The music of chaos is enticing, but it leads only to the destruction of the soul.
-The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, 1890
I have been writing about panic quite a bit recently, from different angles and in relation to different ongoing social and political issues, but especially as it relates to nudism and nudity. I have written about panic in the context of sexual liberation and the nudist movement, in its role in the rise and fall of America’s nude beaches, relating to nudity in horror film, and in how it contributes to the worsening social conditions for today’s nudist movement, but I have not written about the panic itself, about our current panics collectively, or about what they are doing to us at scale. Panic, especially moral panic, is at the root of much of our social and political malaise these past few years, as we struggle to grapple with our discomfort over larger social change, progress, and medical and technological advances, and as we punish one another for our own unease. This panic over change usually ties back to an irrational, fear-based response, one that hearkens back to the word’s origins. Panic is merely a reference to the Greek god of shepherds, fields, and glens, Pan, whose fitful anger upon being disturbed from an afternoon nap was said to inspire panic, causing stampeding flocks and stirring fear in people all around.
The moral panics that we see today are not unlike panics that came before, like the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, or the Satanic Panic of the mid- to late twentieth century. What marks our current suite of panics is not so much a fear of communism or murderous cults, but a pronounced fear of bodies, femininity, deviance from predetermined gender roles, and sexuality sparking targeted cultural and legislative assaults on women’s bodily autonomy, the transgender community, queer art and representation, and the nude body itself. The nature of a panic is to tap into our fears, push us to become irrational, and, in our state of fugue and fury, cause us to harm ourselves and others, and that’s precisely what these recent panics have done. In our panic, we have not only watched these targeted attacks take place against women and the LGBTQ community, we have also watched as the impact of those attacks has spread well beyond the intended targets. Much like a stampeding flock, a moral panic can hardly be contained once incited.
To protect our livelihood, our autonomy, and one another, we should follow these panics back to their source, back to the shouting, disturbed gods at their center. None of these concurrent panics—from abortion access, to transgender identity, to queerness, to nakedness—are novel to our generation, but stretch back decades if not centuries and all trace at least some of their roots back to common sources: Misogyny, prejudice against femininity itself, and a crusade against human sexuality. Examining those connections can reveal a great deal and, I hope, help us survive the stampede.
Panic! At the OB/GYN
In June of 2022, as part of its decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, the United States Supreme Court decided to reconsider and ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade, its landmark 1973 case which had previously enshrined abortion access in to law—or, more specifically, which had enshrined a woman’s decision to have an abortion into her constitutional right to privacy. This abrupt and controversial change caused serious concern for many Americans, both for the judicial precedent that it sets and for the impact that it would be sure to have on women and healthcare in the United States. Like the rest of the nation, I began furiously reading into the unfolding events, all of which felt frantic, cold, and detached from human stories. I have since found the ongoing coverage by the podcast This American Life both informative and intimate, already spanning three episodes chronicling the decision’s initial and evolving human impact: The Pink House at the Center of the World, When to Leave, and Nine Months Later.
Digging deeper, it is interesting to discover that the recent Dobbs decision is the apex of a century and a half of panic over women’s bodily autonomy. Rather than being rooted in religious or political ideology, however, its origins extend back to an organized effort by nineteenth-century American doctors to ensure their monopoly of the obstetrics profession by discrediting and maligning the midwives and healers who had established themselves as the reliable authority on both birthing and abortion. Doctors claimed only they were knowledgeable about women’s bodies, that only they could be trusted with this care, but since very little was actually known about the field, the doctors’ “claim of advanced knowledge didn't actually exist in the medical community. Historians note that this argument was mostly used as a way to take away women's bodily autonomy. Now, it was a doctor who could interpret their medical condition,” writes Deepa Shivaram for NPR. This same panic that was crafted and wielded to strip women of their autonomy in service of the consolidation of medical industry power led to abortion bans in every American state by the early twentieth century, though less-safe, illegal abortions persisted. While Roe v. Wade reinstated an access to abortion similar to that of the early nineteenth century, it also reignited a panic over women, their bodies, and the choices they make with them, as abortion and awareness of it increased. They’ve taken it too far, opponents would say. The following decades saw abortion stances turn into a political and religious litmus test—a recent development that came as a backlash to the feminist movement’s support for abortion rights—rather than a conversation over medical necessity, bodily autonomy, and sexual freedom. Under post-Roe conditions, not only are women in many states unable to access safe and legal elective abortions, they are also finding themselves unable to access medically necessary ones, putting lives and families at risk in service of a culture war.
