This is a nonsense. The Kaiapoi pool has a ban on poolside nudity, which precludes even very young children being changed. A mother of four was asked yesterday to desist from changing her 16 month old away from the changing facilities.
She said the two family changing-rooms at the centre were busy when she opted to change Ophelia at the poolside, and it also allowed her to keep an eye on her other young children who were swimming.
The aquatic centre management is standing by its policy, which is also in use at other facilities nationwide.
Them's the rules.
Of course a woman can breastfeed at the poolside. I witnessed one (to borrow Oswald's description) "she-mountain" do just that. A huge mammary gland was flopped out for all to see while a large baby hung off the end. Is this nudity? No. It's that sacred cow, breastfeeding.
Not a soul would have challenged this right.
Whatever happened to exercising commonsense and a bit of decorum?
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3 comments:
Oh yes. The rulemasters back home in Kaiapoi are as bonkeroon'os as any species you'll find up and down the land.
Perhaps the farther a nation gets from the cradle of western civilisation the more prudish it becomes. This is almost comedic if not sad. Certainly when I was on the beach in the south of France no one batted an eye at nudity. In Paris women used the public pools topless but everyone kept their bottoms on. But in the south it was not unusual to be au natural. As for the nudity it was interesting for all of about 6 seconds and then became like the vapours in Rotorua --- present but you really didn't notice it.
I was slightly taken aback however by a recent walk through the Tiergarten in Berlin. This is the centre of a city of 4 million people. I didn't really anticipate finding several hundred people lying in the sun in the park totally nude. What was interesting about it was that this was a bit more apparent than the beach situation. The main walkways in the park go through the nudist area so in this sea of nudity you see elderly clothed couples out for a stroll or families with the kiddies walking by. No one seemed to notice except for three old men, clothed, who found a park bench overlooking the nudist field and had staked out seats there for the duration of the afternoon. For them this was clearly a spectator sport. Everyone else seemed oblivious. Meanwhile, a few yards away some of the heaviest auto traffic in the city was passing by -- of course maybe it was heavy for the same reason those three men had that bench claimed for the afternoon.
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