Fuss and bother

I've commented before on how anything involving sex or nudity can cause a ridiculous fuss out of all proportion to what's being objected to.

I keep thinking people will become more relaxed about what is perfectly harmless behaviour, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

What am I talking about? A long list of things. Breastfeeding in public. Kissing in public. Skimpy female clothing. Visible cleavage. Bra-less breasts. Naked male chests. Nudity on TV. The word vagina. Politicians having affairs. Older people's sex lives. Photos of women with stretch marks, scars or mastectomies.

There's still a huge tacit understanding about what is and what isn't allowed, and one step over the boundary can unleash a barely-concealed puritanism.

What the complaints usually amount to is a supposed flouting of "decency" (or sometimes public decency). But decency is such a vague concept it's almost meaningless.

Given my enthusiasm for kissing and hugging in public, I'm surprised nobody has ticked me off. But we in Northern Ireland are very keen to show public affection, even to people we've only just met. It's a delightful custom.

In the nude

What is it about nude statues that gets people so worked up? Time after time nude statues are declared to be obscene and have to be covered up or removed. What causes this absurd over-reaction?

The latest statue to incur vigorous protests is the statue of a mermaid at Monopoli in South East Italy. It's said to be unrealistic, with large breasts and a large bottom.

Adolfo Marciano, head teacher at the Luigi Rosso art school, whose students created the sculpture, said "The mermaid is like a tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy, especially in our country. It would have been very bad if we had represented a woman who was extremely skinny."

Anyway, who says a statue has to be "realistic"? The whole point of art surely is that artists can express themselves however they want. If art always had to be realistic, an awful lots of famous sculptures and paintings would have to be scrapped.

But this sort of controversy over an art work is a regular occurrence. The head teacher of a Florida school was forced to resign in March after parents complained they weren't told that lessons would feature Michelangelo's David, which one of them said was pornographic.

In 2002 the US Justice Department was reported to have spent thousands of dollars on curtains to hide a number of nude statues from photo ops. Three years later they changed their mind and removed the curtains.

So what is it about a nude artwork that gets people so steamed up? It's simply a depiction of the human body and all its physical features. Why do they find the human body so embarrassing? Have they never seen one before?

Pic: the controversial statue

Nudes and prudes

There's a general assumption nowadays that prudery has died out and all the old hang-ups about sex and nudity are a thing of the past. But it's not true. Everywhere you look sex and nudity are causing as much fuss as ever. If anything the squeamishness is getting worse.

A long list of things can prompt anything from tut-tutting to all-out uproar. Breastfeeding in public. Kissing in public. Over-revealing female clothing. Too much visible cleavage. Bra-less breasts. Naked male chests. Nudity on TV. The word vagina. Politicians having affairs. Older people's sex lives. Photos of women with stretch marks, scars or mastectomies.

Despite today's supposed laid-back attitudes, in fact there's still a vast unspoken code of conduct about what's permitted and what isn't, and one step over the boundary can unleash a barely-concealed puritanism.

Of course there should be limits on what we do or show in public. I don't think daily life would be improved if everyone strolled around in the nude and shagged wherever they felt like it. But a bit more tolerance and open-mindedness would avoid a lot of the sillier complaints.

Some protests are just balmy. Is it really outrageous to name a female body part? Or show your affection by kissing someone? Or feed your child as nature intended? Only if you're a fully paid-up member of the Permanently Offended community.

Given my enthusiasm for kissing and hugging in public, I'm surprised nobody has ticked me off, though I've had a few disapproving looks. I don't expose my chest to all and sundry, and not my legs either unless it's a scorching Aussie summer. And I've never had an affair, so I'm free from criticism on that score.

But I have to report that prudery is a long time dying.

Unsavoury kilts

It seems the old Scottish custom of not wearing anything under your kilt is no longer sacred. It's being attacked as unhygienic, childish and offensive.

