Nudity

It's almost Independence Day weekend in the United States and so I am making my own very specific declaration of independence. In  honor of "the personal is political" and in honor of Independence Day (and because I happen to have a very recent photo of me swimming naked near an American Flag) I want to make a simple declaration: I need to be free to swim naked. I dislike the confinement of swimsuits. They cling and bind and besides, other than wet t-shirt contests, why would anyone put on clothes specifically to get them wet? We take off wet clothes! Why put something on to go in the water?

Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, wrote Noel Coward in 1947. Till the early twentieth actors, actresses and all things to do with theatre were considered unseemly as a career choice. Actors were often conflated with 'rogues', 'vagabonds' and 'loose women' as an underclass. The twentieth century saw a paradigm shift whereby  an acting career could bring fame and fortune, and  actresses and actors like Vanessa Redgrave and Ronald Reagan could enter politics without having their characters impugned.