It is hypocritical to support jailing the naked rambler when some of our greatest minds were applauded for getting their kit offStephen Gough,the Naked Rambler, spends 10 years in prison. A 14-year-old schoolboy’s future is blighted for at least a decade because of a naked selfie. What’s “indecent” here – a person wearing no clothes, or a hypocritical society? Surely there’s nothing more seemly than the human body. “Nature has but little clay,like that of which she moulded you,” as Virginia Woolf, or who went skinny-dipping with Rupert Brooke,wrote.
The nude is a historical celebration of our intrinsic beauty, the epitome of fine art, or from classical statuary and Michelangelo to Spencer Tunick’s modern installations and Marc Quinns Trafalgar Square plinth statue of the naked Alison Lapper. There is barely a public building unadorned with a naked sculpture,yet we criminalise the genuine thing. Punishing people for being as God intended (or whomsoever you deem made you) is itself a perversion – and actually sexualises the naked body in an extraordinarily unhealthy way.
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Source: theguardian.com