Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Alpha the Robot Meets Zorine, Queen of the Nudists

A fascinating bit of history, via BoingBoing today.

With a little of further research, I also discovered this historical account of Zorine and her nudists at the exposition. By today's standards it seems pretty innocent, but I think Queen Zorine actually qualified as a titillating act in the 1930's - and from that second link it sounds like actual nudists got upset with her. It seems like she was exploiting the voyeuristic urges of people back then, in an environment that must not have provided much opportunity to indulge such urges. At least that's my interpretation - the culture is so alien to me that it's impossible to get my head around how it must have been perceived back then. Which is part of what makes it so interesting, to me at least.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

The mainstream isn't always right

I'm starting to wonder if Nudiarist is just deliberately missing the point of my posts, as he seems to enjoy knocking down strawmen of his own creation that bear little resemblance to anything I write here.

For example, I thought that the point of my last post was pretty obvious and straightforward. It was simply looking at the way society perceives and reacts to different kinds of threats to children, and pointing out the frequent disconnect between the reality and the reaction. The aim was to highlight that the "threat" of nudity is in actuality less than that of other kinds of threats, and that society's reaction to it is totally overblown, especially compared to how it treats these more substantial threats to the well being of children. However, there's no evidence that Nudiarist managed to get that. Perhaps that's the fault of the author, although to be honest I can't imagine how I could have been much clearer, and several others who've read it don't seem to have this trouble understanding the point.

To illustrate, this is his reaction to my point about child molesters, which amounts to no more than an unqualified assertion:

Sorry, Eric, while I appreciate your efforts in attempting to construct what you feel is an important series of arguments, you completely undermine yourself when you say "We live in a society that all but assumes that all men are pedophiles." Even in context this is a foolish and paranoid statement. If you said "we live in a society that all but assumes that all men exposing their genitals in the presence of a child are pedophiles", you might have a point.

Now, in that post, I included the example of British Airways banning men from sitting next to children on flights. Not "men exposing their genitals", just plain old men. Nudiarist did not address that in his objection. I also included the example of Virginia's initiative that encourages people to report adults holding hands with children, again, irrespective of whether genitals are being exposed - it's a program designed to foster suspicion of any adult/child contact. Nudiarist didn't address that, either. I also could have included other links - such as the very sad story of Abigail Raye, whose potential savior opted not to save her for fear of being labeled a pervert, or Brennan Hawkins, who was lost in the woods and actually hid from rescuers because he feared being stolen, or many more examples indicative of a cultural hysteria regarding grown men and children.

There are any number of ways that one could have rationally critiqued my point. Personally, I'd have argued against the generalizability of these extreme examples. But Nudiarist, rather than address either of the original examples or the societal issues raised by them, simply offered his own faith-based assertion that that my statement was "foolish and paranoid", as if that's sufficient to prove me wrong.

Normally I wouldn't even bother replying to this kind of argument (if you can call it that) but elsewhere in his post he actually managed to raise a separate issue, which I'll get to in a moment.

I chose examples in my previous post in an effort to cover the spectrum of real and imagined threats and corresponding overreactions or underreactions. I included sports in the list specifically because it was by far the most non-obvious harmful thing I could think of. Sports are outright encouraged by parents and society alike, often describing them as "wholesome" and "character building", as well as attaching the word "hero" to people who play the game well. Most people are unaware of any negative effects, largely because sports are so popular. As a result, many people react exactly as Nudiarist did when it's pointed out to them - knee jerk disbelief.

Knowing that the assertion that sports are harmful would be met with some skepticism by most of my readers, I provided several supporting links, referencing hooliganism, drug and sex scandals, and an article correlating them to crime. Granted, I didn't delve into it too deeply, but that would have been well beyond the scope of the post. I felt the links provided were enough to support the general idea that sports have ill effects that people don't often think about about.

Given that I did provide that evidence - limited as it may have been - I'm surprised that Nudiarist's only rebuttal was:

There is no point to be made here, it's just random demonizing. Sure, there has to be somebody out there making these arguments, but it's way out of the mainstream and has no bearing on reality.

