"I heard that some other gyms are offering courses on 'pole-dancing' as a sport, so I thought: Why not bring something new to the market?"

The new idea for the gym: naked Sunday. Sounds dangerous. All those machines. And not too clean. Even if you avoided the place on Sunday, would you want to use the machines on Monday?

Nude exercisers would be required to put towels down on weight machines and to use disposable seat covers while riding bikes. All machines would be cleaned and disinfected afterward. "We clean them every day anyway"

So you're going to need a layer of material between you and the machines. Shouldn't that be pants?

And another thing, nudes might look reasonably okay strolling around in the sunlight or frolicking in a pool, but do you really want to see them straining with weight machines? Remember that old "Seinfeld" episode, the one where he has a girlfriend who's always naked in the apartment:

JERRY: Coughing... naked... It's a turn-off, man.

GEORGE: Everything goes with naked.

JERRY: When you cough, there are thousands of unseen muscles that suddenly spring into action. It's like watching that fat guy catch a cannonball in his stomach in slow motion.

GEORGE: Oh, you spoiled, spoiled man. Do you now how much mental energy I expend just trying to picture women naked?

JERRY: But the thing you don't realize is that there's good naked and bad naked. Naked hair brushing, good; naked crouching, bad.

Naked crouching to pick up a heavy weight? Really, really bad and horrible.

MELISSA: You got anything to snack on?

JERRY: Uhh...

MELISSA: (grabbing the pickle jar and straining to open it) Oh, pickles! Unnhhhh! It's a tough one.

JERRY: Look, please stop! Let me help you with that!

MELISSA: (finally opening the jar) Unnnnh! Oooh. That's gonna leave a welt. Look at that.

JERRY: (leaving the room) I can't. I can't look anymore. I-I-I've seen too much....

...

JERRY: Well, I hit the wall yesterday with Lady Godiva. She did a full body flex on a pickle jar.

I'm picturing men and not women going for this. But it's the men I'm worried about getting... entangled in the machines.

By the way, I see that the "Seinfeld" script never uses the word "nude." It's "naked" every single time. There must be some serious comic research on which words are funnier, and "naked" is funnier than "nude." "Nudes" are serious -- they pose for artists, they have a solemnity and purpose. "Naked" -- it's just an adjective with no corresponding noun. You have to say "naked people." "Naked" has much more potential to be embarrassing and ridiculous.

Motivated by "the absurdity" of the TSA trying to see him naked via machine, John E. Brennan got real-flesh naked... and arrested... and prosecuted.

And acquitted... by an Oregon state judge:

Citing a 1985 state appeals court ruling stating that nudity laws don't apply in cases of protest, [Multnomah County judge David] Rees said, "It is the speech itself that the state is seeking to punish, and that it cannot do...."

Brennan said he knew he wasn't breaking the law when he dropped trou partly from his experience riding in Rose City's annual Naked Bike Ride, during which Portland cops traditionally look the other way....

"The irony that they want to see me naked, but I don't get to take off my clothes off. You have all these machines that pretend to do it."

From a legal standpoint, I have a few questions. Is Rees saying that the state only prosecuted him because he was expressing an opinion via nakedness or that a consistently applied anti-nakedness law must have an exception for people who want to use nakedness as a way of expressing an opinion? Also, if a city allows one naked protest, does that mean — under Oregon law — that people can take their clothes off anywhere — in Oregon — as long as they're trying to say something via nakedness?

Here's some more detail about nudity in Portland, which might like a reputation as the "Naked City."

In recent years, Portland police have taken a reserved approach when they encounter residents in the nude. They receive 9-1-1 calls about naked people in public "off and on" and especially in the summer, said Sgt. Pete Simpson. Police will use nudity laws to pursue charges against people caught urinating or defecating in public, or having sex in cars, on lawns or in full view of others.

But how about those who are naked for the sheer sake of being naked? "We don't necessarily encourage people to be naked in public, but generally speaking ...being nude in public is not enough to go to jail," Simpson said. "You've got to be doing something more."

Case-in-point, each year officers look the other way when thousands fill the streets for the World Naked Bike Ride, he said, "because of the sheer number of naked people."

Pick a policy and be consistent. I remember the time last year when I was down at the Capitol Square here in Madison, checking out another anti-Scott-Walker protest, talking to a man on the street, and the naked bike riders suddenly appeared:



"That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"

(That video of mine includes a racial analysis of the naked bikers and — if you watch to the end — an Ayn Rand point of view.)

"The Naked and the Nude."

I was just talking about the naked/nude distinction, a propos of some blather on NPR. The NPR position, which I called "so NPR" was: "In fine art, the female body is a nude. In not-so-fine art, she's naked."

A reader emailed:

From my high school days, I recall a line from a poem contrasting naked and nude. Through the magic of the Internet, I am able to retrieve the entire poem. Note that the poet, Robert Graves no less, takes the exact opposite view of the article you cited in your most recent post.

