This week San Francisco had a bit of an identity crisis, I daresay. The Board of Supervisors voted to ban public nudity (purportedly with carve-outs for festivals). I suppose the one upside is that this is the first mention of the perineum in the codes of California. And, admittedly, it's unclear how dedicated the police department will be to enforcing this, particularly in the days surrounding Folsom and the like, but, geez, supes, did you forget where you lived?
This is an atrocity. I can see this sort of ban flying in St. Louis, but San Francisco is supposed to be the place where nudists and everyone else can come to fly the flag of whatever the fuck they are. Why are we taking that away? Purportedly it's to draw "some line of decency," but that reasoning presumes that nudity is, by definition, indecent, including where the nudists does nothing but stand still. Let me share an anecdote to display why that's insane:
A couple of months ago I was walking through the intersection of Castro and Market (I do this a lot). It was a lovely day, and perhaps consequently three nudists were loitering in the sunlight near the concrete barricades. Also standing nearby, consulting a map, was a young hetero couple with their three small kids, aged roughly 4-9. I had a bit of hesitation at the thought of all that peen in such close proximity to children before I realized that the parents were not at all concerned by the presence of the nudists and their children hadn't even seemed to notice. The kids weren't fixated on the swinging peens nearby in the least. I realized that children have no concept of whether nudity is right, wrong, offensive, acceptable, grotesque, inappropriate, etc., until their parents or their community teaches them it is any of those things. So why, after all this time, supes, have we decided that moral judgment is the city's to impose? It's pretty damn easy to avoid the two neighborhoods where the nudists play if you're one of our 75 year old citizens with some kind of Southern Baptist bent... so why can't the Castro continue to be a place that doesn't inflict moral judgements on personal expression?
This is a fail, supes. A grotesque, small-minded fail.
This is an atrocity. I can see this sort of ban flying in St. Louis, but San Francisco is supposed to be the place where nudists and everyone else can come to fly the flag of whatever the fuck they are. Why are we taking that away? Purportedly it's to draw "some line of decency," but that reasoning presumes that nudity is, by definition, indecent, including where the nudists does nothing but stand still. Let me share an anecdote to display why that's insane:
A couple of months ago I was walking through the intersection of Castro and Market (I do this a lot). It was a lovely day, and perhaps consequently three nudists were loitering in the sunlight near the concrete barricades. Also standing nearby, consulting a map, was a young hetero couple with their three small kids, aged roughly 4-9. I had a bit of hesitation at the thought of all that peen in such close proximity to children before I realized that the parents were not at all concerned by the presence of the nudists and their children hadn't even seemed to notice. The kids weren't fixated on the swinging peens nearby in the least. I realized that children have no concept of whether nudity is right, wrong, offensive, acceptable, grotesque, inappropriate, etc., until their parents or their community teaches them it is any of those things. So why, after all this time, supes, have we decided that moral judgment is the city's to impose? It's pretty damn easy to avoid the two neighborhoods where the nudists play if you're one of our 75 year old citizens with some kind of Southern Baptist bent... so why can't the Castro continue to be a place that doesn't inflict moral judgements on personal expression?
This is a fail, supes. A grotesque, small-minded fail.
