Boring naked people

I was listening to the OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) the other day and they were discussing a new law that has been adopted by the City of Ashland that prohibits nudity in open public areas. Blah, blah, blah, blah…. We needed this law because we’ve had three strange instances over the past two years involving nude people. And the other side… We should have the right to be nude anytime and any place we want, it’s part of our freedom of speech, and our right to protest.

Now I could only take about 10 minutes of this before I was bored to tears. It’s really just one bunch of people over reacting to a few odd incidents, and another bunch of people that just want to run around naked. I mean really, how irrelevant dose your life have to be that you’re willing to devote this much energy to this topic?

Why would anyone think that going naked to protest something will get them taken serious? I’ve only heard of one time where it really made an impact and that was over 200 years ago. Young women were commonly stripped and publicly flogged for fairly minor offenses, while men and older women were either not punished, or if they were it never involved public nudity. A woman of a certain age and several friends committed infractions they knew would get a younger woman stripped and flogged. They insisted that they be treated the same as the younger women. The stripping stopped for all women. Basically she was pointing out that nude women being flogged was more about titillation for the male population than punishment.

There will always be crackpots who feel they need more attention and will decide to commit outrageous acts to get it. For some this will mean riding a bike around town in a hemp g-string, riding the bus pantless, or walking around in their birthday suit. Why someone chooses to get attention this way is a mystery, but I guess it’s less harmful than some other things people do.

Back home if we saw someone walking around naked we would have assumed that someone’s very slow relative had gotten loose and needed help getting home. If we saw a large number of naked people, we would assume that there was a short bus somewhere close missing it’s riders and they needed help finding their way back.