Why is public nudity illegal?

[John P]

I found this picture of the monument from the rear. Wow, that is kitsch on a large scale! I've been to Washington a few times and always managed to miss it, but if I'm ever back there I'll take a stroll by.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul-mcclure/6600064477/in/photostream/

[jbeegoode]

Holy Cryminy! That nekkid pervert is sneaking up on that poor Boy Scout and gonna molest him fer sure!!!

So, I could see how dressing the guy in the fashion of the day would take something away from what Milles is going for in time, but what other significance, or reason would he have to portray the male adult as nude? Is he carrying clothing while on a hike, getting ready to jump in a swimming hole? Lady liberty isn't nude, too, to find their way through the woods for a late night skinny dip with that torch, the clothes would be too much to carry, too.  These are adult symbolism. I'm not sure what the male's symbolism is, if any. Any suggestions, or insight?

The scout oath, is written on a plaque on the base. Does the guy symbolize the ideals set in that oath?
"On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight."

That's how I want to be seen when I'm nude. I'd like to walk down the street naked and people to look and say that about me and my character. Is Lady Liberty a Greek thing? She is a Roman Goddess thing. Would that guy be a symbol of the Greek ideal, which would fit as the oath, but also the ideals of any Greek at the local gymnasium, back in the day? What is that guy carrying? It would be a clue.

Could it mean that the scout's mom and dad are hippies, but in spite of that, he's okay?  Hippies are just disobedient scouts.

After all of this, I dug a little deeper and found this: "The statue itself consists of three figures (pictured at right). Each figure, a Boy Scout, man, and woman, symbolizes the idea of the great and noble forces that are an inspiring background for each Scout as he goes about the business of becoming a man and citizen. The male figure symbolizes physical, mental, and moral fitness, love of country, good citizenship, loyalty, honor, courage, and clean living. He carries a helmet, a symbol of masculine attire and a live oak branch, a symbol of peace and of strength. The female figure symbolizes enlightenment with the light of faith, love of God, high ideals, liberty, justice, freedom, democracy, and love of fellow man. She holds high the eternal flame of God's Holy Spirit. The figure of the Boy Scout represents the hopes of all past, present, and future scouts around the world and the hopes of every home, church, and school and that all that is great and noble in the nation's past and present will continue to live in scouts and through them for many generations to come.

A small pool in front of the memorial represents the honor of those children who joined the Boy Scouts of America." It was at: https://www.nps.gov/whho/learn/historyculture/boy-scout-memorial.htm
Now, I'm pleased to find what my bare butt symbolizes. I'd wear it proudly, but it is against the law!?!

ALSO:
There was a post on my Facebook account last week that I was going to copy and paste here, but it got lost in the Facebook shuffle. It was four statues of four women who might have been. They didn't grow up to be women. They were killed in youth. These were to commemorate the sadness of an event resulting in lost young lives because of tragic death. The statues were, all four, nude. Pretty cool, I thought.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

That's the statue all right. I don't remember any pool of water, though.

It is curious how nudity is depicted in public sculptures like that (in various degrees of modesty), yet the idea of public nudity for real people is so controversial. It isn't that simple, of course.

In Washington, D.C., there are numerous examples of nude statuary, both male and female, adult and youth, and of various races (Indian, White European and Black African, anyway). The Boy Scout Memorial was probably the most recent and that was about 60 years ago. Memorial statuary continues to be built for public display but I don't think there are any nudes like there might have been at one time. It might be possible to say that much nude statuary was created with little valid reason for the nudity. Nevertheless, there is a fair amount of it, some of monumental proportions, like the pairs of statues near the Lincoln Memorial at either end of the bridge over the Potomac river, which a lot of people see every day they pass by. From what I have read, there was more criticism over what was called a cliché, meaning overdone Greek classical style statuary rather than the nudity. But art critics criticize and do not create art. Anyway, those statues are probably seen by more people than any other statue in Washington.

One is much less likely to see public nude statuary in most other places, however, but it's out there, sometimes in unlikely places. One such example is in a garden in Manteo, North Carolina, site of the first English settlement in the New World. Virginia Dare was the first child born there, in 1587, but disappeared along with the rest of the colony. The statue depicts her as a young woman--nude. The statue was made in 1859, surprisingly. I keep wondering if everyone pretended that all the nude female statues, all very idealized, on public display here and there had no sexual attraction. Another such statue was of another young woman, totally nude, on display on a fountain in Busch Gardens Amusement Park in Virginia, where it could be seen by anyone. It would be interesting to know what goes through people's minds when they see the statue, especially the kids.