Robert Graves has been in his grave for almost 30 years, and he was born nearly 120 years ago, and yet copyright law is such that I feel I shouldn't copy the whole poem. Counteracting that feeling — and isn't law a feeling? — is the fact that the poem can be found all over the place on the internet, including — I see now — in the comments at the NPR story. So, with all due respect to Sonny Bono and with near certainty that I'm doing the heirs of Robert Graves a favor, let's read the poem. Remember, the question on the floor is whether Graves takes "the exact opposite view" from NPR.

I'm offended by my juice bottle. I was annoyed when the mango juice sold in the Law School snack bar changed its name from Fantasia (no connection to American Idol) to Naked. When I'm consuming liquid, I don't want to contemplate nakedness. That's just wrong: why are you making me think of bodily fluids? For a year, I refused to buy the drink I had been buying for years. Today, I bought one, and I have a number of additional complaints about the packaging.

1. The full name of the juice is "Naked Superfood Food-Juice/Mighty Mango-go." That's too heavy on the assertion that the drink is also a food (big news) and too un-clever in the idea of jazzing up mango by repeating the "go." "Food food" "go go"--and naked! I'm sorry, I don't even want a drink that exciting.

2. Under the ridiculous name it says, "It's an anti-ox mango-fruit-tango!" First of all, I don't need ox repellent. There are no oxen in these parts. Second, it's not clever enough to combine mango and tango especially since you didn't resist mango and go one line up on your packaging. It's like you brainstormed about "mango," then just used all your ideas. (Hey, how about "Man, go!"). Third, mango is also a fruit, so technically, you should say "It's an anti-ox mango-nonmango fruit-tango!"

3. Then it says "Get Naked! 'cause Life is Sweet Enough!" That's not even positive. You're saying your juice is sour? You're going to make my life worse, apparently, and you're also injecting sex into the subject of some juice you want me to drink. That's not good!

4. On the side, it directs me to "SHAKE & CHUG." Okay, fine to tell me to shake it. It needs shaking. But telling me the attitude I'm supposed to adopt while drinking and dictating a speed? That's an irritating intrusion into my lunchtime demeanor.

5. Elsewhere, it says: "With extra A & C, plus Vitamin E and Selenium, every velvety-smooth mouthful of this tropical treat helps you fight free radicals without swinging a punch." Now, you're mixing incomprehensible science, sexual innuendo, and weird political humor. That's just a mess!

It doesn't seem to taste as good as when they called it Fantasia and the packaging had a mild psychedelic theme. I guess they thought they needed to update it. (Or did Disney threaten to sue them?) Maybe they decided they needed to get men to buy it. I really can't understand, but it seems as though they just had a big jumble of motivations and really just didn't think about anything clearly.

UPDATE--CHRIS OFFERS A CORRECTION: "Fantasia did not change its name to Naked. They are two completely different companies. Naked put Fantasia out of business by making deals with all the stores to sell their product and not sell Fantasia." Yeah, the people who sell it kept asserting it was the same thing, but it really doesn't seem to be. So I guess Naked tasting worse wasn't all my subjective reaction to offensive packaging. I won't keep buying it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader credits Naked with trying for a Dr. Bronner's Soap kind of effect. That old too-much-on-the-label approach to cleverness is very much a late 60s/early 70s sort of ethos, which I find hard to see in Naked, because it replaced my beloved Fantasia, which was had a tastefully psychedelic label. That Dr. Bronner's Soap sort of humor was adopted by Madison Avenue when products got names like Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. Now if Naked had called itself Why The Hell Isn't This Fantasia, I would have found it amusing.

"Germans love to get naked. They have been getting naked in public for over a hundred years..."

"... when early naturists rebelled against the grime of industrialization and then the mass slaughter of World War I.... [E]ntire stretches of German waterfronts are designated as nudist beaches. There is a nudist hiking trail. There are sporting events from nude yoga to nude sledding. German saunas are mixed and naked. People regularly take their clothes off on television, too.... 'It’s all about freedom,' said John C. Kornblum, a former United States ambassador to Germany, who has lived here on and off since the 1960s, and was once shouted at by a naked German for not taking off his swimming shorts in a whirlpool. 'Germans are both afraid of freedom and deeply desire it,' Mr. Kornblum said. 'But hierarchy and rules are so embedded that direct political or social dissonance is simply not thinkable. When people walk down the beach naked, it allows them to feel a little rebellious,' he said.... One key to Germany’s relaxed attitude toward nudity, said Professor [Maren] Möhring [a cultural historian and nudism expert at Leipzig University], is that from the start nudism was sold as something utterly asexual. Bikinis, the argument went, sexualize the body. 'Nudism is about the cult of the natural,' she explained. Or as Stefan Wolle put it: 'It’s the most unerotic thing in the world.'"

From "A Very German Idea of Freedom: Nude Ping-Pong, Nude Sledding, Nude Just About Anything" (NYT)(fit-to-print photos at the link).

This gets my "men in shorts" tag. My objection to shorts is long, but I don't think I've ever before blogged the objection to shorts in the form of you ought to be naked.

