I was standing at the curb on Yonge Street just south of Dundas. I’d done my research beforehand and knew this was on the route of the World Naked Bike Ride. By my estimate, the naked cyclists would be turning from Dundas onto Yonge any minute now. I planned to use that most phallic of lenses, the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8, fast and long, like the cyclists who’d soon be whizzing past me.
That’s when Ben stepped up beside me. He’d just bused into town from Brockville and looked like he was trying to get his bearings. Meanwhile, I looked like I was waiting for something. I told him about the naked cyclists; he thought that was cool so he waited with me. I had nothing much to shoot until the cyclists arrived, so I asked if he’d mind me taking some shots of him while we waited.
In my do-over life, or in an alternate universe where the human lifespan is long enough to let us get degrees in 25 different areas of study, I’d like to learn more about cultural anthropology. For now, I have to resort to intuition about what I suspect might be the case. For example, I suspect it might be the case that Western cultures find face tattoos problematic. But I have no data to back this up. All I have is an image of mother losing her shit if, when I was younger, I had come home with a tattoo covering half my face: What did you do that for? I can barely look at you now? What will the neighbours think?
I suspect it might be the case, too, that the Western bias against face tattoos is partly a prejudice we carry with us from colonial days: this is something “primitive” peoples do, but not us. It sullies our whiteness. It makes us more like “them”. This is pure speculation on my part, and it all vanishes from my mind when a glorious parade of flesh zips down the road.