[Greenbare Woods]

Woohoo! That's a freegin' boy scout memorial with lady liberty and some nude dude chaperoning a boyscout!! No denial of it, nude was never a sin, nor rude during the golden days of scouting!!!

What is that guy carrying, a stick, or a gun, Bluer train? How is the backside dressed?
Jbee

The man in the Boy Scout memorial has some kind of crotch cover and censored genitals.  If anything its a monument to "men can't be seen."   It  is quite different from classic Greek statues of men and Gods.
 

[BlueTrain]

True but there are others in which there is no modesty covering. I still find it remarkable that there are so many--in some places--that feature nudity, sometimes even 'full-frontal.' Of course, virtually none are in natural skin colors, all either stone or various shades of green or gold. It wouldn't do to have an anatomically correct full-frontal nude (especially male) in true colors. One exception is the Parthenon replica in Nashville, Tennessee, which actually has a full-size (original size, that is) statue of the goddess Athena, which is flesh color. The clothing is gold color, which I don't suppose is natural.

For the most part, the Parthenon replica being an exception, most buildings and statues that are called classically Greek are really Roman inspired, since the early republic tried to identify with Rome, not Greece. But I guess you could still say they were classically Greek. It's all Greek to me.

[Greenbare Woods]

The Nashville statue of Athena is very large but fully dressed.   Even the human size statue of Nike that Athena holds on her right hand is fully dressed. 

There are many ancient statues in Greece which had full nudity.  Many have since been moved to European museums. 

[BlueTrain]

I think there were conventions about how various gods and goddesses were depicted. I think that each one was generally always depicted the same way. Athena was always clothed, while many others, chiefly male, were often depicted nude, or at least nude for all practical purposes. Some Greek clothing as worn by young men was very revealing. Greek and Roman sculptures were supposedly painted in life-like colors, too, a practice that has not survived.

Indian, as in India, sculpture sometimes features nudes and some of it is very erotic.

[jbeegoode]

Yea, those white statues were said to be painted back when they were new. An Arab guy bought the most expensive home in the Hollywood hills along Sunset Strip, I think it was. It had Greek statues along the railing of the patio every several feet and could be seen from the busy road. He decided to paint them, to be more authentic, I believe the story was. He caught so much crap from people that he sold the house and moved. They were just slap painted brown with flat black hair and looked like paint not life. In the movie the "Jerk" with Steve Martin, they used that house and made fun of it.

People and art and ideals and attitudes of sophistication can be very bizarre.

Yes, that piece of cloth flying in the breeze that happened to cover the genitals is cheating a bit, but then the La Fayette Square, I think it was, had the genitals of the statues covered by shields after their had been nude for quite a while. They thought that foreigners would be offended and think ill of the USA. This was 1959 remember. He is supposed to be nude and a symbol of good stuff even though he wasn't. You can't see cloth from behind, so he is nude until you find out. Okay, not perfectly nude as you say, but big points scored there anyway cause he isn't wearing clothes. I depicts what is a high crime in many states. What about the kids? When scouts see that, do they see nude man okay, or genitals not okay? If genitals are not okay, then the rest is okay. Maybes it gives them a step closer to body freedom, better than what the scout leaders teach them these days.

Then there was Bushes DOJ head that covered lady justice's breast with cloth.
Jbee

It is all bizarre to me, maybe hypocritical. Art symbols somehow don't imitate life, but stand for higher values in life.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

I'd say that most kids would just say that it was a weird statue and let it go at that. "Body freedom" is a concept they wouldn't understand in the abstract. Their ideas of proper and improper are already formed by the time their old enough to notice the weird statue. The Boy Scout in the group is not in the same proportion as the other two figures, too. And his uniform is dated. It really is the oddest statue in Washington.

There are nude statues somewhere around the entrance to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, which I saw when I was there in the army. Nude statues were okay in the 3rd Reich, provided they met the Aryan (that is, Nordic) ideal of human perfection. 

[jbeegoode]

Every intersection in Rome has nude statues, churches have nude statues. But some cover the genitals with a wisp of cloth. Take the piata (that correct) at the Vatican. Jesus gets a wrap. He is to be smaller as a baby in May's arms, her child.

