Uncovering the naked truth about the 1970s

It’s rare that John Ashcroft comes to mind during a dinner party, but I thought of him the other day when my wife and I had some friends over and nobody got naked. People tittered when Ashcroft ordered bare-chested statues at the Justice Department covered up, back when he was attorney general and had the power to do that kind of thing, but how out of the mainstream was he, really?

We have a hot tub 30 yards from our dinner table, but I don’t think it entered anyone’s mind to strip down and jump in. It turns out I’m not so different from Ashcroft: Depending on the guest, I generally preferred it that way.

If it had been in Montecito circa 1970, though, we probably would have undressed en masse and headed for the tub.

My childhood memories are full of naked adults and children. I remember attending a rugby game, of all things, in 1976 at UCSB and at halftime, from out of nowhere, came an elephant chain of naked men and women proceeded across the pitch.

I enjoyed it more than the rugby; my mother took pictures.

Nudity was even a divisive issue for the Montecito Union PTA in the early 1970s. At that time there were pitched battles between liberals and conservatives over, for instance, whether or not to display a Nativity scene at Christmastime. In amongst this, nakedness crept in when someone complained about the nudists wandering around the beaches of Summerland. What the PTA could have done about it I don’t know, but moms lined up on one side and the other of the issue (all fully dressed, apparently).

Today, the PTA isn’t so encumbered.

Public nudity still happens, of course, but at some point those of us in the mainstream began to keep our clothes on.

A family friend told me it stopped in their group when it wasn’t so exciting to see the women disrobed anymore, but that doesn’t explain why we, the younger generation, still by and large winning the battle against gravitational pull, don’t undress.

There was something about the Reagan era that made us all keep our clothes on, and we’ve been doing so ever since. I often wore a multistrapped burgundy Members Only jacket in junior high in the early ’80s, so it can’t be that our clothes were so stylish we had to keep them on.

I decided to canvass friends and family on the issue, and it turns out that there are more opinions on the subject than people. Like Jimmy Hoffa, nudity just disappeared in the ’70s, and no one can agree why.

One friend thought that all our working out has made us too body-conscious to bear being seen sans habiliment. My sister ventured that it was less threatening to be naked when married, noting that people tended to get hitched up younger back in our parents’ day.

Another friend believed that in the 1960s and ’70s you could go hot-tubbing naked with friends, even new friends, because life was meant to be lived. Social interactions today, he argued, are just a cover story for economic explorations, and it’s not as easy doing business with someone after you’ve seen each other naked.

At this point, I stopped asking around, figuring that conversations about nudity should be less depressing than this.

Whatever the reason for the cultural shift, I’m fairly supportive of people keeping their clothes on, which might — for the first time — put me in the same camp as John Ashcroft. Oh well, nudity makes for strange bedfellows.