Except maybe Conor Friedersdorf, who criticizes San Francisco’s impending ban on public nudity:
Talk to someone who has been to a nude beach, or read the Yelp reviews for spas where people are naked together, and you’ll keep coming across comments like this one:
Odd as it may sound, it’s really refreshing to spend an hour being naked amongst other naked women. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at nude female bodies aside from my own, so it’s a nice reminder that we’re all essentially the same, yet unique. By the time I leave, I’ve seen so much variety that I don’t even care that I have a mole on my butt.
Americans are bombarded with images of semi-clothed people all the time. It just happens that they’re all beautiful actors and actresses, magazine cover girls, television underwear models, and porn stars. The average person sees lots of naked bodies, but very little real variety. While that may be more aesthetically pleasant, it skewers our notion of what a normal human body looks like.
What’s funny about this to me is how quickly you can adjust. In Germany, for example, nude sunbathing in public parks is perfectly acceptable (on the three or four days a year the sun shines). When I first stumbled upon it, I was a little startled. Then almost immediately I was bored. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and am used to seeing other dudes naked and not getting all Saudi about it. But nude women? After a few, er unfamiliar sights, I went along with the general crowd and forgot about it soon enough.
One thing I love about America is that you can go shopping in San Francisco starkers and can’t get a drink in some rural counties. Anyone who wants to homogenize this country even a little more than is inevitable in the great American churn … has too much time on their hands. Leave the wangs alone. And learn to look elsewhere.
(Photo by Flickr user Torbakhopper)
The Dish 