The fact that there is no law in San Francisco to prevent people from walking around naked could be viewed as curious, I suppose. But it is no more curious than the news that a city supervisor is trying to rectify that oversight (or extreme tolerance) by banning nudity in restaurants and requiring naked people to put down some sort of cloth material down before sitting on public seats and benches.
Scott Wiener — and no, I’m not making this up — to the rescue.
(Aside: I read about this news in the New York Times only a few minutes after hearing a news report about a murder trial in the death of a woman named Ellie May. My immediate response was that, while I am against the death penalty (more about that in a future column), I might just make an exception for someone who would kill a person with that name.)
I’m not in position to judge Mr. Wiener’s motives, but I wonder why it is nudity in restaurants that offends him so. Wouldn’t a male at the dining table have an even better reason to put a napkin on his lap than most? (Surely a waitperson would be obliging enough to offer two napkins so he also has one to sit on.) And female nudists almost certainly would keep their offending protuberances in check, lest they come to rest atop the dinner plate. The potential for disaster is wide-ranging and truly frightening (hide the steak knives!).
Are bare bottoms by definition more unsanitary that clad ones? Trousers that might have been worn for weeks on end (where else?) would be deemed perfectly acceptable but freshly scrubbed buttocks itching for contact with cold concrete or scorching stainless steel would require a buffer?
Perhaps Wiener has been lobbied by restaurant owners who feel that public nudity has hurt their business. It’s possible, I suppose, that such customers make their frankfurters look abnormally small, their buns over-baked or their milk seem stale. But is the San Francisco public ready to have to pay to see naked people, like most of their American counterparts? And do they really want to see what is on offer at the pay-for-view joints — buff, lithe bodies capable of hanging upside-down without the slightest reverse sag that the free competition offers? Or male pride that needs puffing up by the insertion of dollar bills into the packaging material?
In actual fact, San Francisco does not give its citizens carte blanche to strut the stuff they were born with. Nudity cannot be accompanied by “lewd thoughts or acts” (presumably by those of the nudist and not the voyeur, er, viewer). Nor can the practice be undertaken “where there are present other persons to be offended or annoyed.”
According to the news story in the New York Times, citizen’s arrests are rare and police officers do not qualify as offended parties. It’s difficult to determine whether citizen’s arrests are rare because San Franciscans are unusually tolerant, or because they just can’t figure out how to grasp the offender in order to run him or her in.
I do know that when I witnessed a Doukhobor women’s protest many years ago, I doubt that I was in the minority when it didn’t strike me that they should have been arrested for their nudity. I was much too preoccupied in distancing myself from the bevy of naked seniors.
Put me down in agreement with a San Franciscan, a middle-aged female who routinely takes visitors from out of town to areas where naked folks often appear (apparently they like to stick to certain areas).
“Where are the supermodel types?” she asked. “We want to know why it’s always the people who should not be naked who get naked.”
Some of, I suppose, are content to remain spectators while others, Scott Wiener included, want to control the show.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.