Now, the "somebody", if he'd bothered to follow one of the links, is economist Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics (which became a bestseller by arguing non-mainstream ideas), who was sharing an article on the blog of the same name by French political scientist Sebastian Roche. Also mentioned in that blog entry as having discussed the link between sports and crime is author, sports journalist, and NYT columnist Robert Lipsyte, who has written much on the darker sides of the sports business and jock culture. These are all people to whom I ascribe far more credibility on the question than Nudiarist or his argumentum ad ignorantiam.

Further, even if none of those names above mean anything to you - there's plenty of reality-bearing evidence that I'd think should become obvious to anyone considering the idea with an open mind. One need only open the sports page on any given day to find stories about pro sports scandals having to do with drugs or sex. One need only glance at any high school to notice the fact that the computer club isn't ever the ones bullying the football team. Anyone who's taken a general psychology course is probably familiar with BIRGing and CORFing - as well as the fact sports breeds violence & aggression, misogynism, and a sense of entitlement among athletes. While these ideas aren't well known or often thought about by the general public, they're not especially unknown or even controversial among psychologists, either (which again, is what made it such a great example to use in my previous post).

Anyway, my ultimate point here isn't the question of whether sports are good, bad, or somewhere in between, as it's not a debate I have any particular investment in one way or the other (though obviously I have my informed opinion about it). What I found curious is that rather than investigate the issue and challenge my assertion on rational grounds, I guess it was just easier to say that the idea that sports are good is popular and therefore must be right - because popular ideas are always right... right?

I would think that if one wanted to challenge my assertion about sports, they would have challenged the validity of my original examples, or at least offered counterexamples showing positive benefits. That may have produced a real debate and who knows, maybe I would have been proven wrong. Instead, the sole objection Nudiarist offered is based on the popularity of the view that sports are good, which I guess he thought that was sufficient to prove that I was "randomly demonizing".

I find this to be an especially poor argument coming from a nudist, considering that nudism itself is a far cry from mainstream and that the mainstream view is that nudity is offensive, wrong, and harmful - which makes him at best inconsistent and at worst hypocritical to use such an argument. This kind of non-thinking deference to mainstream views and social norms without consideration for evidence or reason is fairly typical among nudists and stands as one of my pet peeves about them. It also gives the appearance of being closed minded and intolerant when nudists need to be about just the opposite. Also, using such arguments also shows a complete lack of awareness of the basic arguments that justify what we do, as well as the relationship between nudists and the rest of society. Nudists, just by being nudists, argue that at least one mainstream view held by society is completely wrong. So then why should nudists ascribe credibility to other mainstream ideas just because they're mainstream? If citing mainstream support for or against something is really a valid argument in of itself, then on what basis can we defend this lifestyle, and what right do we have to practice it?

Further, there's a funny thing about these mainstream views that Nudiarist hinges a lot of his arguments on: contrary to what he implies, these views seldom have much of anything to do with reality. In fact, they're often spectacularly wrong. The view that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, had no WMD's, and that an invasion of Iraq would be a disaster was very out of the mainstream in 2003 - they turned out to be dead on accurate though. It's only recently that the mainstream view seems to have come around on scientific issues like global warming and social issues like homosexuality - one need not go back much further than a decade to find the majority on the wrong side of those questions. As we go back further in history we find mainstream support for such historical atrocities as slavery, racism, child labor, and the subservient role of women, to name a few. The entirety of scientific progress depends on challenging the mainstream - experiments are designed to prove that the theory being tested is wrong, and people like Galileo, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein revolutionized the way we see the world because they threw out some of the most fundamental mainstream ideas of their time. It's also worth remembering how non-mainstream ideas like "inalienable rights" and "all men are created equal" once were.

On a personal level, one of the things that I pride myself on is that I make a genuine effort to overcome my human biases and think both critically and independently about pretty much everything I can. I regularly challenge my own assumptions as well as the assumptions of society, and strive for consistency in my world view and a rational basis to rest it on. Do I always succeed? Of course not. I'll often fail to challenge assumptions that I should have challenged, and many times I'll come to conclusions that are simply wrong even when I do ask the right questions. But I always seek to correct myself and learn, and I simply can't imagine living a life where I take society's supposed wisdom at face value, where we're talking about nudity, the value of sports, or anything else one can imagine.

