I’ve grown up in a country with nudity a common and normal occurrence. There are places in parks were people were (and are) partially naked, my family was often naked at home, I have no trouble at all with nudist beaches or tanning naked etc.

But I was reacting to someone suggesting that showing up nude in public anywhere you want should never be seen as an offence.

And I am convinced this would lead to an increase in sexual harassment. Because it is very different to be naked at the beach, in the park or even walking naked down the streets from, for example, having your gymnast teacher teach you while they are being naked, or allowing people to be naked in public transportation and similar situations.

I believe that in our current society (I am not talking about an ideal world, but the actual, current world) this would cause overall more harm than promoting freedom. The way people are completely naive, in my opinion, how some people will actually use this opportunity to harass others is honestly baffling to me. I can only imagine that people underestimate how common harassment is in everyday life and that they don’t automatically assume all the consequences this would have (probably a good thing).

Things that would happen when you would pass such a new law:

• People will block your way in narrow areas to make you have to touch them to get past or move.
• People will touch you with various body parts with the goal of making you feel uncomfortable.
• People will show off their sexual arousal to you with the goal of making you feel uncomfortable.
• People will seek opportunities to hold their erect penis / their breasts / whatever in your face.
• People will smear their bodily fluids onto you and your stuff on purpose.

Just a hole bunch of new situations that you can’t defend against and that regularly won’t be able to proof.

If that’s not immediately what comes to your mind, you’re probably a man and / or very lucky.

And the notion of “well harassment is already illegal” is completely worthless because you are already pretty much powerless to defend yourself from harassment since it’s near to impossible to proof in the majority of cases. Do we really want to even increase this problem when we haven’t really made any progress yet, as a society, to battle the problems we already have in this regard?