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Thursday, August 7, 2014

On the Penang nude sports games – Che Sapienza

A former Gerakan Wanita chief was among those who decided to bare it all for a nude sports game at Teluk Bahang National Park in Penang.

A small group of nudists wanted to extend their understanding of themselves and get close to nature.
With good sense and respect for society, they chose a part of a forest reserve, not the neighbourhood shopping mall, to cavort au naturel. With less good sense for what society can accept and even less respect for those who attended, someone posted a video of the proceedings.
Ironically but naturally, such disclosure triggered an excessive show of moral outrage in a country whose moral bearings have not been seen to be of the best fit across many areas of endeavour.
The reaction from all and sundry that we have now seen shows us to have a false sense of modesty, a misplaced sense of righteousness and a weakness for voyeurism. In sum, the reaction to the disclosure shows that we make a big deal out of nothing. This is a country of country bumpkins.
Our warped morality is now stark naked for some people have sought to politicise and racialise the issue by asking if the nude parade had been within sight of the surau. May they direct their energy to solving social ills like rape and incest. May they reflect on social attitudes that see virtue in discrimination against women.
Religious oppression, sexual repression and political restriction are not uncommon in this country.
We should pause to ask who most readily accepts and suffers most from these kinds of self-flagellation. This is not a trivial question for it is a question that reveals whether a society can see the woods for the trees.
This is already clear as of now: We are now using or rather misusing police resources to investigate this incident in the forest in a big way. To not stamp the newly opened investigation file with the words
“NO FURTHER ACTION” is to make a mountain out of a molehill. A sheer waste of taxpayer funded resources.
For the rest of us, we should remember our own personal sins of commission and omission and note the many wrongs and injustice all around us in both the public and private spheres. Do we fail to see the naked truth because we never fail to see the naked flesh?
A statesman can see the woods for the trees. The nudists assuredly could. For why else did they choose a forest reserve and not the shopping mall? But our politicians are neither statesmen nor nudists.
Mistaking the trees for the woods is within their skill sets.
The anxiety with which the State Government of Penang sought to distant itself from what happened has been unseemly. There was never any danger that it would be implicated as the organiser.
It is safe to say that no state government in this country would have had the imagination to organise such an event at this time. The handling of the issue reflected more profoundly for the worse on Malaysian society and politicians than on the idiosyncrasy of the human spirit.
Don’t get me wrong: I have not said definitively that I am for nudity in public. But I hope that I make clear that I support the notion of a well-ordered society that is also emotionally well-functioning because it has a sense of humour. A sense of humour is a proxy for freedom, honesty, mutual respect and perspective. Human relations, whether they are personal and intimate or social and open, are founded on such qualities.
A bunch of happy people had a lark in a secluded part of a public space. If we have a more developed sense of humour, we would dismiss this incident with a degree of mirth whilst sending a clear signal that we will tighten up controls over forests and parks and warn that such activities would not be allowed to happen again.
We would explain that our community standards have been offended. Prudently left unsaid on this occasion but not escaping the attention of thoughtful people would be the prospect of those community standards changing over time.
Let’s not be so keen to trot out that tried and tested but clichéd and formulaic contraption called “public morality”. In Malaysia, its intended scope is often nothing more than the finite area of the pubic region and seldom the infinity of the human mind and the human spirit.
Nudist colonies might be allowed in this country sometime in the future. But not before at least 5 of our public universities make it to the top 100 in reputable annual rankings of the world’s best universities. So, let’s not lose sleep in the near term over something that is a remote prospect for as far as can be reasonably estimated.
* Che Sapienza reads The Malaysian Insider.

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