The Freedom to Free Ball: On the Right to Bare Arse

Those who believe in personal freedom tend to base their politics on the maxim: “do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone else.” But what if the unsightly view of your jiggling, rippling, Burger King-packed posterior does hurt others? Should you have the right to publicly flash your corpulent derrière, or should the law force you to keep the junk inside your trunk?

 

Politicians favor the latter, not because they want to shame the morbidly overweight—although this is a righteous pursuit—but because they want A) teenage exhibitionist skanks to become discrete ladies, and B) teenage gang-bangers to become productive, belt-wearing members of society who don’t flash their underwear and then kill one another over the colors of those underwear. (By “gang-bangers,” I mean the criminal thug kind, not the FFM/MMF/MMFF/MMMMMF kind.)

 

For example, Louisiana ordinances criminalize the wearing of undergarments in a “lewd fashion,” punishing violators with five hundred dollar fines and six-month jail sentences. In Pine Lawn, Missouri, “sagging” is now punishable with three-month sentences, and the law extends to parents for allowing their adolescent offspring to dress provocatively. A Florida mayor, who moonlights—get it?—as a Christian minister, has proposed similar fines and sentences. In 2004 Virginia lawmakers tried to pass a statewide ban on sagging, the same year that they finally decriminalized oral sex—a prohibition that made me an incorrigible serial offender for the year that I lived in Alexandria.

 

The American Civil Liberties Union and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have condemned these laws for violating the First Amendment and targeting racial minorities. But when does self-expression become a public display of nudity? And should the latter qualify as a crime in the first place?

 

In 2006 a Maryland judge ruled that “mooning,” even though it’s “disgusting,” does not meet the definition of indecent exposure—punishable by three years in jail—because “any woman wearing a thong at the beach … would be guilty.” (The defense attorney joked that this decision would “bring comfort to all beachgoers and plumbers.”)

 

Obviously the prudes have their own agendas. Theocracies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Federal Communications Commission punish the slightest exhibition of human flesh; Republicans want to ban all forms of adult entertainment, turning everyone into children, and would happily stuff America’s female population into burqas.

 

But(t) on the other hand, if everyone walked around with their tushies on display, wouldn’t you want to puke? Haven’t you ever seen a documentary on nudists? They are nearly always five hundred pound slobs. And two hundred of those pounds are always from body hair. Who wants to look at such wretched displays of bloated, unrefined humanity?

 

If the nudists want to pay for their own land they can do whatever they want, but it would simply be revolting if they strolled around in public, forcing everyone to gaze at their capacious sausage thighs as they contaminate park benches, subway seats and restaurant chairs. Aren’t public toilets gross enough already?

 

We must find a compromise between our Constitution’s guarantee of free speech and our primal desire to not gaze at sagging, bloated flesh-bags whose favorite restaurant is Waffle House.

 

Simple: Nudity Permits.

 

The website HotOrNot.com allows visitors to rate the attractiveness of their online peers. We simply nationalize this service in the same way that socialist banana republics nationalize bananas, an appropriately phallic metaphor. If you want to walk around without any clothes on, you must first visit the Municipal Department of Hot or Not, where a panel of judges (let’s call them “boobiecrats”) will rate your physical appearance… no, wait, forget the boobiecrats. A jury of your peers. It will be just like high school, or—if you’re female—every single day of your life.

 

If the jury considers you a lean, sculpted, luscious specimen of sexxxiness, you shall receive a four-year Nudity Permit, which is promptly invalidated in cases of pregnancy or Hardee’s Monster ThickBurger ingestion. But if you look like the kind of fattened bovine that goes into a ThickBurger, you shall receive no such permit for your nausea-inducing body. You shall receive death by firing squad.

 

Let’s get serious: the truth is that moralists who want to outlaw sexy clothes are simply old, ugly, boring and jealous of our fine young asses. If they consider the human body so offensive that it merits criminalization, they should commence their legal crusades with long, hard, demoralizing looks into the mirror.