By sheer coincidence I came across this picture. It reminds me of the students who took their clothes off during anti-government protests in The Hague in the late 1980-ties.
The picture was made on September 2005 during an anti-war protest in the USA.
If I were a woman marching with this crowd, I’d probably be too modest to protest bare breasted. But I must admit that I do like the sight very much, and the message is brought across quite effectively. Yes, I’m all for it: breasts, NOT bombs.
Using nudeness as a way to protest is as old as we are, and maybe Lady Godiva was one of the most well known protesters to practice this. The weird thing in the upper picture is though, that this march is taking place in the USA, where prudence is as widely spread as the legs of the Penthouse Pets in the USA edition of that notorious magazine… or so I hear from regular readers.
Could it be that these two things connect: strong chastity in a culture can provoke blatant nudity when real attention for the cause is what is aimed for? The consequence would be that in Europe, nude protesting should be a rarity, since “us Europeans” are very liberal in showing ourselves.
Rather, in Europe, people take their clothes off to show that they are having a good time, like at all these Fun Parades which are held in the summer throughout Europe. The most famous example is probably the Love Parade in Berlin, where the second picture was taken.*
Are we – as a culture – deteriorating? I know that the many Muslims who come to this country are appalled by the Dutch lack of shame, which in its turn causes an integration-rift between the natives and the influx.The modest Muslims, who come to live here, have no intention at all to adapt to our “indecent lifestyle of filth, infidelity and disrespect”. The question is, can we blame them?
We can blame them for some of it, surely. But the resistance against our culture does not surprise me at all, although I prefer a liberal stance. I wouldn’t like our collective idea about nakedness to change too much. It would take away the lion share of enjoyment of events like the ones shown on the pictures. I would even want our liberal culture protected against regression towards a collective sense of prudence that was fashionable 50 years ago; even if – in a few years from now – Muslims will represent the largest religious brand in this country.
So this is where we come out: if Europeans in general and the Dutch in particular, are going back on their liberal cultures and become neo-decent and neo-boring because of that, I will organise a BIG protest, with imported protesters from the USA.
* I’m leaving the F.K.K. in the old D.D.R. out of the equation, because that seemed a weird aberration anyway. A totalitarian regime promoting public nudity is a peculiar cluster of cultural parameters to say the least.
