To the editor:
We have in my neighborhood in Madison annually a kind of reenactment of the tornado of human bodies witnessed by Dante in the Inferno’s scene about sins against chastity: a nude swarm swirling around busy downtown on bicycles, eliciting a wave of stares, grins, whoops, glee, and photo taking by bystanders, as perhaps the demons enjoy seeing tormented souls, and certainly a vignette of post-sexual-revolution social sin.
Madison’s “World Naked Bike Ride” either opposes fossil fuels or celebrates the immunity of moral chaos to correction by authority. Not everyone experiences it as altogether benign: a local woman who had been sexually assaulted in early life recently told a journalist that “seeing dozens, often hundreds of naked bodies unexpectedly is a trigger for her.”