What's your personal history of being outdoors naked? I believe that I have never been outdoors naked! Is that possible?

If you were both afraid of freedom and deeply desirous of it, would you hit upon the solution of going outdoors naked?

"One day [Trump] might walk to Marine One stark naked and we’ll all just say: 'This is the end. It has finally happened.'"

That quote from "Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio" ends Maureen Dowd's new column, "The Naked Truth About Trump."

Why all this talk about Trump naked? I'm not seeing the old Bob Dylan quote — "But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked" — so what is it?

Trump is an attention addict, and now he’s in a position to get all the attention in the world, as long as he keeps those sirens blaring. 

Mm. Yeah. So... are you going to say that Trump is so desperate for attention that if all else failed, he'd get naked?

I will keep reading, so you don't have to. Hang on.

CNN has been on a constant Breaking News Alert for months. And we are Trump addicts, hooked on the hyperventilating rush of wild stories and all the great things that accrue from playing Beowulf to Trump’s Grendel.

As we pat ourselves on the back, though, for the grueling hours and Pulitzer-quality scoops, we should remember one thing: Even if we vanished tomorrow, Trump would probably end up in the same place.

You could put a nanny cam on the guy and leave the room, and he would crash out of his high chair. He incriminates himself faster than we can incriminate him. And he surrounds himself, in the Trumpland of Misfit Toys, with playmates who have that same perverse gift for self-incrimination and immolation....

Well, that's kind of a word salad, and I don't know if that's Pulitzer quality, but you know Maureen Dowd did win a Pulitzer Prize. It was back in 1999: "For her fresh and insightful columns on the impact of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky."

Back to the "Naked Truth About Trump" column. I'm still waiting to see the justification for talking about Naked Trump:

“He needs the excitement,” says Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “Without the drama and the crisis and the powerful opponent, he’d be just another guy.”

Okay. That makes sense. What follows, the end of the column, is D’Antonio's comparison of Trump to Jimmy Piersall, a baseball player who had a mental breakdown and later wrote: "Probably the best thing that happened to me was going nuts. It brought people out to the ballpark to get a look at me.”

D'Antonio continues, and this is the last paragraph of the column:

“That may wind up happening with Trump,” D’Antonio says. “One day he might walk to Marine One stark naked and we’ll all just say: ‘This is the end. It has finally happened.’”

"That may wind up happening with Trump" — in other words, Trump might have a mental breakdown. The nakedness is just D'Antonio's idea of what a person having a mental breakdown might do. I don't like to see this kind of disrespect for people with mental illness. I think stripping off your clothes and walking in public is something that a person having a mental breakdown might do. In fact, I once saw that happen to a man (from my apartment window in NYC in the 1970s).

Trump's problems and quirks are not about the troubles of the truly mentally ill. The Jimmy Piersall business is just a pointless detour, and the word "naked" in the column title is the kind of desperate plea for attention that the column seems to want to deplore.

"She does not feel self-conscious when she is on stage. It is only when she returns to the wings that she feels a little shy."

I'm reading "Why I’m performing Wagner naked at the Royal Opera aged 81/Illona Linthwaite won’t let being nude in front of 2,200 people stop her from defying the ‘bad press’ given to older women" (London Times).

“The curtain goes up and there’s nothing happening, it’s just me. I thought that was really frightening and then when it happened, I thought, actually, this is brilliant,” she said.

The role is Erda, in "Siegfried."

Erda is usually “frocked her up to the nines” in gossamer gowns, Linthwaite said, but Barrie Kosky, the director, wanted the octogenarian’s body to symbolise nature and remind the audience of their mortality.... 

That's the director's view — an old woman reminds you of death — not the old woman's. She thinks she's there to remind you of life: 

She thinks her performance is something of a political act in a country she views as “spiritually arid” for its lack of empathy towards older people. Ultimately, she wants the audience to look at her and see the future not as a tragedy, but an adventure. She wants people to feel: “Hey, I’m looking forward to 80.”

I asked Grok: "If you saw Erda in 'Siegfried' portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?" [ADDED: The actual full question was "What views are attributed to the character Erda in 'Siegfried' and if you saw her portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?"

Answer:

"Not even 48 hours after word got out a 43-foot-tall nude effigy of Donald Trump hung suspended from a construction crane, the indecent artwork was gone."

"But for most of Saturday and Sunday, a mile or two off Interstate 15, a few hundred yards from the always-bustling Love’s Travel Stop just north of Sin City, the statue had people stopping and staring.... [T]he statue was what some would call 'anatomically correct,' displaying the unknown artist’s concept of the very public billionaire’s private parts.... Alex Lannin, a 53-year-old special-education teacher in Las Vegas, brought Spirit Airlines flight attendant Honey Hunter, 27, of Spokane, Wash., to view the piece. 'I would say [it’s] very creative, like a piece of artwork, you know,' Hunter said.... Real-estate professional Clem Zeroli, 25, brought his girlfriend Tommi Alexander, 24, to pose together for a selfie at the site.... 'It’s not very respectful,” Zeroli said, “but I think it’s kind of funny. Any publicity is good publicity.'"

