Nudes in the news

[jbeegoode]

I'd like to read her papers, or muse. I'd bet that she has come up with some interesting ideas as a woman's perspective in liberation, equality and body liberation, considering the many perspectives in the movement, today.
Jbee

[nuduke]

As you can see from the pictures in the article the people in the background are wearing not only clothes but their academic gowns as well! This is typical of functions in Cambridge and Oxford especially of 'domestic' gatherings in colleges.  Good for Victoria Bateman - she is obviously not one who has body hang ups.  The big puzzle is why she chose that function and that attire.  She would have made as big an impact in terms of standout from the stuffy subfusc dress of the college common room, if she had worn, say, a clown outfit or a boiler suit or just had her breasts on show.  She was outrageously dressed for the event but not nude - her pubic region is covered and she was wearing a garment.  Using nudity to illustrate womens' choices, I rather feel, muddies the issue as those choices are in many areas other than dress.
John

[Greenbare Woods]

Uh huh. I imagine that the men at this event were wearing the standard male uniform--full coverage in some form, anyway. And how welcome would a deviation from that have been? All she's doing is the standard "women on display" format, just a bit more extreme than at the Academy Awards.

I assume that under British law, and given that it was indoors anyway, she wasn't running much risk of arrest. But then again, if it's "conduct likely to cause alarm and distress"--perhaps that could lead to trouble.

Would a man doing the same have been fired from his university job?   Probably. 

[nuduke]

Quite so, Bob.
I think perhaps women have freedoms already that men don't.

John

[Greenbare Woods]

I was recently reading an article about how the harassment of women exists even in the hallowed halls of science. Apparently, highly educated men will also behave like pubescent teenagers. I have read more than once of women scientists that have either made discoveries or achieved breakthrough research only to have tenured male colleagues take over and get credit.
Duane

Their first example female was dead, and they admit that the Nobel Committee never awards to dead scientists, male or female.  Then they claim sexist discrimination by the Nobel Committee.  Nonsense hate speech.

From that link: 

1943, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 while still a graduate student in radio astronomy at Cambridge
(cut)
The finding resulted in a Nobel Prize, but the 1974 award in physics went to Anthony Hewish—Bell Burnell's supervisor

In typical misleading anger the article pretends that somehow women grad students are being discriminated against.  NONSENSE. That is standard practice for men graduate students as well as women students.  My uncle, for example, invented a very profitable process for the oil business while a grad student.  His Professor and the Uni claimed and owned his invention.  The grad student is legally assisting the Professor doing his research.  Whatever he or she invents is legally the Professor's invention.  And, in fact, the Professor has supposedly been educating and steering the grad student.   So all the feminist sniveling in this article is hateful nonsense. 

[jbeegoode]

 Using nudity to illustrate womens' choices, I rather feel, muddies the issue as those choices are in many areas other than dress.
John

How do you find that so? I'm thinking that they are more intertwined. Costuming in socio/cultural sense of ones self, etc. Please, elaborate.

[BlueTrain]

The obituary of Turner Stokes appeared in the Washington Post. He was president of what was the ASA at the time for a couple of years in the 1980s and an activist for legal nude beaches. He was 90 and a local resident. One of his goals was to create a nude beach on Assateague Island on Virginia's Eastern Shore but the publicity that was generated resulted in an anti-nudity ordinance. After that, he moved to the Maryland side but park rangers began enforcing a state ban on public nudity.

[jbeegoode]

"The NAked Guy" in Berkley is another example of an activist, getting in the face of authorities, making publicity and creating anti-nudity laws in response. I couldn't help but think of these when I was reading about these new body freedom rulings in the Isles and people then actually practicing their rights.

Another example, was that young man walking nude down the street in Kansas. No one knew that there was no anti nudity law. They just assumed it. The local council managed to sweep the issue under the table by tabling a vote until things calmed down, I believe.

That's why I mention New York Topfree law and how little that the freedom is exercised. You make the freedom to do something and then slowly culture and social responses will change. That area of Virginia has been backward. Apparently it still is. It was probably a bad place to pick a battle.

The backlash is more manageable when people stop believing their fears that naked people will be everywhere and scratching their balls in public places, when reality is that a few will actually mind their own business.

We can't just sit back and take it. Nothing has changed by not making the attempt, assuming that we will lose, accepting the status quo. Getting ahead of ourselves is the mistake.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

As far as that place in Virginia being backward, I don't know. I have been nude on the beach there, however, something like 35 years ago. But if your goal is to have a legal nude beach, what better place than at the beach?