Those two figures are big forces of ideal behind the scout. But still, why can't that transfer to real people?
Jbee 

[nuduke]

The man in the Boy Scout memorial has some kind of crotch cover and censored genitals.  If anything its a monument to "men can't be seen."   It  is quite different from classic Greek statues of men and Gods.

True, Bob, but the classical Greeks gave their male statues rather small willies for the most part because that's not what their statuary was about.  Well balanced lot the ancient Greeks - they portrayed the male physique and were not prurient or embarrassed about it because they admired the well developed physique and the human body.  The genitalia were just an aspect of the figure that needed to be represented but was a matter of fact rather than voyeurism.  Mind you, like today, they idealised it a lot.  Not many, if any, Greek statues of fat old paunchy gits and chubby matrons with saggy boobs!  I wonder if Greek women had a feminist movement going objecting to the idealised standard of Greek female statuary in the same way as they object to idealised fashion models today!
John

[nuduke]

Odd.  In all the time I've stood naked outdoors, a wisp of muslin has NEVER floated by on the breeze and hooked my genitals.  I feel deprived.
John

[BlueTrain]

I think some pre-historic carvings of women depicted them as rather plump. They were still, in a way, idealized, but representing something different entirely, nothing at all like early Greek or Egyptian renderings of females. It appears to have been more of an earth mother figure instead. Some of the earth mother figures of the hippie movement decades ago had just that appearance. I don't think the hippie movement had a feminist element.

More or less modern black African sculpture, on the other hand, seems to often feature rather exaggerated features for some reason. Perhaps it could be an artistic convention but such art as I have like that would probably not be described as primitive. Buddha is usually depicted as of normal weight but sometimes rather obese and sometimes skeletal. I imagine there are various conventions at play. Some Indian statues of some god show him totally nude and without a wisp of muslin. Or fig leaf, as is sometimes applied to Greek and Roman statuary. In some Renaissance fencing manuals, the combatants are sometimes shown as totally nude or with a wisp of linen. I have no idea why they were illustrated that way.

[jbeegoode]

Odd.  In all the time I've stood naked outdoors, a wisp of muslin has NEVER floated by on the breeze and hooked my genitals.  I feel deprived.
John

Womens lib of the sixties was smoking, working, getting out of the house, sexual liberation with the pill, skinnydipping, tossing the bra to accept them as they are and liberate them. Demand equality and figure out just what that is. Then to participate in all of the other liberation that the "freaks" were doing. To question everything and experiment. All of this is a dramatic change from the 50's homemaker and get a husband model of female life.

I have noticed that often the "hippie" women still maintained the kitchen chores and men much less so, often still today.

To me, that's feminism, the dawn of feminism.

There was a movement toward natural and away from plastic takeover. This had to do with the hair in the pits thing. Natural also showed us that we are all of varied bodies. Thus some heavier "sisters" participated.

Renn fencing/rapier/sword manuals needed illustrations. Illustrators of the time reflected the art and its trend of realism. It showed the actual body positioning better, but for example Fiori, it didn't always do such a good job of it. After extensive experimentation with these manuals, we discovered that a twist here and there augmented and corrected what was depicted. Most were off a bit. For example, change a footing and balance and the variety of responses increased, by not attempting to follow the manuals to the letter. The artist didn't catch it all. Individuality is an element of surprise with a sword. Even today with photography, you will find interpretations of original manuals vary. Stick figures just wouldn't "cut" it.

I used to do lots of street sword fighting, and study of the old manuals with friends. Long sword, Italian two hand, rapier, cut and thrust, knives. Italian and English. It was so much FUN, but my body was wearing. Did lots of competition in SCA. Didn't do modern fencing, but trained by an Olympian pal. With various boots and toe shoes like barefoot too. Shoes make a big difference and the nudes were barefoot.
Jbee

[nudewalker]

My experience with women's lib was the mistaken idea of men that liberated meant sexually available. In other words a braless female was an invitation to touch her breasts. I swear, a lot of repressive laws are passed by those men who didn't understand the concept or the ideals.

As for fencing illustrations, the idea of them being done nude was to emphasize certain muscle and groups as they worked as a whole. There was an art major I knew who had me pose in various sporting activities so she could sketch the muscles that were used.