From "Pop-up exhibit? 43-foot naked Nevada Trump effigy vanishes after roadside ruckus" (NY Post).

We've been through this before.

I blogged naked Donald Trump effigies on August 19, 2016. There were 5, simultaneously, in 5 difference cities. I said: "The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on 'Crossfire' in 1986.... '[Brutality] is already in politics....'"

And on October 18, 2016, I had "Gender equality: Naked statue division": "In August, we saw the naked Trump statue set up in Union Square in NYC, and today we get the naked Hillary statue at the Bowling Green subway entrance in downtown Manhattan."

What goes around comes around as they say, and I'm not encouraging the creation of retaliatory naked statuary. I'll just quote Bob Dylan again: "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."

"When he was the Naked Guy, he was completely sane."

The NYT Magazine has its end-of-the-year set of articles about various people who died in the past year. The one that caught my eye was the Naked Guy (Andrew Martinez):

[A]s a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Martinez... ate his meals nude. He went to parties nude. He even attended class nude....

It was easy to dismiss his behavior as a silly stunt, but to those who knew him, Martinez was guided by an endearing, if naïve, sort of undergraduate idealism. Raised in a family that refused to buy clothing with designer labels, he now argued that all clothes were a form of repression and that by not wearing them he was making people think about the coercive nature of convention. “Our purpose is to prove that people define normalcy in their own terms,” Martinez said at a “nude-in” he staged in 1992 at Berkeley, during which more than two dozen people disrobed.

The nude-in made the Naked Guy a media favorite. The feminist writer Naomi Wolf hailed Martinez for making himself “more vulnerable to the eye than women were.”

(Typical Wolfish bilge.)

[I]n the fall of 1992, the school instituted a dress code mandating that students wear clothing in public. Martinez quickly ran afoul of the rule, and after he showed up naked for a disciplinary hearing, he was expelled.

Things go very bad for Martinez after this point, and not just because the school kicked him out. The poor man, who became a media darling, really was mentally ill. He suffered for many years, and, in the end, killed himself.

Until his death, Martinez’s family and friends did their best to keep his mental illness a secret. This was at his request. “Andrew did not want people to know about his illness,” his mother said, “because then they would think he was crazy the whole time.” In his moments of lucidity, there was one thing he desperately wanted to convey: “When he was the Naked Guy,” one friend said, “he was completely sane.”

This is very sad, including the poignant way his mother and friend seem to think that if only he had been allowed to live amongst us in the nude, he would have kept it together.

Take this, brother, may it serve you well
Maybe it's nothing
What, what oh...
Maybe, even then, impervious in London
...Could be difficult thing...
It's quick like rush for peace because it's so much
Like being naked
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
It's alright
If, you've become naked
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that nixon

Well, is this NSFW?

It's Susan Hallowell, the director of the Transportation Security Administration's security laboratory, as X-rayed by the "backscatter" machine. She's willing to appear in this form, so why not you? What's worse, that or a pat-down search? Take your pick.

This reminds me of the discussion of X-Ray glasses in Bill Bryson's new memoir of his boyhood. Wouldn't people look creepy, seen naked under their clothes? They wouldn't look like a naked person, because the clothes would be smooshing various parts of their body in strange ways. (And speaking of creepy: "Do I Creep You Out?" (via Drawn!).)

Then there's this book, "Seeing Through Clothes," that contends that paintings of nudes tend to do just that, depict the bodies pushed into a form that could only be achieved with a corset or some such device.

Nude people. You don't really want to see them. Believe me.

AND: I'm still going to watch "Positively Naked" on Cinemax tonight:

On an early morning in March 2004 some 85 adults gathered at a restaurant in Manhattan's meatpacking district, removed their clothes and posed for Mr. Tunick's camera. Arlene Donnelly Nelson and David Nelson's moving 38-minute documentary, to be shown tonight on Cinemax to commemorate World AIDS Day, captures the moment gracefully.

Like a lot of their fellow human beings, some of these men and women are a little apprehensive about revealing their naked bodies to total strangers, not to mention the world. One man says he is much more nervous about showing his distended abdomen (a side effect of medical treatment) than his penis. Many seem nervous at first but soon relax into the equality that nakedness creates. Not surprisingly, one man reports "a sense of camaraderie" in the experience.

At first the sight of scores of naked adults milling about and looking confused about what is expected of them bears an unsettling resemblance to a scene from a Holocaust film. But as the photo session proceeds, an energizing dignity takes hold. Neither the documentary nor the magazine cover photograph focuses on genitalia. The scene really does convey, as publicity materials suggest, the spirit within the flesh.

We'll see if it's quite as spiritual as all that. I tend to doubt it. I hate the idea that it's supposed to be profound because we're told it's about AIDS, as was done so often years ago.

ADDED: "The equality that nakedness creates"??

