Prohibition Makes for Strange Bedfellows

It occurred to me while doing some online research for an article recently that it is a definite fact that prohibition makes for strange bedfellows. Allow me to elaborate.

Entering the word "nude", "nudity" or "nudists" as a Google search term returns predominantly pornographic sites. Some of the ones most frequently seen advertise things like;

• Naked singles on video
• Naked chicks
• Teen nudists
• 1000s of naked picture & videos - watch tons of sex totally free
• Nudists & Public Nudity Porn Links
• Nudist amatuer movie page (Porn site)
• Nude Teen Girls Blog
• Free porn movies and teen sex pictures
• Boobs, Ass, Stockings, Teens
• Free High Quality Porn
• Nude Girls Gone Wild

Doesn't it give you a feel for what a sick society we live in these days? Famous American essayist Walt Whitman once wrote;

"Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! - ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thoughts, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent."

- Walt Whitman, A Sun Bath - Nakedness

I have always found it difficult to reconcile the fact that the government extends consitutional freedom of speech protection to pornography and yet prohibits mere public nudity, criminalizing it as lewdness. It is difficult at best to comprehend how any sane, even marginally intelligent person could view simple, non-sexual nudity as an affront but have no apparent problem with the existence and proliferation of pornography.

Without pronouncing judgment on others, speaking for myself only, while I champion non-sexual nudity I have no interest in observing either pictorial or film depictions of people having sex together or engaging in self pleasure or provacative posing to draw attention to their genitalia. There is nothing wrong with sex but there is a time and place for everything and at least in my opinion, sex is a private matter that should be engaged in privately. I not only have no interest in seeing those things, I actually quite honestly would find it offensive to be non-consenually exposed to any of those things. Yet our government apparently believes it is my responsibility to avoid looking at it if it offends me and thus it is okay for it to exist ad naseum on the Internet and cable television channels. Doesn't in then make perfect sense that the government might make it an indivdual responsibility to turn the head by those who find mere, non-sexual public nudity to be offensive rather than empowering them to make a criminal complaint if they happen to encounter it?

Pornography and the apparent insatiable American appetite for it, is one of the main reasons that nudists and naturists must continually argue against the mythical linkage between nudity and sex and a primary explanation for why so many in society think that behind the walls of every nudist club there goes on a non-stop sexual orgy. The hyprocritcal, putitanical standards of modesty and decency in this country would be laughable if they were not at the same time so annoying, unhealthy and downright despicable.