In creating the “Naked in School” universe some fifteen years ago, Karen Wagner may not have realized that the ideas underlying her story’s premise was in fact an allegory condemning a government’s overreaching its legislative powers; in Wagner’s story, government authorities used pseudoscience masquerading as psychology to justify the creation of an educational program which had great potential to cause physical and psychological injury to its innocent victims.
In Wagner’s original vision, an unnamed authority—“the state”—decides to adopt an educational program to force young, unwilling teens to conform to a standardized version of human sexuality in a one-size-fits-all requirement where selected teenaged subjects are compelled to allow their naked bodies to be used for the gratification of not the subject, who becomes an unwilling victim, but for the other students who are allowed to fondle, molest, humiliate, and otherwise torment the victim. The first story in this genre, Wagner’s, began as a fairly dystopian view of the heroine’s situation but over the course of the story, she began to accept her situation, embracing her newfound exhibitionism and the voyeurism of her fellows (see “Karen Naked in School”).
Later stories by other authors explored the limits of both a dystopian and a utopian viewpoint of the NiS Universe with stories elaborating on both points of view. And these stories explored the whole range of human sexuality, not only involving teens with a lesbian or gay preference, but delving into other sexual orientations like bisexuality, transvestism, transgenderism—and even asexuality.
The government’s enactment of laws mandating the imposition of nudity in schools was obviously required to assure that there was no possibility of opting out; the resulting compulsory nudity allowed the themes of forced sex, sexual objectification, humiliation, and domination to be used in story plots. And this is where Wagner’s allegory lies.
Governments seek to control their citizens in many ways. The most direct way is through the laws that their legislative bodies enact and many of those laws regulate personal and private matters. Typical examples are laws about who may marry and laws prohibiting abortion. Sometimes laws can be quite discriminatory; an extreme example is the denial to women of many rights granted to men in the laws of some countries.
In 1852, Massachusetts enacted the first state law which made primary education compulsory for children; also in the U.S., states are responsible for determining the regulations for the education of children and states allow parents to select from among several choices of how to educate their children, including public, private, or home schooling. But the education laws don’t specify the details about what is to be taught in schools; those details are left to local authorities but are mostly subject to varying degrees of state control.
However, there are some religious or cultural groups whose members believe that the government exerts too much influence over their children’s education by teaching subjects which they find objectionable. Examples of objectionable topics in the news recently have been evolution, sex education, and climate change.
Another area where government mandates exist and where religious or cultural opposition is encountered involves childhood immunizations. Immunization laws require that parents surrender a limited amount of self-determination for their children’s health to achieve a public health benefit for society, but most states allow for limited exemptions for religious or other reasons.
We know that governments do adopt other laws which are intended to benefit the society as a whole; examples are the tax laws where the revenue collected supports public services, but many taxes are “regressive” and harm those who have limited financial resources. Other laws may disadvantage certain minority groups while favoring the majority.
Then there are laws which are simply bad; they may be based on poor science or adopted by government bodies reacting to social pressure. Some examples of such laws or proposed laws have been: bans on sale in restaurants of sugar-sweetened drinks larger than a certain size; laws which restrict the use of Wi-Fi network connectivity in the belief that radio signals are harmful; and laws which require notification of women who receive mammograms of the density of their breast tissue where there is no medical evidence that breast-tissue density has any health significance.
Sometimes the interpretation of a law may appear to go beyond its original intent; in the interest of gender equality, the U.S. government has recently sought to mandate that schools allow the use of restrooms and locker rooms be permitted according to a pupil’s own “gender identity.”
Governments may also mistreat their citizens. In the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study of the early twentieth century, the U.S. government conducted research on a vulnerable population without treating them or permitting them to be treated for the disease, and the country’s poor treatment of native Americans, even in fairly recent times, is well documented.
We could go on about laws in other countries too, such as the 2011 law in France which prohibits Muslim women from wearing in public traditional Islamic garb which conceals their face, or the 2004 law which bars pupils in French schools from wearing any clothing or symbols which are identified with a faith community. Recently, even the wearing of a modest bathing suit (“burkini”) on French beaches was banned in a large number of towns, but these decrees were subsequently overturned by France’s top administrative court.
Governments aren’t the only entities that restrict or dictate personal rights. Religious and cultural groups do too. Notable examples are the preventing of girls from getting an education; the forcing of men to grow beards and women to wear the burqa; the practice of female genital mutilation in many cultures around the world; forced marriage at very young ages; honor killings of women in patriarchal cultures; sexualized violence against women in war zones; enslavement of children to fight in wars; and similar human rights which are mostly cultural and not associated with any religious law. Notice how many of these cultural issues are directed against women and children.
Wagner’s Naked in School allegory is based on the idea of the government imposing a new kind of school program, one affecting teens in particular, using an absurd premise—required school nudity—and by doing so illustrates how damaging such a mandate can be to vulnerable people. Teenagers are among the most vulnerable people; they must struggle to build a positive self-image and must accommodate to their sexuality in their changing bodies as they mature. Forcing them to be naked in public is an attack on their human dignity and their right for privacy, just as the imposition of a state religion is an attack on people’s personal rights for private beliefs, or the imposition of cultural restrictions is an attack on people’s human rights.
These are some of the issues we address in these stories, a trilogy which tells how a group of young people combat the governments whose education policies they come to abhor. Our stories are a social commentary from a libertarian viewpoint, whose roots lie in Wagner’s allegoric tale about overreaching government powers. We hope you enjoy the ride.