UPDATE: I've now watched the documentary "Positively Naked," and, despite all the talk about an art "installation," it was very much a documentary about people living with HIV/AIDS. An art-focused documentary would have been entirely different. I'm not knocking it for using AIDS to add weight to art, because it wasn't enough about art. It was about AIDs, and the feelings of the people who got naked and photographed were the subject of the documentary. Yes, photography on this level is art, but there was no pomposity about this art, and Tunick was an appealing and reasonably modest character. He wasn't at all like the stereotypical "installation" artist. As far as the nudity, it was really the standard nudist material. Getting nude in a group has some meaning. It's not art. It's a psychological phenomenon that isn't edgy or new in any way. So basically, this was a conventional documentary about struggling individuals. They also got nude and posed for a big photograph. But there was no pretension about the quality of the photography as art. The emphasis was entirely on the camaraderie. Nice. I wouldn't have watched it if I'd known what this was going to be, but it's perfectly fine for what it set out to do. Really, I would have preferred a full-of-himself artist revealing a lack of sensitivity toward the subject, but that's speaking only of the documentary I'd like to watch. Tunick seems like a decent guy, and that's a good enough thing in itself.

"Biden is also known to swim naked."

Said the commenter Kevin, at my post about President Theodore Roosevelt wading, naked, in winter, in Rock Creek Park, where passersby might look on.

That made me want to look back at my post on the subject — here it is, February 17, 2021 — because I seem to remember thinking — while others evinced outrage — that it's fine and not sexual behavior to swim naked in your own pool, and if you're stuck with Secret Service protection, it's their job to endure it stoically. I'd quoted Biden:

"[L]iving in the White House.... it's a little like a gilded cage.... The vice president's residence is totally different. You're on 80 acres overlooking the rest of the city. And you can walk out. There's a swimming pool. You can walk off the porch in the summer and jump in a pool and go into work...."

I said: 

"A naked man broke into a Downtown apartment... a white man in his late 30s to early 40s, about 6 feet, 2 inches tall, very skinny and very tanned."

From "Naked burglar awakens Downtown resident, steals cash, Madison police say" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Why would you commit burglary naked? This happened at 6:15 a.m. Sunrise was 6:24, so it was already light out. The resident was asleep, and "When the naked man woke the resident, he told the resident he just wanted to wake him up." Naked man then asked for cash and got it. I note that with a naked man, you can see that he doesn't have a weapon and that he's not really mentally with it. Would you give him cash?

"'This is Bush v. Gore all over again,' one friend said as we struggled to absorb the news last Friday afternoon."

"'No,' I replied. 'It’s worse.'"

Oh? Is that an admission from Linda Greenhouse that Bush v. Gore wasn't really all that bad? Actually, yes!

In the inconclusive aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, a growing sense of urgency, even crisis, gave rise to a plausible argument that someone had better do something soon to find out who would be the next president. True, a federal statute on the books defined the “someone” as Congress, but the Bush forces got to the Supreme Court first with a case that fell within the court’s jurisdiction. The 5-to-4 decision to stop the Florida recount had the effect of calling the election for the governor of Texas, George W. Bush. I disagreed with the decision and considered the contorted way the majority deployed the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee to be ludicrous. But in the years since, I’ve often felt like the last progressive willing to defend the court for getting involved when it did.

That’s not the case here. There was no urgency....

"Here" = King v. Burwell. That's the new Obamacare case that's freaking people out.

This is a naked power grab by conservative justices who two years ago just missed killing the Affordable Care Act in its cradle, before it fully took effect.

Naked power grab? It's a naked power grab to grant review of a case that's been decided by a Court of Appeals panel, just because there's no split in the circuits? The Supreme Court has discretion over whether to grant certiorari, and its own rule on "Considerations Governing Review on Writ of Certiorari" refers to "compelling reasons," then lists a few things that it says are "neither controlling nor fully measuring the Court's discretion" but that "indicate the character of the reasons the Court considers." One of the things on the list is a split in what different courts have said about federal law. But another is: "a United States court of appeals has decided an important question of federal law that has not been, but should be, settled by this Court." So: It's an important question. Where's the power grab — naked or clothed?

The nakedness metaphor must have really stood out to the headline writer. The piece is called "Law in the Raw." Greenhouse doesn't like that the Supreme Court inserted itself — its naked, grabby self — into the controversy when there was going to be a rehearing by the full D.C. Court of Appeals (which had vacated the judgment of the 3-judge panel). But if it's an important question that in the end the Supreme Court is going to resolve, maybe it's also important not to drag things out. Get it resolved so we can move forward either knowing things need to be redone or freed from the cloud of possible illegality.

But Greenhouse's real complaint is that she — like many others — reads the Court's impatience as revealing the opinion on the merits: "There is simply no way to describe what the court did last Friday as a neutral act... [T]he justices have blown their own cover...." By "the justices," she means the 4 Justices she presumes voted to grant review:

Certainly Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the four who two years ago would have invalidated not only the individual mandate but the entire law — voted to hear King v. Burwell....

