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like "batang" and "butoh" the onomatopoeic equivalents of "dong" and "dick" with all their bluntly bellicose and brutal, yet cute and comical, connotations.)

FAMOUS NUDES

Since the Fig Leaf Syndrome gained prominence during the Renaissance, we must assume that it was a purely aesthetic choice, reinforced by convenience for, in Italy, which produced the famous nudes of Raphael, Rubens, Da Vinci and Michelangelo, the fig tree grows ubiquitously. It's easy to imagine how the first fig leaf cover-up was conceived: here's Leonardo happily painting his mistress in her garden under a fig tree, but when he reaches below the waistline he suddenly realizes that he can't go for complete realism without inflaming papal passions and getting hauled up by the Almighty Church of Rome. Just then the fig tree sheds a leaf which flutters lazily down in front of his model and gets strategically integrated into the final portrait.

In the Middle East such problems did not arise. Patriarchal notions of modesty forbade the realistic depiction of biological forms, so artists confined themselves to the abstractions of sacred geometry - wherein maleness could be represented by lines and angles, and femaleness by arcs and orbs. The dome-and-spire leitmotiv found in Christian and Islamic architecture gained wide popularity, not least because of its potent subliminal reference to forbidden pleasures. And don't forget the genital worship suggested in the design of all pagan temples: lingams and yonis, phalluses and vulvas, lines and circles, plugs and sockets everywhere one looks.

At the root of the Fig Leaf Syndrome, a primal trauma lies buried beneath countless generations of guilt and resentment. All myths point to the source of our existential angst and collective schizophrenia: SEX! SEX! SEX! Yes, what Adam and Eve discovered after eating the Forbidden Fruit.

Plants have been doing it for aeons but, really, you can't get too worked up over the mechanics of pollination. Animals do it but can't really help it and, then, only seasonally and therefore they feel neither good nor bad about it. With animals, sex is totally guilt-free and rarely kinky. However, when WE decided to get into the act by sliding down the Timechute into physical space, we externalized our male-female polarities and got titillated by the principles of attraction and repulsion: at last we could experience the hormonal rollercoaster ride of biological necessity and non-specific year-round lust. It was so wonderfully heady

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