Harry's Freedom Foxhole - Let's Get Naked

Back in the good old days—I mean the days when humans were basically just upright-standing apes roaming over the savannah eating root vegetables and dying very easily—everyone had sex outdoors. Having sex indoors was not an option, because there was no “indoors.” Also, you spent your entire life with the same small nomadic band and probably didn’t wear clothes, so it wasn’t a big deal to see a couple people fucking whenever the mood struck. But then came shame and religion and clothes and buildings and privacy and whatnot, and now everyone gets in a tizzy whenever you and a friend(s) want to feel the sun and wind on your genitals.

The latest crackdown on people’s perfectly natural desire to bang one another as our noble upright-standing ape ancestors did comes from Mazomanie, Wisconsin, where there’s been something of an epidemic of people basically having a nonstop weed-fueled Midwestern-style fuckfest on the bucolic banks of a river. See, the state bought some land back in 1949, and it’s become a vacation destination for nudists thanks to its isolation and liberal prosecutors who don’t care if you want to dangle your sausage or parade your boobies on a private beach. The problem is, the nudists started going to the woods to fuck and smoke pot, and, amusingly, despite all kinds of efforts over the last 20 years—a Christian protest at the beach, a lawsuit, a proposed anti-nudity law, a ban on camping on the sandbar, a gate blocking cars from driving into the sexy, sexy woods—people still be gettin’ it on. In 2007, authorities closed off sections of the woods near the road and cut down brush to “eliminate cover,” and officers have started hiding themselves and using telescopes to look for “lewd behavior” like a bunch of perverts. Last year, in one nine-day period, cops made 42 arrests—26 for sex and 16 for drugs, apparently mostly pot.

The really funny thing about Wisconsin’s efforts to reduce the amount of semen coating its woodlands is it makes you wonder what is wrong with public nudity and fucking in forests in the first place. Standing outside someone’s window and jerking it, or flashing your junk to strange girls on the subway is a form of sexual assault, but two dudes standing quietly in the woods stroking each other? Who’s getting hurt by them, and what’s the public good of forcing them to get a room? Ruth Bender (who says of public sex, “I don’t know what fun they get out of that”) sued the state Department of Natural Resources to force people to put their darn clothes on because the al fresco fornication and nudity near her canoe-rental place was scaring away her customers, but it sounds like the problem was with her customers. What’re they saying, “Oh no, let’s not rent canoes there, we might see some titties”? Fucking pussies. If Ruth Bender was a real American entrepreneur she’d be selling tickets to a canoe tour of Wisconsin’s largest orgy.

Public nudity laws are very strange because they just enforce mores that are already built into our society, which is very strange—if public sex were legal, it’s not as if everyone would start fucking on parked cars a la Jimmy McNulty. (This only applies to Americans. The English would fuck outside all the time if they could, and need laws to restrain their drunken, indiscriminate libidos.) If I was smarter, I’d probably say something about nudity laws being a system of control that allows the government to legislate what we can and can’t do with our bodies even when our actions are inherently peaceful blah blah blah—but instead I’ll just say it’s messed up that some people in Wisconsin (who probably are kind of gross, let’s be real here) can’t blow each other in the woods.

The good part about our society being deeply ashamed and fearful of the human body is that getting naked is actually a powerful statement. Fifty-year-old John “A Huskier Lady Godiva” Brennan, from Portland, Oregon, got naked at an airport to protest the TSA’s absurd security policies (speaking of systems of control). He was led away by cops and charged with indecent exposure and disorderly conduct—he was by all accounts extremely polite and calm; “disorderly conduct” is the charge that means “you pissed the cops off.” The TSA can scan you with machines that reveal the contours of your bodies (and make transgender people uncomfortable as hell), they can frisk you, they can force you to take off your shoes and belt like you’re going to jail, but you can’t take more of your clothes off than they ask, got it?

Previously - The Republicans Want to Ban Porn

@HCheadle