An intriguing question is whether there was a fifth vote as well, from the chief justice. I have no idea, although I can’t imagine why he would think that taking this case was either in the court’s interest or in his own; just two months ago, at a public appearance at the University of Nebraska, he expressed concern that the “partisan rancor” of Washington could spill over onto the court.

Wait! Taking cases based on self-interest actually would be naked power-grabbing. I love the way Greenhouse signals to Roberts what he needs to do to win the respect of the legal elite, not that he can ever really have it. He can have a little, and, you know, sometimes a little love, with true love withheld, is just what keeps a love-seeker pursuing love... nakedly grabbing.

We were already "more naked, as a nation, than we've ever been" — which is why we're accepting the airport naked-body scanners.

Asserts Libby Copeland:

We are more naked, as a nation, than we've ever been. We are forever baring our souls, revealing the mundane and the sacred. We are naked in our curiosity about the semi-famous and the strange, we are naked in our aspirations (to be semi-famous, even for something strange), we are naked online - or, at least, considerably more exposed than we tend to realize.

All of which may help explain why most Americans seem unconcerned about those full-body airport scanners, the ones that see under your clothes. In an existential sense, we are used to this sort of thing. Go on, take a gander, we seem to be saying. We have nothing to hide.

So if I choose to reveal myself in various ways, I will accept someone else forcing me to reveal myself? That's like the old and much-maligned argument that if a woman is sexually active, then raping her isn't such a serious crime — and that it's impossible to rape a prostitute.

"I know he brought you into his office to show you porn, I know he made sexual innuendos to you. I know this because you told me so in DC..."

"... and you even used the words sexual harassment. You said you would warn off other women thinking of clerking for him. And if there’s a woman out there he harassed worse than you, do you really want to be pitted against her? Because that’s what it would be. I’m worried that this is what he’s asking you to do — to be the female, intelligent face of his defense and make whoever it is accusing him look like a stupid slut, and then he hopefully never has to actually address those allegations."

Wrote "fellow romance novelist Eve Ortega" to Heidi Bond, who clerked for 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski and "who went on to clerk for the Supreme Court and now works as a romance novelist writing under the name Courtney Milan," quoted in the WaPo article "Prominent appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski accused of sexual misconduct."

Bond is now saying that the judge "called her into his office several times and pulled up pornography on his computer, asking if she thought it was photoshopped or if it aroused her sexually.... One set of images she remembered was of college-age students at a party where 'some people were inexplicably naked while everyone else was clothed.' Another was a sort of digital flip book that allowed users to mix and match heads, torsos and legs to create an image of a naked woman."

The "pornography" wasn't related to any legal case. I'm putting "pornography" in quotes because I don't think of photographs of a naked person as "pornography." Is this Renoir painting pornography?

It's bad — it's atrocious! — but it's not pornography. If I ask you whether you find those Renoir women sexually attractive, am I sexually harassing you? Is the workplace hostile if X lets you see that he's looking at a picture of a naked person and asks if you find that naked person sexually attractive? I mean, anybody can see from the vantage point of today that it's a bad idea to interact like that in the workplace, but I think a proportionate reaction would be to agree that we shouldn't be doing that and move forward.

A few personal footnotes:

1. I've met Judge Kozinski and like him, though I haven't seen him in a long time. I think he's more casual, freewheeling, and individualistic than most judges. In fact, what I remember most about talking to Judge Kozinski is that when he attempted to tell me how to become a federal judge, I said I didn't want to be a federal judge: it's better to be a law professor, precisely because you have more personal freedom and can express yourself in a less conventional, more individualistic style.

2. The only time I've ever watched actual pornography was in the chambers of the federal judge I was clerking for. A box of VCR tapes had been seized by the U.S. government en route to some man whose wife actually showed up in court to argue that those tapes were good for her relationship with her husband. So the videos needed to be watched to determine if they reached the level of "obscenity" within the meaning of First Amendment law. I have a vivid image of seeing "my" judge reading legal briefs next to a TV screen closeup of well-lit genitalia.

3. My idea of the meaning of "pornography" is grounded in the 1980s and early 90s when feminists set aside the concept of "obscenity" and spoke instead of "pornography," which they defined as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words." That idea for legislation had a lot of problems and never got very far, but the point is, it was an effort to get at the real problem of the subordination of women. I was a law professor when those things were happening and I wrote and taught about some of these subjects, and the ideas about subordination and inequality still affect what I think about claims relating to seeing pictures of people naked.

And...

Here's the Amazon page for Courtney Milan. People seem to like her books. I've never read any of them. I don't look at pornography and I don't read romance books. Just my personal preference. But I was amused by the biographical statement on that Amazon page:

Before she started writing historical romance, Courtney got a graduate degree in theoretical physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. After that, just to shake things up, she went to law school at the University of Michigan and graduated summa cum laude. Then she did a handful of clerkships with some really important people who are way too dignified to be named here. She was a law professor for a while. She now writes full-time.

I too was a law professor for a while and now write full-time. I'm impressed by her background and her career choices, including the earlier sloughing off the lawprof persona and recreating herself as a freely expressive writer.