It's a good thing too, because while mainstream views do (usually) eventually change to more closely match reality, they've historically proven to be a pretty unreliable judge of what's right. Nudists, who challenge one of the more strongly held views of the mainstream, ought to be even more aware of that than most.

Friday, July 06, 2007

Won't Someone Please Think of the Children?

(I actually wrote most of this post a while ago, but Academic Naturist, thanks to his post linked to below, deserves credit for inspiring me to pull up the draft and finish it)

I have a hypothesis, based on some observations I've made about the people around me: People lose all ability to think rationally when it comes to children.

I don't know what it is about children that creates this effect - I understand the impulse to protect them, both from an ethical and biological point of view, but that just makes it even more mind boggling how incompetent adults are at it.

Take all the very real dangers facing children that parents don't know about, downplay, or outright ignore:

  • Marketing and Advertising.

    The average kid watches an astounding 18,000 television advertisements a year, the majority of which are for candy, junk food, fast food, or sugary breakfast cereals. Advertising is designed to manipulate values, desires, and perceived needs - and it's effective enough towards that marketers spend $70 billion dollars a year on TV commercials alone. Parents will sometimes get concerned over the content of the television programming - how many have you known to show any concern over the effect of the advertisements that accompany it?.

  • Automobiles.

    After the first year of life, accidents become by far and away the leading cause of death under the age of 14 (and continue to be a significant cause of death throughout the teen years and the rest of your life). The vast majority of those accidents involve automobiles. We should all be scared shitless any time we go anywhere near a car, but instead parents think nothing of piling kids into the car as they barrel down the highway yapping on their cell phones.

  • Global Warming.

    It bears mentioning. These kids, we plan on them growing up one day, right? Assuming no change in life expectancy, someone born in 2007 can expect to live to see the year 2080. One would imagine that a responsible parent would seek to fix the world's problems before handing it off to their kids - instead most seem to expect these kids to solve them, at a time when they'll be far more difficult to fix. Rather, what I see is parents driving their kids all over suburbia in gas guzzling minivans and SUV's. The way people are curiously unconcerned with the impact of that behavior is disturbing, to say the least.

  • Violent Media

    While claims about the alleged harm caused by viewing sexual media are specious at best (see below), violent media has been repeatedly shown to have at least minor ill effects.

Then there's the terrible stuff that parents do to their kids and are seemingly oblivious to:

  • Obesity.

    About 17% of children are overweight, which has led to increasing occurrences of in Type 2 Diabetes at younger ages, as well as heart disease and other problems later in life. While some parents do put an emphasis on eating healthy, it's clear that not nearly enough do - especially given that 66% of those same adults are overweight or obese themselves.

    No sane parent should feed their kid McDonald's or any other fast food. Nor should they feed them pre-prepared meals from the supermarket that are chock full of preservatives. Nor should they let them drink soda, which is chock full of high fructose corn syrup (and diet soda has its own set of problems). Yet given that peddlers of these products find it profitable to market to children (see the point about TV ads above), it seems that many, many parents don't have any issue subjecting their children to this harm.

Then there's the stuff we outright encourage, but is actually pretty bad:

  • Sports.

    Yes, sports. What, you haven't noticed how they make people violent? How it correlates with crime? You've never noticed the way High School cliques develop around sports teams, forming the basis for in-group behavior and bullying? Or how a school's star athletes can get away with murder (and in the case of pro athletes, sometime literally get away with it)? Rather than encourage great thinkers and people of accomplishment as role models, we teach kids to idolize professional baseball and basketball stars - people who at their best still contribute no more to society than Paris Hilton.

    Contrary to the message of every sports movie ever made, there's very little redeeming quality to be found in organized sports, and what value there is decreases exponentially with levels of competitiveness.

  • Homework.

    Despite the conventional wisdom, homework has a lot of negatives and no positives to speak of.

  • Religion.

