Indeed from Tokyo to Killamarsh, you'll find that it's against the law in most countries to put on a display of public nudity. But ask most people in the street as to what's so bad about public nudity and you'll probably get a dazed look. The tautological protestation is that public nudity is wrong precisely because it just is. But that doesn't make too much sense, and when you look at it more clearly then it seems there isn't anything wrong with public nudity at all. However, despite the prima facie argument in favour of the case for public nudity, most people continue to admonish it perhaps linking it with sex, madness and rape.

You only need to take a brief look back at history to realise that things are bound to change though. For as more and more holes are picked in the argument for banning public nudity, so the truth is bared and the acceptability of public nudity, just like divorce, sex before marriage and homosexuality is bound to become tolerated. Amidst the global warming caused by liberal winds, the icy tentacles of authoritarianism have been receding incrementally for hundreds of years.

Public nudity will clearly one day, have it's day. And one group which is currently at the forefront of this social change are the Xplicit Players who are based in Berkeley in California, USA (the barometer of global social change). The Xplicit Players are a profit making performance group who have stirred up great tensions in Berkeley for orchestrating nude performances in public. The eight strong group was originally set up by present directors Marty Kent and Deb Moore. They believe the suppression of nudity has a lot to do with the mode of production. Says Marty, ' Especially since the "industrial revolution", we've been in a situation where the ways of human culture have diverged dramatically from the ways of Nature, both "physical" nature and human Nature. People live in boxes: physically, emotionally, intellectually and psychically. These boxes have been created primarily for the convenience of "industrial culture". We want to see these boxes softened, the social environment softened, so people can interact in more personal, idiosyncratic, quirky, genuinely friendly ways. We want to see heightened standards of personal interaction pave the way for the destruction of the oppressive social institutions under which we slave.'

Xplicit Players regularly put on houseplays which are essentially naked, psychedelic and group based. The performances usually consist of a selection of pre-written sets, although emphasis is put on innovation inspired by the particular mix of people and place. The audience are often invited to participate in the performances - which are usually naked of course and involve the exploring of senses and bodies. The Players also arrange a series of outdoor events where people can tune into, experience and conceptualise their sensual relationship with the so-called natural energies of the weather. According to the group's internet pages they, 'encourage the naked body as an interpersonal antenna that invites voyaging, much like that of sexual partners'.

Much like an orgie then! Marty refutes the claim that they are just penetration less orgies. For starters physical penetration is not allowed. The rationale is that by putting aside the genital focus and making penetration off -limits, the group can open up avenues that are more focussed on mind and immediacy of full-bodied naked presence. Says Marty, ' I don't think it's accurate to call our performances "orgies". I've been to orgies, and they've all lacked any shared central focus. We raise a lot of energies and passions amongst our people, but we also have a focus and discipline that's unlike the feeling of an orgy. We're concerned with the personal experiences of each person present, but basically we're sculptors of psychic energy of the group. It's the shape of the total group energy that interests us the most.

We seem to be deeply concerned with what constitutes a "self" as a discrete entity. We begin with fleshly bodies, which are understood in modern culture to be fundamentally distinct (i.e. "my body" and "your body" are generally understood to be fundamentally distinct entities). We challenge the modern assumption that we are fundamentally distinct entities, by investigating a wide variety of dimensions of shared experience; bodies in contact, psyches in contact, thinking in contact via shared attentional focus in shared time. Our goals are to continue these investigations into the powers and possibilities of merged consciousness.'

However despite the levels of maturity needed to separate the naked human body from pure physical intercourse, Marty admits that sometimes the everyday assumptions of the western human mindstate can creep into the performances, 'Guys sometimes get hardons; chicks' pussies get wet, etc. We emphasize a non-sexual FOCUS of the energies in the performance. This means that sexual arousal is a distraction during the performance, and we treat it as such. It's like somebody talking during a poetry reading. You just go "shhh!" and forget about it. But if people start getting into it, putting their conscious focus on sex, we deal with them personally. This has only happened maybe 3 or 4 times in the past 7 years of performance. I like to think it's scarce because what we're actually doing in the performance is more interesting to people than their pre-existing sexual agendas.'

