All right… I’m in a thoughtful mood today (as such things go with my Cocker Spaniel brain), so I’ll pipe up.
I see three aspects to men going nude.
The first is the bodily feeling of the breeze caressing our largest sensory organ, our skin, and the relief from the restriction of movement, and the pinching, of clothing. On this, most of us, of both genders, seem to agree.
The second is the specifically male situation. All my life I have felt guilty about being male – partly over my personal “thinking with the wrong head”, and also on behalf of all my fellow males who do the same.
But now we have Burning Man – the gathering where behavior is mostly limited only by the fundamental concept of “Your rights end where my nose begins”. For one precious week each year I do not need to feel personally responsible for every rape committed throughout the ages. The sense of mental relief provided by this “License To Be How Mother Nature Created Me” makes a pathetic farce of every medication the doctors have ever prescribed for anxiety, insomnia and depression.
Then the third aspect, which is the occasional erection. Not only do we have the outwardly protruding male mating-apparatus, but sometimes that hardware is at full alert, which, when not adequately concealed by clothing, is considered inappropriate in public, and downright threatening, or at least offensive, to many ladies.
Fact is, of course (I dare say), that the rampant male mating-instinct is why humans still exist on this planet. We are at an awkward stage of evolution, where we are just smart enough to invent our own destruction, but not yet smart enough to prevent this, except by breeding faster than we can kill each other -- not always with the agreement of the prospective mother. Ask any of the countless ladies who have been abused over the last 20 million years or so.
Even at nudist gatherings it is considered bad form to be erect, denying the natural limits of human willpower.
So that leaves us with the one problem of my “rights” versus the ladies’ “nose”. I do believe I understand how many ladies feel. That’s what I have felt guilty about for most of my adult life. Seems the question boils down to where a lady’s “nose begins” in this context.
I can offer no fool-proof solution to any of this. I just want to contribute whatever little I can to the thread.
I’ll go back to repairing bicycles now, for which I am better qualified.
