the blog quebecois

CBC's Rough Cuts ran Naked, a documentary about this silly trend:

Disrobe for dissent, calendars for causes, nudes against nukes. A new phenomenon with old roots is gaining momentum -- busting out, peeling off, and hanging loose, all around the globe.

From Europe to Australia, people of all ages are stripping off their clothes to send messages via the media: "Peace! No Bush! We'd rather go naked than wear fur!"

Since 2001, over 50,000 people have participated in at least 90 nude protest events around the world. At the same time, the �Calendar Girls� of Rylstone, England rocked the world of charitable donations by posing as pin-up girls. These middle-aged moms raised over a million dollars for leukemia, demonstrating what a bit of cheek can do for a cause.

Naked is a thought-provoking and humorous one-hour documentary by Mary Bissell about people who use nudity to affirm their values and fight for their beliefs. From anti-war nude protestors in Marin County, to nudist bicyclists in North Carolina and breast cancer survivors in Calgary, this show reveals the political reasons beneath the very personal act of taking it all off.

I should exempt the breast cancer victims and the English women from my criticism. Those were for personal and charitable, not political, purposes and were discreetly posed. There's a difference between that and marching down the street with your bazongas flapping in tacit support of a dictator.

I've written about this before, when the Dixie Chicks posed nude on a magazine cover during the hoohah that followed their anti-Bush comments.

It's an infantile form of display that supposes that one's argument is so unimpeachable that it requires no elaboration -- or an admission that one has no argument beyond the (imagined) shock and awe of goosepimpled flesh.

I wasn't going to watch it, because most of the women who do this sort of stuff are -- how can I put this gently? -- a bunch of uggos. (Of the men we shall not speak.)

To my surprise, two of the women were strikingly attractive. (I didn't catch their names, or I would have googled around for a picture.) They're sisters -- elegant, poised, and very pretty, in a demure, almost Victorian way. They also had the perkiest, most amazing . . . ringlets.

They claimed that this activity was in no way inconsistent with their self-professed feminism. (One was a Women's Studies student, if I recall.) Much blah-de-blah about the "predatory male gaze," etc. Frankly, I wasn't paying much attention to what they were saying, and none whatsoever when the blouses came off.

The funniest part was when they were speaking to the press after some annoying Vancouver naked bike ride, designed to tie up traffic. There they are, starkers, chatting amiably away when they started yelling at and insulting male spectators who had the temerity to try to take their picture.

I don't get it. They go naked to get attention; then they get miffed because people are paying attention. Much too nuanced for my simple reptilian male brain, I guess.

I suspect that marriage (that evil patriarchal construct) to such an enchanting creature would be possible only with liberal use of duct tape, applied either to her mouth or my ears.

But who can argue with results? These intrepid exhibitionists have an unbroken series of triumphs, from killing off the fur trade, to stopping the Iraq war in its tracks, to electing President Kerry.

What's that? OK, never mind. Newsworld will be rebroadcasting it Tuesday Dec. 6, at 10 p.m. Eastern if you'd like to check out those perky . . . ringlets.