For a forum that (apparently) derived from a secret naturist forum, you should agree that in-your-face, confrontational nudity is going to backfire most of the time. I don't know how Stokes went about his campaigning but from the obituary, it was an interview in Playboy, of all places, that created the waves. There have been a few other places that used to be recognized as fairly safe places for outdoor nudity but over time, things presumably happened that pushed things over the edge and now those places are specifically posted as not allowing public nudity. All I can say is there's a difference between being nude on a public beach in broad daylight and a nude ramble in the backwoods up in the hills. All the same, there are probably still some good beaches to visit where you won't disturb anyone if you're willing to go the (literally) extra distance. But be warned: I know from personal experience that the beach patrols have very powerful binoculars.

[nuduke]

 Using nudity to illustrate womens' choices, I rather feel, muddies the issue as those choices are in many areas other than dress.
John

How do you find that so? I'm thinking that they are more intertwined. Costuming in socio/cultural sense of ones self, etc. Please, elaborate.

In the particular context, reading that the purpose of her attire was to illustrate a female making a choice, I felt that nudity was a bit of an odd choice to select.  Whilst it is indeed an example of a choice to dress as one likes,

nudity carries all sorts of other confusing connotations.  I

felt that nudity which prompts in many people, as we know, a Pavlovian reflex to see first the sexual connotations and assumptions of perverse behaviour, was maybe a poor choice to illustrate her point about the wider choice issues of gender equality and freedoms in that particular environment. 
What other choices could she have made in the circumstances that might better illustrate her argument at that gathering?  A different form of dress possibly.  But surely her point is not solely about dress - the it is about job opportunity, economic participation, equal pay, reproductive choices etc etc.  Perhaps a plaque or a badge might have prompted the conversation without the baggage of talking to a nearly nude woman in the college common room. 
Whilst I would heartily support her viewpoint that there should be equal life choices whatever your gender, or at least that choice should not be limited to one gender or the other, I think her choice of method to make the point was perhaps rather heavy handed and confusing. 
She makes the point about how people, particularly women, connote the body with sin and shame and she was, I guess, making the point about that - if she doesn't feel it is sin and shame to show your body (and I entirely agree, of course), why should anybody else?  So go to the meeting dressed in that way.  But in the same article and the same meeting her point was about far more than just dress sense and body acceptance.  So I felt that those other, probably more vital, aspects got sidelined by the inferior debate over whether one should see her tits over the sherry glass!
I wonder what the actual reception was in the room on that occasion?  The article is silent on this.  Is the picture indicative of the response of the gowned academics i.e. go to the other side of the room and ignore her?  Or was it just that the person taking the picture called her over and it looks as though she's isolated?  Or was this not an isolated incident?  Maybe she's routinely a little firecracker - always sparking up contention. Maybe the other academics all said "Hi Vicky!  What are you up to today? Oh dress protest this week is it?  Very good.  Better than last week's buckets of custard and ketchup for animal welfare, old girl!" and as usual they all turned round to discuss the latest philosophical paper by the college dean.
John

   

[jbeegoode]

I don't exactly know what you mean by "confrontational nudity." We all know that confrontation can backfire on us as a strategy. Perhaps you could explain that.

Taking the risk of being seen depends upon who and where you encounter. You are unlikely to meet someone on a trail that objects. When you increase the population around you, you would, by the odds, increase the likelihood of encountering the vocal odd fool that might object. That is numbers.

There is a certain sense of ownership and belonging inherent with more urban situations and psychologist that also may contribute to someone more likely to object. Some people generally dislike anything that seems out of place to them. These people don't do a very good job of questioning or intellectual processing. They do a lot of assuming and accepting social mores and habits.

So, depending on what you actually mean by the phrase, I probably could disagree and show you some numbers why. Whatever you are saying, you aren't supporting your statement. I suspect that you have no supportive evidence and are just calling something fact that you pulled out of an assumption hat. There are plenty of myths about nudity among the textile obsessionists.

 "All the same, there are probably still some good beaches to visit where you won't disturb anyone if you're willing to go the (literally) extra distance." There is an assumption of disturbing someone. Let alone that one is justifiably disturbed and not just a jerk, most people on a more remote beach location will not be alarmed, as is the story on a trail. If you do it on Miami beach, with all of those people, some one will not like it. Most don't care much, or they approve. I've got statistics for that one, which are somewhere in this forum.

Blue train, how is it that you are disturbed by someone enjoying anything nude? How is anyone disturbed by anyone being nude? Why would you would assume this?

