The City That Knows How, which is how long-time San Francisco columnist Herb Caen viewed his beloved adopted city, is at it again, this time with proposed legislation saying you can’t enter restaurants nude, nor can you, as a nude person, sit down in a public space without putting something under yourself first. How about something completely different? In the interests of decency and healthy sexuality, how about, you don’t let people wander around naked in public!
The human body is a wondrous thing. To that end, I prefer to keep some of that wonder alive by seeing less of most people’s bodies, rather than more. Economics 101 holds that, the rarer a commodity is, the more precious it is. When you have wrinkled old hippies (link is not NSFW) and emaciated drug addicts wandering the streets showing their all, it tends to cheapen the premium we in the West have traditionally placed on God’s (or Nature’s) special design.
In a question and answer he set out in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Woody Allen pretty much sums it up: “Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.” Trying to make the human body as ordinary as yesterday’s newspaper is definitely doing it wrong.
(Cross-posted at Bookworm Room.)
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