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.
