Well I must say, most days your welcome comments to my posts leave me with plenty to think about. But yesterday it was my Saturday magazine with The Times that provided food for thought and also plenty to chat about, both with H, my neighbour who came round for a cup of tea in the afternoon and also several times with friends who rang.
There was an article about Emma Thompson and her new film, "Good Luck to you Leo Grande". In it Thompson plays the role of a woman, widowed and a teacher, who has never had an orgasm and wonders what she has been missing. So she books a young, high class, male escort. In spite of having had 2 children she plays a repressed, dutiful wife who wants an adventure.
Caitlin Moran, who does the interview, says Thompson seems to have waited until she had 'enough power and confidence to do sex and nudity in a way that matters'. Moran says 'it is the first time we have ever seen on film an older naked woman look at herself (in the mirror after the orgasm) with such joy.
We shall have to wait for a full crit of the film until either John (Going Gently) or Rachel Phillips go and see it. I can assure you that both of them give criticism of films as good as any you will see in the papers.
But it set me thinking - not about orgasms - that is an entirely personal thing and not, in my thinking, something to be discussed here amongst bloggers; but about nudity in general. I know that I never, ever saw either of my parents naked. In spite of the fact that when I was small our bath was a zinc one in front of the fire on a Friday night, I was always first in, out and dried and powdered and sent off to bed. What happened after that I have no idea, and don't think I thought about. By the time I reached teenage years my sister and her husband had had a house built nearby with a bathroom and we went there for baths whenever we felt like it.
Things were slightly different when I married. My first husband (and father of my only son) was a painter in watercolours and oils and pastel and once we married - and before if my parents were away and the house was empty and we would not be discovered, I would pose for him. Occasionally I would pose for his friends and once or twice - when the Art School model was unable to attend- I would pose for a class. (my parents never knew and would have been horrified. ) So what I am asking is this. As I now have a carer - a woman who is almost forty years younger than me and who is brilliant to me in every way and who, as she dashes around doing various jobs chats away so that I know so much about the way of life up here - I hear of people she has always known, who went to school with her, or with her brother or sister and who have children from three or four different relationships - are we saying that nudity and sexual relationships have little to do with one another? Because her attitude - and that of her peers - does not seem all that different from that of my generation. I said this to her this morning and her reply seemed to suggest that nothing much had changed.