The sight of a bare-chested woman is immediately arousing to men. The sight of a bare-chested man is not immediately arousing to women.

You don't have to think hard about that. Men will stop traffic to ogle a woman merely rumored to have lost her top. But guys can mow their lawn shirtless all over suburbia, and no one will give so much as a double-take.

I give the council members credit for seeing the issue through to its rational conclusion. Others would have folded in the face of angry feminists. And in the end, they left the law standing.

It's not as if a municipal act would have changed the cultural landscape, as the Uncovered guy and the Swedish bathers would want. Probably a couple of women would have tested the new policy once or twice, found little to no response (except, perhaps, from stunned or ill-mannered passersby), then everyone would have returned to the standards of behavior common throughout the world.

yet, decades later, self-proclaimed revolutionaries continue to poke and prod, refusing to acknowledge what everyone else knows about the effect women's bare breasts have on men. The adult segment of the live-entertainment industry depends on it. Why is this so hard to accept?

It would be easy to attribute their persistence to a desire to live like bonobo chimps. Or, to mere immaturity, a need to separate morality from reality, a rejection of the rules grown-ups have agreed to live by, a stunted adolescent rebellion that asks questions without really wanting to hear the answers.

But those conclusions leave me unsatisfied. Even though there's no intellectual horsepower behind most liberation campaigns, they keep coming up, generation after generation.

I call it Eden Denial. Unwilling to accept original sin (or even to think about it much), Eden Deniers want to lash out at every measure taken by civilized peoples to protect themselves from one another. They can't imagine God would've given us a sex drive unless it was meant to be indulged at every turn, so they reject constrictions like marriage, age of consent, and laws against prostitution. Even the natural consequence of sex—reproduction—is an encumbrance, to be defused through contraception and, if that doesn't work, abortion.

Why they also despise the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, I'm not quite sure.

But sex is only their most high-profile issue. They've taken a strange position on speech as well, demanding that everyone have the right to his opinion anytime-anywhere, then (in Bill Buckley's delightful quip) expressing astonishment when others have opinions different from their own. So we get "speech codes" banning "hate speech" on college campuses which, to borrow another phrase, are an idea so ridiculous only intellectuals could approve.

In economic matters, however, the liberators grind to a halt. No transaction is too small for state control. This I attribute to the other side of the Eden Denial coin. How could God put us here with all these resources and not expect us to parcel them out like a family at the dinner table?

in the end, the problem for eden denial is that we are not animals and we will never be able to live as if we were. Animals have innocence. As Mark Twain observed, a dog cannot blush, nor does he need to. But a dog also knows no crime. He takes what he needs, or whatever we afford him. His nature is his only law, and it works—sometimes crudely by our standards, which is why we make laws for people, to discourage animal behavior.

Eden Denial is insidious, as well as blatant. I remember clearly my high school's effort—or, more accurately, the district's effort, because it was curriculum approvers who allowed this—to promote Eden Denial among students. In an ordinary history class, we were given a scenario in which we'd been abandoned on an island with no hope of rescue or escape. The class was broken up into four or five groups of four, and we had to devise plans by which we would continue our existence.

Almost every plan we came up with called for some form of communal living. Work would be apportioned, and the fruits of our labor shared equally. It all seemed so simple, and not at all unusual for children who'd been reared in middle-class comfort.

looking back, i see the agenda clearly. This was a sly attempt by ideologues in the school system to encourage our thinking like socialists. In a dozen years of instruction were never taught the failures of socialism, from the Pilgrims (who nearly starved under it) to the hippie communes, which all disintegrated, to the catastrophic Communist Bloc, its collective agriculture beset by 44 straight years of bad weather. To speak of such things would have been dismissed as partisan. As if there were two sides to disaster.

The true failure is Eden Denial. That's probably why Genesis is the first book in the Bible; our forefathers had the same insight I have now, having watched as generation after generation tried to escape the reality of human nature. They wanted us to get that lesson down first.

And some of us go our whole lives in anguished ignorance.

1

Notice that I did NOT comment on this article which not only referenced but linked to a bare chested females site.  I think noting my restraint is appropriate given the subject matter.

2 In our 6th grade class we had to invent fictional countries. Somehow we were allowed to come up with a small country that's main industry was making arms for export. (Hmmm, a bunch of war buff males with no females on the team = Chile/Israel.)

3 I have one more anecdote to add. I attended a University in a program that was heavily about multiculturalism and international in focus. As part of our studies, we got to play a very cool game where there are two "societies" that will interact. One of them had an internal trading game, where resources were traded and "matches" won you points. It was like a stock market floor and quite fun by itself. The other culture was based on some system of leaders handing out respect.

Both groups exchanged members with the goal of finding out about the other culture. I was in the capitalist society of traders, and even the lefties among us thoroughly enjoyed the trading maybe even more so than the actual game of figuring out the other societies rules.

Actually, we had a hard time to figure out the other culture since they just stood around with an arbitrarily chosen leader occasionally handing out meaningless chits. (we were trading chits representing food, raw materials, etc.) Very boring. Few interactions at all, which meant you had one or two chances to guess at dynamics.

I think that if you ran that game, you'd find most people preferred the market society. It was also cool to see the freak out when the "mellow" culture came into contact with the market society.  They were mobbed at the door.

4 Hmm. That is an interesting game.