Challenging community standards is hard. It's even harder when practicing your beliefs is a crime; even harder still when that crime is one of the most severe and punitive crimes on the books - in the case of public nudity: the sex offense (despite the issue often not having anything to do with sex).
I was thinking about how unfair it is that the crime of "indecent exposure" often seems to be, if not officially, effectively coded as a strict liability crime. Yes, there are sometimes arguments to be made about intent, but the criminal act is the exposure. The rest is just talking yourself out of a dicey situation, that often doesn't go down the way it ought to. So that even though you might be able to get away with biking down main street during the World Naked Bike Ride, you could still end up, potentially, in handcuffs just for taking a wrong turn and being naked on the wrong street, at the wrong time.
So one of the arguments against the right to be naked in public - or even in private, but in front of not necessarily consenting participants - is that it is indecent, vulgar, or obscene. But there are other things that are vulgar and indecent, that community standards generally condemn the exhibition of, yet are not against the law (obscenity is by definition illegal, yet still very much subjective).
You might, for example, get into trouble defecating in the streets, but I have heard cases of people being charged with nudity in their own homes, yet I have never heard of a case of anyone being charged with a crime for forgetting to flush the toilet (a law I would have been delighted to have recourse to against my brother growing up), despite the fact that this could be exploited by someone with a sexual fetish, to "forcefully" expose a nonconsenting participant to the visible exposure of one's solid waste for sexual gratification. (How, as an aside, is it any more permissible if the motivation is practical humor instead, though?). Most people would agree that feces is disgusting, probably even more so than the sight of our genitals (I would hope), yet I have never heard of any laws against seeing anybody else's in any context.
Another example is gore. Yes, extreme cases are rare. But I am pretty squeamish. (Except when it's entirely fictional). Yes, our community standards generally dictate that people do not openly display their festering wounds in public, and you might very well be barred entrance to certain establishments, but again, I have never heard of a case of somebody being charged with public indecency (or whatever) for not putting on their bandages before taking their dog for a walk down a public street.
Moreover, there is no law criminalizing taking one's bandage off temporarily, for the explicit purpose of grossing a non-consenting person out (an act of which I have been the victim of more than once in my life). These cases tend to be dealt with civilly, without getting the law involved (unless it's a pattern of deliberate and repeated harassment, which is a separate issue). People who flout the conventions of society and make others uncomfortable tend to find themselves without a lot of companionship. Still, if there were an argument to be made that, say, we shouldn't hide our scars, or what have you, then I presume you would be able to make a stand, within reasonable parameters, without finding yourself immediately on the wrong end of a Law Enforcement Officer.
I know, for example, people who, by deliberate choice, do not wash regularly and/or eschew the use of products that mask one's natural body odor, and may even argue that this is a better way to live. Yes, they are typically maligned by the rest of the population - I'm not saying they don't have to deal with stigma, but the critical difference is that if you walk into a restaurant stinking to high heaven, you may be escorted off the premises, in the worst case you may even have to talk to a police officer (although even this seems unlikely), but no one will prevent you from walking home just the way you are, and most critically, you will NOT be charged with a crime that carries more stigma than just about any other, and that, if convicted, could mean losing custody of your kids, and not being able to find a job or a decent place to live for the rest of your life. It sounds absurd on its face, and it may thankfully be rare for it to go this badly, but that it can (and has) happened at all is enough to make you think twice, given how serious the consequences may be.
Plus, the difference between nudity and a lot of these things is that there are actually a lot of good arguments for making nudity more common - and actually a lot of people (even if they still make up a small minority of the population) who want to live this way (which is, actually, probably the reason there is more pushback against it - you don't need to make laws against behavior that is so odious and eccentric that hardly anybody ever attempts to engage in it) - not just a small cadre of perverts, but people for whom this is a lifestyle and part of their life's philosophy. At the end of the day, it's up to the community to dictate what they will and will not tolerate. But it hardly seems fair, and the potential penalties for bucking society's taboo on nudity seem unnecessarily severe in comparison to almost anything else.
