I had to laugh...at all you people who seem to think that, because he wasn't arrested or his children weren't taken away, that "nothing" had happened to the author.

Maybe you really don't understand just how traumatic being the subject of any kind of police inquiry can be--unless you've been through it. Allow me to illustrate:

Back in 1978 or so, when I was 18, my purse was stolen. I was a college student, and I thought I'd just absently left it in one of my classrooms. Yes, I was stupid, and absent-minded, and young. When I finally realized it was stolen, I called the police and made a report, and I also called the JC Penney Credit Card Registration Service, with which my 2 whole credit cards were registered, to cancel them. On the advice of the police, I called the bank to freeze my checking account, then closed the account and opened a new one.

Alas, JC Penney didn't cancel my cards, as promised, and the thieves turned out to be professionals. They were able to dummy up my driver's license to put someone else's picture on it. With that, they had sufficient ID to pass checks. They bought scads of stuff--big stuff, TVs, things like that, with both my supposedly-cancelled cards and my checks. Heck, the nice JC Penney employees carried the TVs out to their car!

One day, two detectives called and asked if they could talk to me. Since I had nothing to hide, I told them sure. So there I was, in my bathrobe, in my little studio apartment. being questioned by two of the biggest men I'd ever seen. With guns and all. It honestly didn't dawn on me until about halfway through the interview that I was a suspect--they thought I'd participated in a fraud scheme. Finally, they asked if I'd take a lie detector test. I told them sure, I would. I was innocent. But I was a pretty shaken up by their suspicion of me. I was the victim here! I never did have to take that test--which I suppose is a testament to those two officers and their common sense.

No charges were ever filed against me either, but I got to spend the next year of my life explaining to outraged merchants that no, that wasn't me, here's the police report. Notarizing samples of my handwriting. Answering questions, most of which weren't polite. And my suspected "crime" didn't involve sex or children. What saved me was, the person whose picture they'd put on my driver's license had braces, and I had 2 full crowns on my front teeth and never had worn braces--nor could I.

But guilty until proven innocent? Exactly. And anyone who doesn't know how hard it is to prove a negative must never have tried.

As for the camping activities, I saw nothing wrong in them. As for pissing on a fire to put it out, one boyfriend reported to me that his boy scout troop did that pretty regularly--it was a fond memory for him. I suppose they should all be locked up, too, bunch of pedophiles that they obviously are. All those boys and men and their rampant penises, and not a civilizing woman in sight!

Guess I'd better go burn the home movies my folks took of me when I was a kid. I know there's at least one reel with me and another girl in a bathtub. We are about 3, but you never know who might get ideas...

Somebody earlier asked about whether the girls were involved in peeing on the fire. I'm going to step in for the ladies and say that this is not really a possibility. To pee on something, we pretty much have to be directly over it. This is a bad idea when a fire is involved. We try not to burn our hoohas if we can possibly avoid it.

What a wrenching piece! Thanks for writing it, Jody.

My father was an accused child molester, and I have a dim memory of him touching me inappropriately. My folks were divorced after this, and he didn't stay in touch with my family. I was never able to ask my father about any of this before he died, to my regret.

Now, as a father myself, I am extremely sensitive to even the appearance of inappropriate behavior with children. I have photographed my boys (now 4 and 1) in diapering/bathing/toweling/potty situations, because I love them and want to provide a full record of our growing and happy family, but I always compose the shots very conservatively. Even so, I always feel this little grip of pain, of guilt, as I take these shots, as though I were doing something wrong. What an awful legacy.

You write: “Several years ago, I was at the beach with some friends who have a daughter who at the time was two years old. They let her run around naked until some pervert (there is no other way for it) told them that they could be fined for exposing their child's body. I intervened and told the guy in so many words that if he saw anything sexual about a two-year-old body, HE had a sick mind, ought to be reported to the police as a pedophile, and be locked away for life.”

It’s not clear, Manhattanite, what this guy did except tell your friends that they could be fined--which was probably true. Why does that make him a pervert? If there was other behavior on his part that showed him to be a pervert, you don’t report having “intervened” in it.

It’s way too simple to fulminate about Americans being “sick,” and it’s historically ignorant to claim that “anyone who sees a child's nudity as sexually provocative is dangerously unbalanced.” Freud and other psychoanalytic thinkers would find this notion strange, to say the least.

You also write: “In Europe, women subathe [sic] topless and no one gets excited over it (except for American males). The human body has been celebrated in history by the Greeks and the Romans, to cite but a few, for its esthetic, not for its sexual value. . . . It is only Americans who are so repressed by Puritan ethics who see nude bodies as the very incanation [sic] of sex, debauchery, and worse.”

Where to begin with this comment? The Greeks and the Romans had some, shall we say, illiberal views about women, did they not, and are you sure it’s ONLY Americans who see nudity in this way, and are you absolutely certain that NO other culture has ever seen the nude body in terms of "sex, debauchery, and worse" (whatever "worse" means)?

But anyway, it’s naive to suppose that a naked female body is naked in a vacuum, when the female body has been commodified up to and past the point of obscenity, both in the U.S. and in Europe. It’s not the naked female body that’s obscene, it’s the context in which it has been and continues to be objectified (and raped, and murdered, and impregnated and infected with AIDS against its owner's will, and on and on). Even a friendly romp with free spirits on a nude beach is not entirely detached from this context—that is, from the worldwide epidemic of misogyny and all its sequelae.

I’ve visited and enjoyed many a beach, hot springs, and spa right in the good old USA where clothing was optional, and I’ve chosen to lose mine. I've done the same in Europe. And in both places, Manhattanite, there was usually some perv lurking nearby, not necessarily American, sometimes with his clothes on, and sometimes with his clothes off (the exhibitionist type). I didn’t really care. I was there by choice, and naked by choice.

And that’s the point. Children are not truly in a position to choose, or to know the full context or implications of their choices. That's why they depend on their caretakers to protect them from certain kinds of scrutiny. I don’t understand parents who believe that they are turning their naked kids loose in a vacuum. Wishing doesn't make it so.

Nor, by the way, do I understand parents who are rude enough to display their children’s nakedness--and, in so doing, their own rigid beliefs--in a public space where clothing is definitely not optional, and where they are certain to offend the sensibilities and cultural traditions of many of their fellow citizens.

I'll tell you what's typically American: this absurd insistence that the child’s body (and mind) are a tabula rasa devoid of eroticism, and this narcissistic conviction that because one thrills to behold the nudity of one's own precious spawn, everyone else should be thrilled, too, and that anyone who feels otherwise must be a sick pervert.

I have no brief for child molesters and sex offenders, but I would bet money that some of the people who insist on their inalienable right to their children's public nudity are the same folks who haunt websites of sex offenders' addresses, and who do much to whip up the general hysteria surrounding sex offenders.