ADDED: Here's an article from 2015 on Heidi Bond/Courtney Milan. This seems to be from the University of Michigan Law School, presenter her as a successful alumna. We're told that her romance novels, set in the 19th century, include details about "judges, lawyers, and courts as well as epidemiological studies and complex calculus."

“Everything that happens and everything that I learn or think or feel is fair game for ending up in a book,” she says. “All these things are tools that can be used.”...

Her encounters with Judge Kozinski are part of "everything that happens," and perhaps she has used that somewhere in her writing, which sounds high-level (and I'm not going to look down my at romance novels (to the extent that I'm an art snob, it's not about sticking to the high side of the high-art/low-art distinction)).

Bond/Milan also seems to have done very well financially:

In early 2014, Yahoo Finance ran a story featuring Bond among a handful of other writers with the headline: “These Romance Writers Ditched Their Publishers for E-Books-and Made Millions.”

“Some of the most exciting entrepreneurs in the U.S. today aren’t hoodie-wearing app developers,” the article says, “they’re women writing books for women and making millions in the process.” The article quotes Bond as one of the pioneering authors who decided to stop selling her books to mainstream publishers and instead launch her novels independently. The result yielded more control over what she was producing while successfully targeting e-book readers who wanted to buy digital copies of books often for less money and more frequently than traditional publishing could produce them....

"Ann! I saw video of naked bike riders down by the State Capitol bldg. True?"

Writes Dave Begley in last night's open thread. Of course, it's true. And thanks for asking. You caused me to go back into my archive to find the time I was at the Capitol, wandering around something called the "Silent Majority Walk" when the Naked Bike Ride suddenly whizzed by. That was in 2011, the year of the Wisconsin protests.

It's a long video, so I provided time stamps. Excerpt:

4:38 — "That's brand new. I'm shocked as shit," says a black man, laughing. I ask him some questions about why he's shocked [by the Silent Majority Walk] and try to find out if he might perhaps actually be a Walker supporter himself. 

5:54 — We hear a hubbub and I realize "These are the naked bike riders!" They ride by chanting "Less gas, more ass." I continue my discussion with the shocked-as-shit guy, who declares "That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"

 

What a great memory! I like that I spontaneously brought up the questions people are still asking about the Naked Bike ride today: 1. What if children saw nakedness? 2. Do these people have a special privilege to be naked because they're in an organized, expressive demonstration? and 3. Is it a white thing?

If you manage to stay tuned to 8:18, you'll hear me ask the man at the Madison Objectivists table how Ayn Rand would react to the Naked Bike Ride. He thought she'd disapprove and that she was "old school" about "sexuality." Oh, yeah? That's not what I heard. Anyway, I don't think nudity is sexuality. 

"Wait a second. Who did what to whom? Kavanaugh’s 'friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student'?"

"Can someone explain the logistics of the allegation here? Was Kavanaugh allegedly walking around naked when his friends pushed him into the female student? No, if I’m reading [NYT reporters] Pogrebin and Kelly right, the friends didn’t push Kavanaugh in the back. Rather, the 'friends pushed his penis.' What? How does that happen? Who are the friends? Who is the female student? Were there any witnesses besides [the classmate Max] Stier? All that the authors write in the New York Times essay about corroborating the story is this: 'Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)' So they corroborated the fact that Stier made the allegation to the FBI, but the authors give no indication that they have corroborated any details of the alleged incident. The book isn’t released until Tuesday, but Mollie Hemingway got a copy, and she writes on Twitter: 'The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event.' Omitting this fact from the New York Times story is one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory."

From "The New York Times Anti-Kavanaugh Bombshell Is Actually a Dud" by John MacCormack (National Review).

The NYT article — "Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not. Deborah Ramirez’s Yale experience says much about the college’s efforts to diversify its student body in the 1980s"— now has an update:

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book's account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.

Note that Deborah Ramirez is not the person in the incident alleged by Max Stier. The Max Stier allegation is used to corroborate the Deborah Ramirez allegation — which is that Kavanaugh, drunk at a party, exposed his penis in some sort of "thrust" near her and that she reacted by hitting him in the penis.

The article — as you can see from the headline — is mostly about class difference. Some young people supposedly felt at home with whatever was going on at parties like that, and some were lost and alienated. That is a serious problem with college life, I'm willing to believe, but I'd rather see it reported and analyzed as a free-standing problem, not appropriated for the purpose of taking down a political enemy.

And I'd like to know: When is it okay to hit a naked man in the penis? When can people get naked at parties and waggle their genitalia at each other? I don't fit in with that kind of partying either — and I never did — so I'd like a sober, neutral explanation. I'm inclined to believe that people at private parties can get naked. We were just talking about Woodstock, that revered historical event where young people got naked. In the words of Frank Zappa:

There will come a time when everybody who is lonely
Will be free to sing and dance and love
There will come a time when every evil that we know
Will be an evil that we can rise above
Who cares if you're so poor you can't afford
To buy a pair of mod-a-go-go stretch elastic pants?
There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance

Clearly, Zappa was making fun of the hippies' high hopes for naked dancing. That song is from 1968, a year before Woodstock, and a decade and a half before Kavanaugh's Yale party days. And here we are today — 40 or 50 years after that youthful revelry — judging those people. I'd love to analyze the whole thing, and I'd even like to see a strongly feminist analysis. But this get-Kavanaugh motivation makes it all twisted and tainted with lust for political power.

