The new prudery is alive and well and showering in a swimsuit in Terrigal. News broke on Wednesday that the popular tourist town’s surf club is banning nudity in its changerooms.
The decision has raised many questions, the first of which is material. How does one engage in the process of changing from one set of clothes to another without the – one would think, obliged – transitional nudity phase?
Back in the 80s and 90s, this was a challenge engaged by the students of my first all-girls public high school with a comparable resolve to 350 years of mathematicians going after Fermat’s last theorem. Lest anyone be accused by their teen classmates of having atypical nipples, “back fat” or – most direly – stray pubes, the entire cohort ritualised the attempt to get out of damp Lycra and into layers of infantilising shirts and pinafores by donning outerwear first, stripping out a swimsuit from underneath and then – somehow – adding underwear while your own clothes acted as a modesty tent.
But there are other philosophical questions provoked by Terrigal’s changeroom nudity ban that lie beyond “are teenage girls in single-sex schools the janissaries of war on the soul?”.
Firstly, if a changeroom appears in a forest but prohibits anyone from changing in it, isn’t it just a shed? Is it just body-shaming to threaten a Terrigal local for “disciplinary action” if she uses a changeroom to – you know – change? Or is the new prudery symbolic of how broader conservative-fringe attempts to undo decades of increasing social liberalism that have had positive and welcome benefits are gaining mainstream purchase?
In the first case, yes. In the second, also yes. In the third – terrifyingly – I fear so. Because in this last case, it is not possible to consider what’s happening in Terrigal without thinking of at least the theme and perhaps also the energy of present censorship campaigns run both here in Australia and in the US.
The Guardian reports that the Terrigal prudery results from enforcement of Surf Life Saving Australia policy that requires adults to avoid being naked in changerooms when children are there, or could walk in, ostensibly to protect children.
Remember that. A story emerged this week from Tallahassee Classical School in Florida, where a teacher presented the examples of Michelangelo’s David sculpture and Creation of Adam fresco, as well as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus painting as examples of Renaissance art. The presence of nude subjects in these artworks were denounced by parents as examples of “pornography”, and the teacher was told to resign or be fired. Meanwhile, school book bans are flourishing across the land of the free; PEN America lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 titles, just from July 2021 to June 2022. This is in addition to the foul bans on drag performance, the withdrawal of gender-affirming care for trans youth and the advent of “don’t say gay” laws – cultural campaigns all aggressively pursued with a familiar rhetoric; the removal of rights already won is to “protect young people”.
Culturally casual, go-along-to-get-along Australians can’t afford to be smug. The Sydney Morning Herald reported recently that infamous local arch-conservative Bernard Gaynor has been copying American book ban attempts, with complaints to the Queensland police, the federal arts department and the classification board that have, actually resulted in LGBTQIA+ books being pulled from Australian library shelves.
OK so it may be a long bow to draw between these events and a surf club changeroom in Terrigal. Of course it’s right to be concerned about the potential for children to be endangered by obscenity, sexual behaviour and/or violence in a changeroom. But if you think sex predators are likely to be deterred by a polite sign on the wall asking them to put some pants on – congratulations, I guess – you’re not thinking like a sex predator, people infamously resistant to restraint on their behaviour. Either you have the physical infrastructure and systems to keep people safe, or you don’t.
And nudity is not inherently unsafe. Academic research has found that “childhood experiences with exposure to nudity … are not adversely related to adult sexual functioning and adjustment” but rather is related positively to sexual adjustment, body confidence and self-esteem.
There is a crucial distinction between nudity and sexual explicitness that becomes obvious the more one becomes familiar with nudity through – you guessed it – non-sexualised social interactions, like using a changeroom. Learning this distinction actually assists children in being able to perceive the threat of atypical, dangerous and unsafe behaviours. The respectful rituals of the public changeroom also provide contextual social education for children for what constitutes appropriately modest behaviour around the naked body.
Of course, conservative institutions from church to state to rather a lot of late capitalism’s worst industries have long realised there is great and terrifying shaming power that results from policing the human body and sexuality. Overthrowing the old prudery liberated entire communities from an oppression that caused not only misery but great vulnerability to harm. If our priority is protecting children, it’s not the local changerooms we should be frightened of. It’s the agenda-ridden moralisers trying to make us fear them.
