I believe we're naked

Nudity? At a strip club? Stop the insanity!\nA Boise strip club called Erotic City thought it had found a way around Idaho's anti-nudity law when it instated "Art Night," a weekly event when patrons were provided with pencils and sketch pads for drawing the dancers, a few months ago. Idaho law states that full nudity is only allowed in instances of "serious artistic merit."\nBut according to The Associated Press, a Boise police raid of Erotic City on April 4 found nothing of artistic merit occurring within the venue and issued misdemeanor citations to three dancers. A police spokeswoman, claiming that the patrons did not appear to be focused enough on producing artistic renderings of the dancers, said, "These women weren't posing. They were dancing."\nWell, if a trained officer of the law tells me dancing isn't art, then I guess I have to believe it.\nPublic nudity laws are an obvious necessity; otherwise, we'd long for the days when we complained about Wal-Mart patrons' insistence upon waddling around in Spandex. But in an establishment advertised as a strip club, where patrons pay money to see the nude human form, I fail to see the necessity or benefit of forcing dancers to wear pasties and a G-string. \nIndiana nudity ordinances leave much room for interpretation. Old Hickory BBQ owner Darrell Russelburg found that out the hard way this weekend, when he and three of his dancers were arrested for public indecency at the Fort Branch establishment this weekend, according to WFIE Channel 14 in Evansville. Seeing as his employees were wearing thongs, he was understandably confused as to the impetus behind the arrests. "The definition of how much buttocks (allowed to be shown) could be interpreted anywhere from a thong bikini being illegal to plumber's crack," he said. \nIn other words, a 15-foot-high billboard on a public highway can picture a thong-clad arse, but nothing so obscene is allowed in a 21-plus strip club.\nOne especially confounding facet of the American public's nudity standards is the aversion to the female nipple, in particular. In this day and age, it's still OK for a guy to walk around his front yard shirtless, but a woman will be arrested unless she covers the "offending" areas with 1-inch pasties. And here in Bloomington, more than one stripper has told me that she paints clear nail polish over her nipples before performing each night in order to squeak by the nudity laws, which prohibit the display of completely bare breasts. Has a mere 99-cent bottle of Wet 'n' Wild been the only thing to spare me from irreversible psychological damage?\nA couple of friends and I discussed the legality of male nipples versus that of female nipples, looking for theories as to its cause. Lactation was the only dividing line we could come up with, yet the Wikipedia Web site set us straight, telling us that "the mammary glands of human males can also produce milk." \nAnd so far, this spring, I've seen several shirtless men on riding mowers whose C-cups were flopping around like fish out of water. They're just as prone to unsightly sagging as we girls are, so why aren't they being forced to don underwire bikini tops?\nIn the case of Erotic City, the nudity was confined within the walls of a strip club (go figure), and to boot, I find the phrase "serious artistic merit" to be far too ambiguous to merit legal intervention. Who's to say what's art and what isn't?\nOn the other hand, if the police don't protect citizens from the corruptive nudity at strip clubs, then who will?