Firms that hire out kilts are complaining that because of the no-underwear tradition, kilts are being returned to them in a disgusting state that upsets their staff, and they have to be thoroughly cleaned before they can be reused*. Some firms are now demanding underwear as a condition of hire.

Regular kilt-wearers however are having none of it. They say insisting on underwear is namby-pamby nonsense and undermines an age-old custom. Kilt-wearers like fresh air and freedom of movement around their intimate areas, and they can't see what all the fuss is about.

But I daresay their women folk aren't entirely happy with the scantily-clad tradition, and aren't too keen on the possibility of accidental exposure.

Personally I've never seen the attraction of kilts anyway. Rather ungainly, old-fashioned things, surely? Why hordes of women find them so exciting and dashing escapes me. If men fancy wearing a skirt (and why not, for heaven's sake?), how about something subtler and prettier?

I must say I'm seeing kilt-wearers in a different light after those squalid revelations from the hirers. I think I'll keep well away from anyone in a kilt in future for fear of unsavoury goings-on. Me, I'm definitely in the compulsory underwear camp. Good grief, lads, have you no sense of personal decency?

* That's the kilts, not the staff

Naked fury

Nude protests are catching on. Those intrepid souls who don't mind baring all their physical imperfect-ions are doing so to oppose a wide range of injustices.

The latest campaigners to shed their clothes are those angered by high apartment rents in Berlin. They visit apartments on offer, strip off and dance.

The protests are organised by a group called Hedonist International, which has also stormed a neo-Nazi pub.

Some estate agents called the police while others were more laid-back and laughed it off as a harmless amusement. But Berlin's socialist mayor was rattled enough to announce rent-capping in newly-gentrified districts.

There have been many other nude protests - against the fur trade in Dublin and Barcelona, office dress codes and airport full-body scanners in Berlin, political reforms in Mexico City, animal cruelty in Sydney, bullfighting in Pamplona and tree felling in Los Angeles.

Naked campaigning isn't favoured in Britain though. I guess people are either too embarrassed by their wobbly bits, they don't think anyone will take any notice (except dirty old men), or they don't want to die of frostbite.

I wouldn't mind stripping off myself if the cause was right. I couldn't care less about my wobbly bits, we all succumb to gravity sooner or later. I stripped off often enough in front of my fellow pupils at boarding school to lose any sense of awkwardness.

Maybe the traditional British stiff upper lip is more than a match for mass nudity. We'd just survey a line of bare buttocks while sipping our Starbucks latté and mutter casually "Some rather enticing curves. Work-outs or anorexia, I wonder?"

Pic: Protest against the fur trade in Barcelona. The placard reads: "How many lives for a coat?" Couldn't find a decent pic of the apartment protest.

Nudity

I've never had any problem with personal nudity. I've never been so embarrassed by my body that I'm desperate to conceal it.

It's not a particularly attractive body, just a common-or-garden male body with the usual bits and pieces. But when occasion has demanded, I've been quite willing to strip off and reveal all.

When I first joined the Boy Scouts, the other boys wanted to have a good look at me naked so I obliged. They were apparently satisfied enough with my accessories not to break into wild guffaws.

At boarding school the boys used to swim nude every morning and I always joined them without a qualm. Likewise after games I would happily undress to take a shower the same as the others. And no, despite all the stereotypes, there was no homosexuality whatever (I can't recall whether I was relieved or disappointed by that discovery).

I was never bothered about exposing my run-of-the-mill body to women. After all, how many women have a perfect body themselves? I always assumed that what we did was more important than whether I had the ideal physique.

Nor am I phased by nudists. What's the big deal about groups of people going naked? As long as it's discreet and within sensible limits, I don't see the problem. Though I've never been tempted to join in. The only two nudist beaches I've ever stumbled on, in Sydney and Vancouver, were both for gays, so I thought it advisable to keep my clothes on.

But really, why are people so hung-up about nudity? It's just the human body after all, just the packaging for what we are. Why be ashamed of it?

(Thinks: Perhaps I could interest a few other oldies in a male version of Calendar Girls??)