Naked as a clam.

I'm reading "Don’t sleep naked — the nine best tips on how to sleep in the heat/Struggling to drop off then waking at the crack of dawn? Boiling nights can be a challenge. Here’s what to do" (London Times).

9 tips are needed because air conditioning is not one of them. In first place is the one that begins the headline, "Don’t sleep naked." We're told "Wearing loose-fitting cotton PJs is a better option than sleeping in the nude, according to the sleep consultant Alison Jones, a spokeswoman for the sleep technology company Sealy. 'A light fabric helps to wick away moisture so that you are less likely to feel clammy,' Jones says."

I think the phrase "Don't sleep naked" is just click bait. If cotton were good for "wicking away moisture" then those who like the freedom of naked sleeping could just cover ourselves with a cotton sheet. But didn't cotton lose that reputation. Hikers these days are advised to avoid cotton. It may wick moisture, but it stays damp. And isn't that what we mean by feeling "clammy"?

By the way, were clams called "clams" because they were seen as clammy or did the word "clammy" postdate the use of "clam" as the name for the familiar mollusk, so that things were being called "clammy" because they seemed clamlike?

"Spencer Elden, who appeared as a naked baby on one of rock music’s most iconic album covers – Nevermind by Nirvana – is suing the band, claiming he was sexually exploited as a child."

The Guardian reports. 

.... Elden alleges the defendants produced child pornography with the image, which features him swimming naked towards a dollar bill with his genitalia visible.

If that's child pornography, a hell of a lot of people are in possession of child pornography!  

Elden, who was four months old when the image was made, says he has suffered “lifelong damages” from the 1991 album cover, including “extreme and permanent emotional distress with physical manifestations”, plus loss of education, wages, and “enjoyment of life”. The lawsuit claims the image is “sexually graphic”, and says it makes Elden resemble “a sex worker – grabbing for a dollar bill”.

Is a naked penis "sexually graphic"? The photo is framed to draw attention to the baby's penis. There's also that "sex worker" theory: The baby is portrayed as money hungry, reacting to the dollar bill that's the bait on a fishhook. But he's only trying to grab the dollar, not required to do anything sexual to get the dollar. We're asked to believe that if you do something while naked, you're doing something sexual. 

It claims Elden was never paid for appearing on the cover, and that his parents never signed a release form for the image, which was shot specifically for the album cover. It has previously been reported that Elden was paid $250. Elden is seeking damages of at least $150,000 from each of the 15 defendants, plus costs, and asks that the case be tried with a jury.

Oh, pay the model! Good lord, must this poor man spend his entire life reaching out for the money you dangled in front of him? And yet, millions of people have loved the Nevermind baby, and I presume would have celebrated Elden and loved his status as former naked baby. Did he suffer? Extreme and permanent emotional distress? 

In 2016, Elden... said: “Recently I’ve been thinking, ‘What if I wasn’t OK with my freaking penis being shown to everybody?’ I didn’t really have a choice.”

We are all former babies who didn't have a choice in all sorts of things — posed in all kinds of photographs — often naked. It dilutes the meaning of pornography to throw in all nudity. The great art museums are full of nudity, including the nudity of babies (notably Jesus).

"On the way to the game camera, I hear a 'hey.' Of course, me being by myself in the woods not thinking anybody else is anywhere around, it startled me, shocked me."

"I hear, 'I’m naked,' and I looked down and he’s standing there in the middle of the creek. He’s not wearing anything at all."

Said Casey Sanders, quoted in "Video goes viral after hunter finds naked man in woods" (WGN9), a story from 2014 that I ran across today.

After a couple of minutes questioning the man, trying to determine if his mental state was stable enough to approach, the man told Sanders he had been drinking creek water and eating rotten crab apples. He then asked the hunter if he had anything to drink.... For the next hour, Sanders helped the man out of the woods....

Why am I reading that today? Well, I was looking for an image — hopefully something in the high art category — that would fit the phrase "naked man in the woods." Most of the hits were about this video, though I did find this relatively nice painting by Edvard "The Scream" Munch:

But, you may wonder, why is Althouse looking for a high-art representation of a naked man in the woods. It's a long story, and, surprisingly enough, it has nothing to do with Jeffrey Toobin. It's too complicated to explain though. It has something to do with the definition of the word "fuck" that I was given by my sister when I was very young and that I lived with for a few years. A simple tableau: a man and a woman naked in the woods. That became a reference point in a discussion when we needed to make fun of a man with a name that rhymes with "fuck." 

There. Don't you love incomplete explanations?!

AND: This post is for all you commenters who are saying Althouse needs to write about Hunter — Hunter Finds Naked Man in Woods.