Columnist Lezlie Lowe has noticed lately that fewer people seem to be comfortable being naked in change rooms.
The world is once again safe from the au naturel wandering of the Naked Rambler.
The 54-year-old Brit (given name, Stephen Gough) prefers to spend his time without clothes. He backpacks Europe that way. He once undressed during a flight from Southampton to Edinburgh.
His latest jail term, handed down Monday, is 16 months. But it’s likely to last longer, given that the former Royal Marine has spent much of the last six years with his behind behind bars for his unflagging nakedness.
The cycle goes like this: Gough is sent to prison for being naked and is repeatedly re-arrested and imprisoned for leaving prison naked at the end of his sentence.
“We can either end up living a life that others expect of us,” Gough wrote to a reporter at the Guardian newspaper, “or lives based on our own truth.”
I’m no naked rambler, but let me verge into what may sound like extreme naturist territory to deliver a truth of my own.
It’s OK to be naked.
It is especially OK to be naked in the change room of your local gym or pool, where people are meant, as the name suggests, to change. From one set of clothes to another. Getting, necessarily, naked in between.
I have noticed, lately, fewer naked people in change rooms.
Folks wear their smelly gym gear home, or cloister themselves in toilet stalls to remove their drippy bikinis.
Women crawl into full-size lockers to put on bras. Parents hold up towels to cover their children’s little naked bodies in family change rooms, frequently at the behest of the kids,
who’ve apparently learned that every adult is a potential pedophile, or, from their friends, that naked is weird.Oh, my, but it’s convenient.
The women I see who clumsily hide for fear of slipping a nip sure are going to a lot of trouble. They add minutes and discomfort to their changing time and subject their clothes to whatever horrors lay on the bathroom floor.
You know, whatever floats your boat.
But me? I’ll take the convenience of being nude any day.
Despite our Victorian-tinged memories, nakedness used to be more acceptable. I’m not going back to the first Olympics, either. I’ve had four men in their 60s who all grew up in different Maritime cities, one Halifax, tell me they used to swim naked at the YMCA. That was just what was done.
Will McBride Photograpahy
At risk of stating the obvious, naked is neither right nor wrong.
Naked is neutral. Naked is not a statement. Naked is neither boastful nor shameful.
Boastful is a common criticism of the comfortably naked. The online commenters on this column will, dollars-to-doughnuts, attack what they mistake to be vanity in the benign few who are really just without shame.
I certainly have no conceit. From my fleeting appreciation of the plebeian breasts I see in change rooms here and there, my boobs don’t look a heck of a lot different from anyone else’s. They are roundish; they are vaguely veiny; they are wilting without yet being completely despondent.
I’m not changing to put on a show. I’m changing because it’s a change room. It’s sense, not showboating.
As for the Naked Rambler, Stephen Gough, I can’t rightly say.
But the anti-social behaviour order that he’s contravened so very many times is clear.
Gough isn’t allowed to bare his buttocks or genitals in public, unless for a medical examination, on a nude beach or — wait for it — in a change room.
Surely we can all get behind that. :2345