All good stuff then. But not as far as the authorities in Berkeley are concerned who have spent much of the last six years filing prosecutions against the group for making public appearances. I asked Marty why he thought people wanted to ban others from appearing naked in public, 'In my experience, the number of people who want to "ban others from appearing naked in public" is really quite small; most people seem quite willing to have us, at least, go naked on the street. It also seems clear that the vast majority of people who do want to ban public nudity are people who have never experienced it. They're reacting to something in their imaginations, a fantasy, rather than to something they've personally seen and experienced. Why do people want to lay their bad dreams on us? I don't know much about it. But I can say there seems to be a lot of resentment simmering in people with repressive agendas. I sincerely believe there's no human behaviour that nobody finds offensive. Whatever it is, from public fucking to blinking your eyes, there's some collection of goons who think it's terrible. For myself, I can't possibly walk down the street without being offended many times per block. Cars offend me. Armed men and women in uniform offend me. Fashion victims in their identical clothes and postures offend me. People with headphones on, treating public space like it's private space, offend me. People with 20 pound boom-boxes blaring out moronic rap where every other word is "nigger" or "motherfucker" offend me. And so forth, ad nauseum. But I don't take my own feeling of offence too seriously. I do some work to oppose the things that offend me, but I also do a lot of work on myself to defuse my sense of offence. A lot of these matters come from culture clashes. And if I don't take my own feeling of offence too seriously, believe me, I take somebody else's feeling of offence even less seriously. So yes, I can "understand" that someone might be offended by public nudity. But I'm just not moved by their offence. I'm moved by deeper feelings of attention, affection and response between myself and other people. Offence is trivial.'

Offence may be trivial but quite clearly not to the authorities in Berkeley who have bought the The Players to court five times over the last six years. This has been quite expensive for the Players who have had to prepare much of their own defences. Thankfully though, the Players have of yet never been sent down. Five times out of five the jury have been prepared to acquit the Players of any wrongdoing. This was much to the chagrin of the authorities, who have since then changed their tactics by attempting to charge the Players with infraction rather than misdemeanours against the anit-nudity ordinance. The latter requires a jury to give a guilty-innocent verdict, the former gives the jurisdiction to the magistrate. In the last case, where Xplicit Players were bought up in front of the judge for performing naked on Telegraph Avenue - the judge dismissed the case due to the improper presentation of the charges. Obviously he wasn't buying this infraction stuff. So the Xplicit Players live on, but it is clear that despite the manifest tolerance exhibited by the public, the authorities are bent on destroying the displays that the Players put on.

So the vanguard of freedom they may be, but the Xplicit Players are still living in antagonistic times. The authorities in Berkeley are mirrored world-wide by others who persistently rule with a moralistic and authoritarian rod despite the wishes of those they are supposedly servant to. For example, in the UK, the Labour Government is bent on shoving the traditional family down the throats of a population constituted by a great majority of which have chosen a life quite different to the 2.4 model.

One idea is that denying people the right to be naked in public, is precisely the kind of arbitrary and meaningless (ab)use of power that law makers enjoy so much. Especially when they can dress it up in some religious discourse. It's also linked to the general perversity of mankind. A perversity which attaches the concept of wrong to something precisely because it feels the need to say that something is wrong. Those with weak identities often turn to hate to fill up the gap.

But of course these anti-freedom laws aren't just all about one way state authoritarianism. There's a critique to be made about the passive, accepting and unquestioning public whose general response to the question: what's wrong with public nudity is informed more by what the state tell them than by what they actually think. Generations of humans it seems allow streams of culture to pass through them with no great resistance.

And yet, as has been alluded to earlier on, history shows that there has been a move to more democratic and liberal thinking over the last couple of centuries. There is in fact, some resistance and with that comes the move to a more tolerant society composed of humans that are more in touch with themselves and each other than with the godbox of state sponsored consumerism: TV.