Since the 2022 Supreme Court decision, abortion rights losses have most prominently impacted women in states with abortion-banning trigger laws in place or where lawmakers had already drafted new legislation to be voted into law. This has created hurdles or outright bans on abortions in roughly half of the US, in many cases also impacting women who had no intention of terminating a pregnancy, such as those carrying an unviable fetus or those facing life-threatening complications. Doctors in states like Idaho are forced to turn away women with pregnancy complications, sending them across state lines under the shroud of darkness, in fear of social and legal retribution, dehumanizing the sorrow and worry they are experiencing. As the panic spreads, it has also begun impacting families who struggle to conceive, threatening the rights of those who desperately want to bring children into the world through in-vitro fertilization. If the intention was to celebrate life and the family structure, the real-world outcome has been dehumanizing at best and deadly at worst.
The cultural impact of this panic extends beyond the dismantling of a wide range of obstetric care. In tow is a normalization of minimizing and politicizing women’s issues and concerns, a challenge to women’s freedom of movement across state lines, a dangerous dismissal of personal autonomy, a reduction of bodies to their reproductive functions, and the codification of a legal and medical system eager to deliver consequences to women who have sex. Many also see a troubling path toward birth control bans and challenges to recreational sex in general. That is to say, this stampede of unfettered, misogynistic panic over femininity and women’s bodies is unlikely to stop at reproductive freedom.
Panic! In the Locker Room
Much in the way that an increase in abortions administered following 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision and subsequent embrace of abortion rights by progressive movements reignited a moral panic over women’s bodies and sexuality, the past decades’ increased awareness of transgender identity, support for the transgender community by progressive political movements, and advances in therapeutic and medical support for trans individuals have set the scene for a similar panic. Many will be tempted to attribute this panic to a transgender rights movement that has “gone too far” to advance its cause, but the panic over transgender identity is not new, and it’s not the fault of transgender people any more than women are to blame for panic over abortion, but the concurrent abortion and transgender panics are certainly rooted in the same anxieties around gender and sexuality, with anti-trans arguments often citing concerns over the “mutilation” of trans bodies and infertility caused by hormone treatments as justification for legislation restricting or banning gender affirming care. The guise of defending children and babies makes an excellent shield against criticism, but it does not mean the underlying panic is warranted.
As such, today’s panic over transgender identity has set its sights on minors, their families, and their schools, igniting a frenzy over access to vital gender affirming care, parental rights, trans inclusion in gendered spaces and activities, and the language we use. The anti-trans efforts to “protect children” seem to be only succeeding in making life less safe for children, however. At the core of this chaos is a dehumanization of transgender people, predictably leading to injustice and deadly violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people. Also predictably—because panic does not paint within the lines—it has led to accusations and attacks against cisgender students who don’t perfectly fit someone else’s idea of what a girl or boy should look or behave like. While much of this culture war over transgender identity is happening around schools, young people are merely a proxy for a larger panic around trans people, one which has targeted bathroom use, government recognition and voting rights, and access to healthcare even for transgender adults. Just as anti-trans panic has spilled over to cisgender youths, it has also been spilling over to cisgender adults mistaken for being transgender and we should expect that trend continue for as long as we make it our business to police the way others identify and present themselves. It is an important reminder, however, that the panic over transgender identity is, at its core, rooted in a disruption to established, binary gender roles and the prejudices tied to them.
Consensus over the genesis of historical Western anxiety about transgender identities is mixed, but leading voices like transgender writer Julia Serano attribute what we often describe as transphobia to a deep misogyny that extends to transgender people, also known as transmisogyny, and a commitment to viewing gender in two rigid, mutually exclusive categories. “In a world where masculinity is respected and femininity is regularly dismissed, it takes an enormous amount of strength and confidence for any person, whether female- or male-bodied, to embrace their feminine self,” says Serano in her manifesto, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, in which she exposes the ways that anti-trans sentiments are rooted in our collective prejudice and hatred toward women and femininity. There is not only a prejudice against cisgender women’s femininity, but a deep discomfort with transgender people expressing or eschewing it.
You might be noticing a trend of misogyny, healthcare limitations, and challenges to bodily autonomy that spans both the abortion and transgender debates. These trends have manifested themselves in deadly attacks on healthcare providers and the transgender community and have ushered in a culture that empowers individuals to surveil and intervene in another person’s gender expression, sexual activity, healthcare choices and bodily autonomy, and inclusion in public life, regardless of any supposed affront committed.
