Naked bike ride certainly wasn't 'flashing' (From The Argus)

Naked bike ride certainly wasn't 'flashing'

5:16pm Thursday 18th June 2009

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In answer to Pat Smith, (Letters, June 16), questioning why it is acceptable for a man to bare all on a bike when a “flasher” would be arrested, it is because there is nothing intrinsically illegal, indecent or offensive about the naked human form – male or female.

The World Naked Bike Ride carries on a tradition, found across cultures and history, of celebrating the human body, with all its “bits”.

The issue here for UK law is more about the intention of, or the reaction to, nudity rather than nudity itself.

If it is someone’s intention to cause “alarm or distress” by exposing themselves they can be prosecuted.

When organisers of the World Naked Bike Ride negotiated this issue with police in the past, the police accepted there is no intention on the part of participants to cause “alarm” or “distress” and none is likely to be caused.

In fact, the experience of the naked ride in Brighton and elsewhere is that the public response is overwhelmingly one of amusement, if not hilarity, and is generally supportive.

The World Naked Bike Ride is a carnivalesque celebration of bikes and bodies in all their splendid variety.

The naked cyclist simultaneously represents human vulnerability, in the face of pollution and traffic accidents, as well as body power as part of the low-carbon solution to our destructive dependency on oil.

A mass of cycling nudity is, as such, utterly different in intention from a “flasher” and is therefore acceptable in law. The daily sight of thousands of exhaust pipes, protruding from the rear ends of cars, pumping out poisons into our air ought to be a much greater cause for alarm and distress than 700 scantily-clad humans envisioning a sustainable future in which we’re more relaxed about our own and each other’s bodies.

Duncan Blinkhorn
co-organiser, World Naked Bike Ride
Seville Street, Brighton