Spring Break antics and cultural stages

[Elheru Aran]

So I was thinking about an article I saw a while back; it was in Time magazine, but a very similar one is apparently on 'The Guardian' website. I won't post the entire article, but here's the link.

To summarize; the author states that toplessness is becoming less frequent upon French beaches. Concerned about skin cancer and such, the younger generations are putting on more swimsuit at the beach.

The Time article went a little further, however, in commenting upon how this cultural standard was changing in France even though it'd been around since the 1960s or earlier; while in recent years in America, there has been a great upsurge in crazy antics on Spring Break, Mardi Gras, and such. Everybody has probably seen various wet t-shirt videos, beer party antics, and such. It provoked the thought, 'what if this is a stage in the growth of the American popular culture?'

Or, is this rather an example of the French just smarting up about skin cancer, while American college students (the great majority of people who engage in that kind of crazy activity) are being dumb?

Is this also connected to a general European sophistaction about sexuality, having less of a nudity taboo, than Americans, who indulge in forbidden fruit during party activities?

I couldn't help but think about Rome too, how their society grew sexually decadent for a time-- and then the Christians moved in and cleaned it up. France doesn't have the prevalent religious fundamentalism as we do in the States; are right-wing conservatives going to push for a stop to these activities, specially as crimes skyrocket during Spring Break times in various destinations?

I could be off target here, but I thought it was fodder for a discussion...

[Simon_Jester]

I think you're making some bad assumptions. Among them:

-The implication that nudity on French beaches occurs only during some "spring break" period and is restricted to wild young college age types (implied by the way you talk about people cracking down on the practice in France)
-The idea that "sexual decadence" is a meaningful concept. Seems to me it's the sort of thing that historians who like to blame disasters on sex use so that they can escape defining their terms.
-The idea that high crime is correlated with nudity.
-The idea that we can generalize from one culture to another and call something that comes and goes in one place "just a stage" when it appears in another.
-For that matter, the idea that topless sunbathing is going to go away in France, as opposed to becoming somewhat less popular.