Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Streaking
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT STREAKING BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Streakers have invaded the Walter Cronkite show, the Johnny Carson show, the Oscar awards, and the...
...Paganism—There was a time when all serious streakers were pagans...
...The Athenians, meanwhile, were streaking happily at Olympia and winning trophies from the gods...
...This will come as good news to the prurient, who equate streaking with mere exhibitionism—-"the compulsive exposure of the sexual organs in public...
...Etymology—According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the verb "streak" derives from the Teutonic prefix "streig-," which means "stroke, rub or press...
...States of the Union EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT STREAKING BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Streakers have invaded the Walter Cronkite show, the Johnny Carson show, the Oscar awards, and the Yankees' home opener...
...Everyone in town that morning had closed his shutters and forborne peeping at the lady—except a fellow named Tom...
...In another place Gibran instructed streakers how to behave in a group: "When one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone...
...It is hard to streak while a fig leaf—the deciduous conscience of the race—keeps slapping one's thighs...
...But puritans are silent on the subject of joyful exposure of same...
...Many of the parents of today's streaking children took Gibranish vows...
...Dick Diver, the melancholy psychiatrist in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night...
...Streaking dreams are advertised by Revlon and Chanel...
...and "prestige" (streaking for status...
...Fitzgerald was on to something here, but he failed to follow through...
...The rest of the Bible has little to say on the subject...
...Plutarch assures us that "there was nothing disgraceful in it, because everything was conducted with modesty, and without one indecent word or action...
...And, adds Plutarch, "he accustomed the virgins occasionally to be seen naked as well as the young men, and to dance and sing in their presence...
...Exegesis — Actually, streaking seems less an expression of neurosis than of innocence...
...Psychiatry—The best guess is that streaking is vaguely therapeutic, like a whirlpool bath or hot milk...
...to the fleetest went the fairest...
...Her husband, the Earl of Mercia, had ordered the streak in protest against excessive taxes, and it worked: The taxes were lowered...
...Some insist that streaking constitutes an even more sinister threat to our way of life than whispering in the classroom or smoking in the john...
...Just the other day a young streaker said to me, "I wish the fellows up ahead would remove those stumbling stones...
...In my town they have been arrested in forests and along state highways...
...The Greek word gumnas, whence comes "gymnast," means "one who exercises naked...
...And why did it not occur to President Nixon, in his hassle with the Internal Revenue Service, to put Pat upon a white motorcycle and send her streaking down Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Many parents, educators and clothing manufacturers are worried...
...Shame rushed in as soon as Eve bit the apple and slipped into something uncomfortable...
...Will our children seize the former while shedding the latter...
...Similarly, Nixon might have nipped the Watergate weed in the bud had he agreed with Congreve that "To go naked is the best disguise...
...It is a key passage in the annals of streaking...
...There is little agreement, in short, on why children streak or whether they ought to...
...Diver had a patient "who thought that if he could walk unclothed and unmolested from the Etoile to the Place de la Concorde he would solve many things—and perhaps, Dick thought, he was quite right...
...Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone...
...Every Anglo-Saxon language, notes Sir James G. Frazer in The Golden Bough, "possesses in common a word for marriage which means simply bride-race...
...There is plainly a need for mature understanding and endless discussion...
...Job observes that he has come naked into the world and will go out the same way, an apparent suggestion that he is streaking through life...
...The game was invented in Eden: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed...
...Ours is "nuptials...
...Lady Godiva's successful tax protest raises questions about the politics of streaking...
...This sort of thinking has worked into the children's genes...
...In sum, I trust I have proven to everyone's satisfaction that there is less to streaking than meets the eye...
...Matthew, on the other hand, praises apparel: "For 1 was . . . naked, and ye clothed me...
...It is probably just as well that students do not read Arthur Symons these days...
...Only the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission prevent the models from disrobing...
...Genetics—Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet has become a standard wedding text, and Gibran was a born streaker...
...Ay," I answered, "they remove them not...
...Today's youth watches TV commercials in which a handsome boy and a beautiful girl float in slow-motion toward passionate embrace across a green never-never land...
...We had similar fantasies in the '50s, but they were half-hearted, and left us with the gloomy feeling that our Krafft was ebbing...
...But not for Arthur Symons, the English symbolist who suffered periodic bouts of insanity...
...restrict" (streaking for discipline...
...We have, for example, testimony from Dr...
...He who wears his mortality but as his best garment were better naked," Gibran obscurely warned...
...Why didn't the American colonists simply streak through Boston instead of dumping tea and starting a revolution...
...Here is Symon's awkward vision of streaking: "Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears;/ A naked runner lost in a storm of spears...
...Politics—We hear nothing more about streaking until the 11th century, when Lady Godiva got on her horse and cantered through Coventry...
...Others fear a dangerous ideological showdown between Karl Marx and Hart, Schaffner & Marx...
...The high school principal, a tweedy fellow, has threatened to suspend anyone caught naked on school grounds...
...Among the Norse, men raced naked in competition for brides...
...dreamt I went shopping in my Maidenform bra— a paltry hallucination...
...Herewith, for the use of local police departments and PTA panels, some background notes on streaking: Etiology—In dreams begin streak-ings, and for most of us that is where the matter ends...
...Besides, various "streig-" mutations have given us such words as "strike" (streaking for protest...
...Lycurgus, king of Sparta, ordered virgin girls "to exercise themselves in running, wrestling, and throwing quoits and darts...
...All of which explains why the Christians, during the reign of Theodosius II, journeyed to Olympia and dismantled the Temple of Zeus...
...that such companions thou'dst unfold,/And put in every hand a whip/To lash the rascals naked through the world...
...or, reacting to crimes committed by his aides, had he adopted Emilia's streak-scheme in Othello: "O heaven...
Vol. 57 • May 1974 • No. 10
