Confessions of a navel observer

Confessions of a navel observer
by David Benjamin

“It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing.”
— Modern Girl, 1957

MADISON, Wis. — I went to Catholic school and developed a belly-button fetish. Looking back sheepishly, I trace this syndrome to a cadre of Dominican nuns obsessed with nudity. Nowadays, their prudishness seems excessive, but in the Fifties — as every Catholic kid knew — nuns never undressed.

Their habits (that, is, their duds) were actually bonded to their former bodies and their wimples were stitched — before they took their vows — right into their skulls. Picturing this process tended to make your skin crawl. Some of us figured that this baptism-by-needle explained why Sister Mary Ann was such a bitch.

Sister Mary Ann, in particular, was so pathological about nakedness that most of her pupils at St. Mary’s — especially the girls — were convinced that the only way to avoid seeing our bodies, playing with ourselves and committing a sin in the shower was to keep our clothes on all the time. Sister Mary Ann was vague about how we could get clean that way. My suspicion is that she really didn’t care.

Because B.O. isn’t a sin.

Starting in second grade, the nuns of St. Mary’s instilled in my malleable mind a palpable terror of witnessing in the flesh any more of a girl than her arms and less than half of her legs. Cleavage gave me the willies. And belly-buttons?

If I got a load of a girl’s navel, even accidentally, I knew I was bound straight for Hell. I intuited this without doctrinal guidance. Nobody, not even Sister Mary Ann, told me specifically that a glimpse of the female belly-button was a mortal sin. I probably decided this based on media attention to a) the recently invented bikini and b) its nearest occasion of French sin, Brigitte Bardot. I lived in fear that a bikini might suddenly thrust itself before my eyes — on Groucho’s TV show, in the Saturday Evening Post, or, most ominously, at the municipal swimming pool. All summer, I stepped out of the locker room and froze, hoping fervently against the soul-searing sight of a naked torso, as I scanned the moms sunning themselves at the shallow end and the dissolute high-school girls who minced and flirted with boys near the diving board.

My fears were groundless. This was Tomah, a mostly German hamlet in the Great White North, where the default format for women’s bathing costumes remained, almost ’til the Reagan administration, the full-torso, breast-crushing Playtex living girdle.

I learned the hard way, however, that the age of the belly-button had already begun. There was no escape, even in the Erwin Theater, where my dad took me one Saturday to see a religious film called Solomon and Sheba. I had no idea beforehand that Sheba was Gina Lollobrigida, and that Gina would drop her robe in Technicolor and VistaVision, revealing little more than a snake-motif bra, a see-through skirt and a jewel in her navel, after which she belly-danced endlessly — on and on and on, writhing, shimmying, twirling! — beneath the lustful gaze of Yul Brynner (and my dad, whom I knew was susceptible to this sort of scantily-clad enticement).

To my eternal regret, I didn’t enjoy or even dimly appreciate this wondrous introduction to Ms. Lollobrigida who — in her prime — rivaled Sophia Loren in sheer Roman lusciousness and easily eclipsed such brunette-bombshell rivals as Jane Russell, Debra Paget and even Natalie Wood.

The ten-year-old prig version of me just sat there in a cold Vatican sweat, squirming, trying not to wink back at Gina’s belly-button, despairing for my Lutheran father’s immortal soul and trembling at the prospect of stepping into the confessional a week hence and telling Father Mulligan that I’d had an “impure thought” about Gina Lollobrigida. I never owned up to that. In years of confessing, I bottled up my every impure thought, eventually departing the Church, absolving myself unilaterally and embracing a lifelong liberating love of the naked navel.

For a while, about ten years ago, when the fashion gods declared that every woman had to wear low-slung jeans with cut-off tummy-baring tops, I was initially thrilled. My secret paganism had spread and, suddenly, the streets were a parade of creamy tummies and proud, pierced, jeweled bellies.

All of which, if you recall, became swiftly too much of a once-good thing. A tummy is a delicate barque. The bare-midriff vogue, one soon perceived, was not a celebration of six-packs and Salomes. It was more like a humid Sunday at Cony Island. I looked around and I saw more plumber’s guts and love handles — both women and men! — than Lollobrigidas and bikini bods. I was back at the Erwin, averting my eyes.

Thankfully, the trend passed. People stopped feeling obligated to flaunt a body part better left to the imagination, and several layers of heavy fabric.

Speaking of heavy fabric, the controversy that got me thinking about swimwear, navels and Gina Lollobrigida was the French government’s determination to banish from beaches the so-called “burqini” swimsuit, a Muslim coverall reminiscent of the costumes worn by the bathing beauties of Atlantic City in 1900.

In France’s struggle with its greatest human rights issue, it seems odd — well, absurd — that the government’s most decisive policy is a Baywatch dress code. If ever there was country where anything — on the beach — goes, it’s France. If BB can get away with baring her belly-button, and a thousand starlets at the Cannes Festival can get away with baring much more than that, a few Muslim housewives shouldn’t be hassled for wearing Dominican habits in the hot sun.

Sooner or later, the Prophet’s gals are going to come around. They already are. Walk around Paris and you see subtle signs of Koranic heresy — Hermes hijabs bearing rhinestones, spangles, bangles and Disney characters, with complementary eye makeup and matching Nikes.

This burqini fuss is happening, after all, in France — famous for Josephine Baker, Lova Moore and the Folies Bergere — a land where everyone sooner or later lightens up and figures out the national truth:

Taking it off is always better than putting it on.