The Weekend Newds 5/23/09

• 89 year-old Jo Wallace remembers when fundraising was done in formal wear, but now she has posed nude for a calendar to raise money for a local women's shelter.
• Members of the Dunscar Golf Club in the UK raised £10,000 for breast cancer by selling a nude calendar.
• The nude body of a man has been found floating in the waters east of Wreck Beach in British Columbia, Canada.
• James Martin explores places to get naked in Europe.
• Nick Sortal of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel got naked for a yoga class. Instructor Ray Whetstone said, "If you can stand in front of a mirror naked 15 minutes a day and deal with the issues, you're going to be a very healthy person."
• Illinois has become the latest state to make "sexting" a crime.
• I'm not so sure I understand this story. A size 12 Cambridge student is in the finals of a modeling competition because "Studies have shown that 63 per cent of girls would rather be a topless model or lap dancer than a doctor, lawyer or teacher...I want to use this opportunity to show young girls that education is important, as someone that has prioritised my own education and worked really hard to get into Cambridge and get my degree." So...she's trying to put a stop to female objectification by posing in her bikini?
• Tom Lubbock critiques the great painting "Reclining Nude" by Jean-Francois Millet.
• A 12-year old boy in Dallas could face obscenity charges for having a nude photo on his cell phone.

  "It makes me uncomfortable to think about that," said Scott Mauro, a school counselor. "I mean, these are just little kids. I think it's just a cry for attention, just looking to give them attention."

• Time Out New York promotes the World Naked Bike Ride event through Central Park on June 20.
• I'm not so sure that this letter to Annie's Mailbox is legit.

  I looked around and saw a man in a hot tub. I assumed this was the guy, so I kept watching. Five minutes later, he got out of the hot tub and really was naked. I instantly got a headache and my eyes burned. I want to do something to prevent children from seeing him. I know he was in his own backyard, but you could see him clearly from the field. Would that count as public nudity? Do you think I should report him? — Scarred for Life

• You want to run around naked in public? Apparently all you have to do first is declare you are doing it for charity. 21 year-old Roy McGuinness was cheered on by family, friends and spectators has he rode "The Naked Bus" in Ireland to raise money for the MS Society.
• Model Amy Houlton, wearing only the paint of an artist's design, walked through downtown Toronto to promote the Canadian Bodypainting Championships.

  Amy poses next to the main doors, below huge images of CBC’s best-known presenters. Peter Mansbridge’s stern, 20-foot tall face seems to disapprove. Inside, an encounter with a school group elicits a mixed reaction. One girl dismisses it as “disgusting,” but some of the teenage boys can’t believe their luck: “Oh my God, was she naked?!”

• A poster of a toddler pretending to breastfeed her doll is eliciting both scorn and praise at a hospital in Manchester, England.
• 25 actors had to take off their clothes for 25 days during the filming of "The Girl Who Lived", the story of a young woman who survived the Auschwitz death camp during World War II.

  The volunteer cast and crew worked from 4pm to 4am to avoid work and study commitments and spent months taking part in trust exercises and workshops so the nude scenes could be filmed with ease.

• Former Albion mayor Michael Hadick, when asked about nude photos of him posted on a website, declared, "I am naked every day. It isn't a big deal."
• Guy Adams, commentator for The Independent, cannot understand America's strange morality laws.
• A Munich art exhibit celebrates 150 years of body images in photography.
• A Denver prosecutor says that a woman flashing her breasts in public is not free speech as protected by the First Amendment.

Vassalboro Allows Sexually-Oriented Businesses

Instead of banning nudity in the wake of a topless coffee shop opening within its town limits. Vassalboro Maine will instead seek to regulate "sexually-oriented businesses" by limiting location and manner of operations.

The new ordinance proposal says its aim is not to prohibit free speech or target sexually oriented businesses, but rather to address the "negative secondary effects" of such businesses. Those effects are described as "perceived decreases in value in both residential and commercial properties" and the way in which the businesses "can adversely affect the character and quality of life of a town and can be incompatible with surrounding uses."

The news article does not indicate if town officials have any proof of these alleged "secondary effects". Is it legal to pass ordinances based upon mere perceptions?

Ohio Court Rules Against Topfreedom

An Ohio Court of Appeals has ruled that free speech is not absolute, and since women's breasts are considered "erogenous zones", Lorien D. Bourne will not have her disorderly conduct conviction overturned.

The 3-0 opinion said that while the “court does agree that there are occasions where shirtless males are offensive; however, we cannot ignore the firmly rooted societal differences between male and female anatomy”.

“Rejecting the appellants’ equal protection arguments…..’We further note that the reason the female breast was explicitly enumerated as an ‘erogenous zone’ is the fact that female breasts are anatomically distinct and our society has viewed the public display of female breasts far more differently than male breasts. The female breast has traditionally been viewed as an erogenous zone. Because of the anatomical and societal differences, the government has an interest in preservation of the public decorum, decency and morals”.

This ruling is disturbing on many levels. The statement that shirtless males can sometimes be offensive is a giant step backwards for body acceptance in the United States. Does this mean that an obese man with large breasts can be singled out as being offensive? If someone complains about a shirtless man, will the police be under legal obligation to ask him to cover up?

Also, the government has no business defining "erogenous zones". The human body is loaded with erogenous zones, most of which are completely legal to expose in public, such as the mouth, the eyes, the ears, the nape of the neck, the legs, the feet, etc. One can argue that the most erogenous area of the human body is the lips, which women paint in order to accentuate specifically as a sexual attraction. Once the government gets into the business of controlling societal "norms" it threatens to become an American Taliban, or an Iranian police state, where officers regulate women's clothing through brutality, threats, and imprisonment.

It's just stunning to me that a woman sunbathing topfree in a park could be considered a threat to society, when there are so many greater and more serious issues facing us today. Not only is the media guilty of sexualizing the female breast, the government has now become its enabler, complicit in objectifying female anatomy for the pleasure of males.

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