Panic! At the Drag Brunch
There exists only a small chasm between the panic over transgender identity and anxiety over the other letters of the LGBTQ community, but that chasm is bridged all too neatly by the queer community’s abruptly controversial art of drag, performances marked by their subversion of gender norms, impersonations of female celebrities and personalities, and exaggerated performance of femininity, typically—bot not always—by male performers. Concurrently with recent legislative attacks on abortion rights and transgender care, many states have begun taking up legislation against drag shows and other performances of femininity or gender other than one’s own. Though many laws have passed—and many more have been proposed—there have also been harsh criticisms to these drag bans, citing them as overly broad, potentially criminalizing transgender participation in daily life and turning any performance that contains nudity into a punishable offense, and we are beginning to see these laws overturned as constitutional challenges come forward.
Coming on the heels of a string of high-profile news stories about child trafficking and a heightened awareness of child grooming, the justification behind these drag bans is the supposed threat that drag performances and performers pose to children’s safety. Even without actual evidence of any such threat or harm, the allegations against the art of drag presented by lawmakers have very effectively dredged up age-old scare tactics against the homosexual community, reigniting long dismissed prejudices that painted gay men as sexual degenerates, groomers, and predators, intent on stealing away America’s children—especially its boys—and turning them gay. Given the cultural weight and historical importance of drag within the LGBTQ community, it is impossible to separate targeted legislation against these performances from the larger queer community implicated by the heightened panic. And, as you might expect, the legislation and restrictions have not stopped at drag performances. Subsequent bans on LGBTQ books and books with LGBTQ characters have been on the rise as well, not only limiting the queer community’s access to their own stories and history, but reducing the presence of queer identities from the stories and history absorbed by the larger population.
Drag brunches and Drag Queen Story Hours may have been the gateway through which the most recent stampede came running into the LGBTQ community, but the panic over queer identities has raged for generations and is itself also heavily rooted in misogyny, notably a prejudice against feminine traits and behaviors exhibited by men and boys. “Individuals who have an especially rigid adherence to gender roles frequently see LGBT folks as transgressors violating the tacit rules of the gender hierarchy. Prejudice against gay men reflects the fact that homophobia is often motivated by societal denigration of femininity,” writes the ACLU of Southern California, citing the invocation of Title IX in cases of discrimination against LGBTQ students. In the context of the recent rise in hostility towards women’s access to abortion and transgender identity, the misogynistic roots of anti-queer hostility become transparent as well. Shielding these panics behind tired “protect the children” language implicates femininity, sexuality, women, and LGBTQ people as categorical threats to social order, and makes it very difficult to slow the stampede caused by this moral panic.
The idea that queer people should not be known about or seen being themselves in public, that queer art should be criminalized, and that queer people cannot be trusted in the presence of children is not only pushing queer people back into the closet but it is enabling homophobia and normalizing “groomer” claims as weapons to be wielded against anyone challenging conservative or traditional values, queer or not. It serves only to further police our individual expression of gender and sexuality—which varies wildly even among cisgender, heterosexual people—enforcing toxic standards of masculinity and femininity that are harmful for everyone, further increasing aggression towards women and damaging the mental health of men.
Panic! At the Bike Ride
Following close behind the outrage over drag performances and the claim that such performances are riddled with nudity and sexual innuendo comes a renewed outrage over nudity itself, in all its forms, though one could argue that this is yet another instance of a long-raging panic that never fully died, only quieted. Just last year, in 2023, we saw the beginnings of an overflow from the trans and drag panics into general nudity, as online left-wing political commentators called out the hypocrisy of Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis targeting drag brunches for purportedly exposing children to LGBTQ themes and adult nudity while ignoring that children are also exposed to these supposed “threats” at the state’s world-famous nude beaches. In hindsight, this criticism is unlikely to have singlehandedly steered the stampede toward nudity, but it was a harbinger of a moral panic already in movement. Earlier that same year, for example, panic had struck a Florida private school over a clerical oversight that exposed students to a “pornographic” work of art: Michelangelo’s statue of David. The story exposed an already fomenting conflation of sex and nudity and the inevitable, consequent treatment of all nudity as a threat to our children’s safety, despite a lack of supporting evidence.
Within months of these cautionary events, panic over nude bodies—especially but not uniquely in the presence of children—had inspired legislation intent on criminalizing nudity wherever children may be present. News broke over a child’s attendance at a World Naked Bike Ride event in Madison, Wisconsin and the story attracted both public outcry and the attention of lawmakers in the state who quickly drafted bills to make any such instances of intentional exposure of the genitals, including in nonsexual instances, a misdemeanor punishable by a $10,000 fine and/or nine months in prison. The rapid onset of these events and the potential criminalization of nudity sparked serious concerns among nudists and naturists in the state and nationwide. While these particular Wisconsin bills appear to be stalled for now, the likelihood of other states taking up similar efforts against nudity and nude recreation seems high, especially in light of other recent events, such as protests over a trans woman using the women’s facilities at the popular, nudity-required Korean spa in Los Angeles, Wi Spa, or the removal of the Friends of Bates Beach (a group supporting a nude beach in Southern California) booth from the Carpinteria Avocado Festival.