    I'm not going to expand on that one - because if you'll ever agree with me on that one, you don't need to read the argument here. And conversely, if you don't agree with me, no amount of links is going to convince you otherwise.

Then there's the legitimate threats that we overreact to and in a rather spectacular style, utterly fail to protect against:

  • Child Abductions/Molestation.

    Remember how someone tried to blow up a plane with his shoe, and now we have to take off our shoes at the airport? And then we went through the same thing with bottles of water. These security practices aren't just annoying: they're completely pointless. Yet we do them anyway, because it gives the appearance of doing something, however ineffective.

    Now, if there's one thing in this world that breeds even more irrationality than the threat of terrorism, it's the threat of child molesters. Child molesters, like terrorists, are out there. They're bad guys, they mean harm, and they need to be stopped. Sexual abuse of a child is one of the more truly horrific things imaginable. But it's truly stunning how misplaced the fear of it is, and how we wind up not protecting children from the threat as a result.

    I mean holy fuck - the state of Virginia wants you to call the cops if you see an adult holding hands with a child. If you live down there, I'd advise against helping a young kid cross the street. British Airways bans men from sitting next to children on flights. We live in a society that all but assumes that all men are pedophiles.

    Here's the reality of child molestation though. The vast majority of molesters are family members. The vast majority of the rest know the kid in some other capacity (teachers, priests). And child abductions and molestation by strangers is so rare that every single time one happens in this country of 300 million, it makes the national news.

    That latter point probably explains why people are so irrationally afraid that their kid is going to be the next JonBenet Ramsey - if we see it on the TV, we think it must happen more often than it does. (As a rule of thumb, if it's on the national nightly news, it's not actually anything we should waste energy worrying about.)

    Here's the thing though: if we want to help make children safe from strangers that would abduct them off the street, "don't talk to strangers" is really bad advice. We actually make the world less safe for them by preaching it.

Now, at the same time that we irrationally fear for the children, there's another group of "children" that we show a completely irrational fear of. Consequently, we place restrictions on them that (surprise!) wind up doing more harm than good. That's right, I'm talking about:

  • Teenagers

    We live in a world where increasingly, teenagers are legally prohibited from doing much of anything. Driving is restricted. A group of teenagers hanging out in a town park, minding their own business, will (in my experience) always attract a cop. Shopping malls are increasingly off limits. Freedom of speech for teenagers, not so much.

    It shouldn't surprise anyone that the onerous restrictions and prohibitions we subject them to actually cause many of the behaviors we want to limit.

And then, if there's one thing, as a society, that we've decided we need to go above and beyond to protect all children from above all else, no matter what, no matter how much liberty and freedom we have to sacrifice to accomplish it is:

  • Porn and "Dirty Words"

    It says a curious thing about our culture that the term "adult" can be used as a shorthand for these things, despite the fact that there are any number of other things that separate adults from children in terms of entertainment and activities we enjoy. But these "adult" things are the only ones that need to be kept out of sight of children no matter what.

    We can describe gory murders on the 6:00 news, but they can't use the word "fuck" on TV. Oprah can help a con man convince millions of people that magic is real, but any depiction of sexual congress has to be left to our imagination. (Maybe if I wish hard enough, the FCC will go away?)
  • Given that we all but ignore threats to their health like obesity, and care nothing for the mind warping effects of marketing - this stuff must be really, really, really bad to warrant this kind of censorship. The harm that it brings to children must be unimaginable - worse than diabetes, worse than what the violent media we don't censor does, worse than environmental destruction.

    Except... there's really not much to back that up. The thing is, in the real world, more than 30% of 14 year old boys are porn users. Many more of both genders have at least seen it. And it stands to reason that if 14 year old boys can get at it, so too could anyone else - girls and younger children just aren't as interested, which also undermines the "harm" argument. Not for a lack of trying, studies have had a difficult time correlating porn use with anything negative (though they have managed to correlate it with a decline in rape).

    While the case isn't exactly cut and dry, the idea that some immense harm comes upon children or teenagers who are exposed to porn and the word "fuck" just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. And on balance, they seem much less harmful than some of the things mentioned above.