There are very powerful binoculars. But then somebody has to use them for a purpose. If you are alone minding your own business on a beach nude, in most places you are disturbing no one, alarming no one and breaking no laws. That's what a beach patrol will see with those binoculars. No intent whatsoever. You are presenting, again, typical textile fear mongering as fact. Why do you spread fear mongering crap. Unreality. Is it that you want to discourage naturism, free range naturism and progress?

It is curious that Playboy of old had anything to do with this beach thing. It just associated the free beach, naturist population with the sexual objectification playboy mentality. Playboy got thrown under the counter away from the kids as some kind of adult entertainment by the same people who it confronts. With associations like playboy, these same influences will kill any nude beach as another nasty thing. Playboy was not a good place to promote a nude beach, but a good place to discuss body freedom and a good place to confront Playboy for its antiquated shortcomings. If that was the case. Playboy was a step into change that needed to happen at that time. Things are evolving socially from that point when Playboy made significant difference.
Jbee

 

[jbeegoode]

Yes, Nuduke, certainly we are left in the dark about the reaction. I think that it is certain that she got plenty of reaction of all sorts and had plenty of opportunity to discuss her point of view with all the broader connotations associated with body freedom and women's lib. I'm thinking that that was her purpose and it worked. When someone makes a bold costuming statement like that, men's eyes often glaze over and they listen. They may even ask, "What the hell are you doing?" and she has her opening.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

My comments are mostly based on my own experiences. Did I say I was disturbed by someone enjoying anything nude? If I did, I take it back. But sometimes other people are disturbed by naked people, to be sure. Otherwise, I doubt those signs I mentioned would have been put up. Don't assume away the problems by saying that it is unlikely that someone you meet on the trail would be bothered. I've had bad reactions when I was wearing shorts and no shirt. I've had the police called on me and I'm had warnings given to me by the beach patrol. That's what I base my assumptions on, past experiences as a prediction of future experiences. But there were only a few times that I came close to getting in trouble. They never stopped me from doing anything.

I didn't think "confrontational" was that difficult to understand. I'm not trying to spread fear, just telling you about my own experiences. The beach patrol was there to enforce the rules. Maybe it was the particular beach (North Carolina). Some people are very conservative, going on reactionary.

"Ownership" is an interesting way to put it. In the backcountry, particularly around certain hot springs, none of which I've visited, I understand that sometimes the custom is that the first ones there set the standards of dress. There are a few mentions in Park Service regulations (maybe Forest Service) where allowable nudity is alluded to.

Please stop turning everything I say upside down. Everything I mentioned is real. These things happened to me.

[nuduke]

JBee,
I am guilty of analysing but one aspect of the matter - i.e. the article as presented.  I realised this as I had fleshed out my opinion in my last post in response to your prompting but I had not gone further than that article.  So I looked up Victoria Bateman and she is a very publicly prominent figure and academic.  Her website expands considerably on her views and it appears that this article describes but one piece of campaigning in a well reasoned overall campaign that causes her to use her body to consistently make the point about personal choice and freedom. I recommend you and other readers have a look at her website http://vnbateman.com/index.html and possibly other google results.
I found this nugget which clearly explains her position:

It is through this public reaction to the naked body that we are truly able to judge the extent to which society is (or is not) comfortable with women taking control of their own bodies . Where society is disapproving, it serves to show that we still have a long way to go before women are free to use their bodies as they wish.

  I am reconsidering my own opinion therefore.  Whilst as a one off event her state of undress might be considered confusing to her overall proposition, as I explained in my last post, I now find that her repeated use of nudity and considerable media presence talking about her position puts this instance in the context of a much more intelligent and purposeful campaign. Perhaps more women AND MEN should join her in getting naked and challenging public reactions in carefully controlled circumstances, as Bateman does.  Those instances that she resorted to nudity to make the point were done in safe circumstances and pretty certainly well planned (i.e. being nude in a radio studio, being the subject of a nude portrait and the seclusion of the college common room). 
So I'm afraid I shall have to attenuate my opinion and side with Prof Bateman in her campaign of well chosen instances where she may use nudity to illustrate her views on freedom of women to make choices about their bodies.  Mark you, I look for the male colleague to Bateman and other women protesters for equality that might take up the cause and bring to the fore those areas where men suffer reciprocally

(but not Gough, please!!)

. 
John

[jbeegoode]

Thank-you for the link. I shall dig deeper. This sounds fresh and well thought out.
Jbee