Just as is the case with reproductive healthcare, transgender identity, and queer representation, this bubbling panic over the naked body is nothing new, either, and has long been linked to anxieties over human sexuality, gender, and morality. Though panics over nudity have waxed and waned over time, a defining moment in the modern history of panic over human nudity and bodily autonomy was the Comstock Act of 1873, which followed shortly behind the aforementioned campaign against midwifery and was itself followed by a suite of additional legislation referred to as the Comstock Laws. Championed by devout Christian Anthony Comstock who was appalled by the depravity of print advertisements, gambling, pornography (which, for Comstock, was a very broadly applied term) and the promiscuity of American women and sex workers, these laws targeted the distribution of obscene print materials (such as anything that contained nudity, sexual or not) and access to birth control, but also extended to displays of fine art depicting the nude body and providing any information about sexual and reproductive health. Not coincidentally, indecent exposure laws in the United States began to appear at precisely this same time. In his later life, Comstock bragged that “he seized 150 tons of books, made 4,000 arrests, and drove 15 people to suicide,” in his crusade against obscenity. While our idea of obscenity has changed over the past 150 years, the impact of these laws and the moral panic behind them persists to this day and has claimed far more lives in service of enforcing purity and eliminating vice.
While any nudist will tell you that an appreciation of the human body in all its shapes and forms and colors leads to a healthier acceptance and enjoyment of one’s own body, this renewed stigma around nudity and sexuality threatens to plunge Americans into a new Comstock era. The freedom that many Americans enjoy to gather at nude beaches, resorts, and events, to appreciate nude art and literature, or to use nudity as a form of speech or protest is undeniably intertwined with concurrent panics over gender, sexuality, and reproductive freedom. In the chaos, we may be tempted to view these each as separate issues, but our attention should be on them all as they all pertain to bodily autonomy and freedom of expression.
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Surviving the Stampede
I can appreciate that many of my readers will have varying, even vacillating views on the themes above, and that’s OK. I did not set out to change anyone’s opinion on obstetrics or LGBTQ people or the naked body, but to demonstrate how these delicate freedoms are intertwined and interdependent and to, hopefully, unmask the irrational fears that stoke our panics around them. I set out to remind you, reader, that these panics are old, they are very deeply rooted in prejudice and misogyny, and they can cause very real damage to our social fabric, our institutions, and our lives. They encourage us to normalize policing one another instead of learning to accept one another. They convince us to dehumanize rather than empathize with one another. They provoke discord and division rather than bringing us together and reminding us of our shared struggles. They fool us into discarding our values and morality in exchange for vindication and modesty.
Though this stampede of legislative and cultural challenges over bodies, femininity, gender, and sexuality are raging now, causing a stampede of legislative and cultural challenges impacting us all in different ways, we should not lose sight of the values, people, freedoms, and peace that we hold dear. Panic over changing times, the decisions that other people make with their own lives and bodies, or the way people express themselves will not slow the passage of time or disrupt the constance of change, but it will hurt people, both those targeted by the panic and everyone else. I wish I could say there was a simple solution to calming the stampede, stopping the onslaught of attacks, and assuaging the fears that feed into these interconnected panics, but I think the most important thing we can do is to keep ourselves calm, recognize the source of the fear, work hard to protect each other and our freedoms, and remind one another of our humanity.
After all, the angry cries of sleepy old gods should not so easily separate us from our reason and compassion: It is important to resist the chaos.
The worry with Comstock is that it will be relied on to enact a national abortion ban. Not only would it target the mailing of abortion care medication, it could prevent medical supplies related to abortion from being distributed, hamstringing the clinics still in operation.
The policing of others is a defining part of current legislation. The Wisconsin anti-nudity legislation's most concerning part to me was the clause that granted would-be reporters immunity from taking photos.
Hiomophobia and queer hostility is driven as political gains, too. Here, I am seeing more emphasis on it as an agenda item vs abortion because it's perceived to have less opposition. Aligning with someone's identity as a means to gain political power is common, but the danger created for people when the political promise is to ban existence is frightening and dangerous. Immigrants also fall into this category.
Hi Timothy - this is an excellent post that I read with rising fear. I live in England where much of what you describe as happening in the USA is still just over the Western horizon. My experience has been that it won't stay there...