Thursday, May 31, 2012

Going Naked

If you are a woman and you go out in public you have to cover more areas of your body than men do.

The law restricts you more than men, based on your genetics, not on anything you have done.

Your body has an effect on other people's behavior, and that is the basis of the regulation. It is not a prediction of your own behavior.

If you have a higher genetic probability of trouble making, in one more or less arbitrary way of categorization (race, ethnicity, sex, health) not of making other people trouble makers, placing new restrictions on you based on genetic predisposition to what is true of you alone, either in body or mind, would be something new. But people are worried. Current law does allow the argument you are better off dead because of what you will become, but supposedly for your own advantage, and only before you are born.

We are now, right now, each overwhelmingly probable corruptors of each other, rather than teachers. And if some lesser capacity, or greater capacity in the case of sexuality, is a sight other people don't want to see, is that because it is an implicit criticism of their unfortunate urge to lower themselves? We know nothing about this.

We would be better off free to choose whether, when, and how much to go naked, but encouraging each other to take care, adapt and manage the effect we have on others, on our own responsibility, creatively and for each other's good.