

For now I intend to focus on the inspiring architecture of ancient Greece. And I’ll continue being a voyeur and aficionado of gorgeous bare bodies.

So go ahead, boys and girls – let it all hang out.