  • Nudity

    (Yeah, this was a very long build up to the main point, which ironically turns out to be pretty short)

    Readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with the "What if a child saw?" type objections to public nudity - but usually, people making these objections can't even define the kind of harm they think would come to a child who saw a naked person. Or, if they do, it's usually some vague mumbling about "corruption" and "innocence" - terms which should be a pretty big tip off that we've ventured into fantasy land.

    Whereas the impact of sexual media and pornography is at least arguable, simple nudity simply isn't. No one has ever been able to articulate - let alone demonstrate - how a child (or anyone else) is harmed by the site of a woman's bare breasts or a man's penis. The objections and fears are completely unfounded, and have no basis in research or rationality.

    There hasn't been much research done into the impact of simply nudity, but what little there is vindicates it as somewhere between harmless and a good thing - Academic Naturist just posted a great roundup of what research there is on the subject.

In fact, most of the "harm" that one can point to with regards to these last two subjects stems from repression rather than exposure. Porn in of itself is probably has no impact. But when porn is the only medium by which people learn about human sexuality and the human body, then problems start to emerge. Fear of sexual expression leads to a deficit of information about safe sex practices and in turn leads to teen pregnancy. Similarly, acting like nudity is shameful and that there's something wrong with the human body sends the message to children that there's something wrong with their body, which leads to body image problems.

So I plead with you, with parents, with society - won't someone please think of the children?

Friday, June 29, 2007

Something Awful?

One of my favorite blogs on the web is Naked Jen. Simply because she's an talented writer that infuses a lot of her personality and life into her posts, making each one an enjoyable read. Which is why I cringed a little bit when she was featured on the popular Something Awful blog, which normally features the kind of content that the name would imply.

Much to her credit, Nakedjen already wrote a great response to the post, that embodies exactly why I like her writing and her attitude so much.

I don't really have much to add, especially since she already responded so well herself. But I did want to voice my support and point any of my readers that might not have been aware of her to her site.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Bums in Time Square

A new ad campaign will feature naked rear ends on large billboards in Times Square:

New York city is no stranger to public displays of nudity, both in public advertising and otherwise. Still, it's a relative rarity in the big apple - so this kind of thing is welcome. Anything that exposes people to nudity and gets them used to seeing it is a good thing.

And hey, we can all hope that it becomes so commonplace that it eventually loses the shock value that makes it useful for advertising.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Study: Men look at a nude women's faces first

I feel my gender is somewhat vindicated:

Contrary to popular opinion, men are more likely to look at a female's face before other areas when looking at pictures of naked women, according to a study by Emory University researchers. And women will gaze at pictures of heterosexual sex longer than men, the study found.

The study is based on how men responded to "sexy" photos, but I imagine that it's generalizable to how men look at women in general, whether nude or clothed. We're more interested in faces. Women, on the other hand, aren't so innocent:

Men went straight to the face and lingered awhile, but most of the women were more interested in the sexual activity. How much so depended on whether they were taking hormone-filled birth control pills.

The researchers reason thusly:

Wallen and Rupp said their study suggests that men's increased attention to faces may be related to higher activation in the amygdala, a portion of the brain that processes emotional information and excitement.

Women can tell by looking at naked men whether they are aroused, Wallen said, but female bodies don't reveal much.

"It's cryptic, but facial expression is one way of showing an indication of interest in and enjoyment of sex," Wallen said.

It really has very little to nothing to do with nudism, or even nudity for that matter, but I thought this was an interesting bit of research. I love when science defies the conventional wisdom and challenges the assumptions we have about the world.

Monday, June 18, 2007

NY Woman Affirms Legal Right to Go Topless

My apologies for linking to the NY Post...

Who knew it was legal for a woman to walk around with her breasts exposed in New York?

Well, one woman did - and a cop didn't - and now she has forced the city to fork over a $29,000 legal settlement for illegally busting her when she law fully bared her bosom and went for a stroll two years ago.

Yes Virginia, women can go topless in NY. In fact it's been legal there for the last 15 years. (See previously mentioned Jordan Matter Photography for some pictorial examples of this). I think it's great that this woman stood up for her right and won compensation for the way she was treated.