Dress Standards on Public Transportation, and other things

You're sitting on a public bus, and your stop is about half an hour away. The bus is gradually getting more crowded, and newcomers are standing in the aisle holding on to hand rails. A man gets on and stands right in front of you. He acts completely normally - he says "Excuse me" and "Thank you", he awkwardly smiles the way you're supposed to on a crowded city bus, etc. - but there's one thing that makes him look more than a little unusual, and which makes other people feel very uncomfortable. He's completely naked.

This is a city bus - it's supposed to be for everybody who either can't or doesn't want to ride in a car or ride a bike. And we know that, in freer societies like ours, we're supposed to be free to do with ourselves as we please. Is it okay to kick him off the bus, or to not allow him on the bus in the first place? In some cases, yes. But wouldn't that violate his sovereignty over himself? I don't think so.

You should be free to walk around your own bedroom and bathroom naked. If your curtains are drawn, you should be free to walk around your entire house completely naked. If your neighbors permit, you should be free to walk around their house completely naked. If the owner of a restaurant permits, you should be perfectly free to sit at a table and enjoy a meal completely naked. You do not, however, have the right to present yourself unclothed on the property of anyone who doesn't consent to your nudity. You have sovereignty over yourself and what is yours; you do not have sovereignty over other people and their property.

We see the signs in restaurants that say "No shoes, no shirt, no service", and we never think twice about whether excluding someone who isn't properly clothed according to that sign violates those people's rights. Restaurant owners want to maintain a certain atmosphere that caters to a particular segment of the population (those who don't want to be offended by the presence of shirtless people), and to run their business the way they want to run it (which they have a right to) they have to make clear certain rules about how they want their property used. When a shirtless man walks in, no one violates his rights by refusing to take his order. If he really wants to have a shirtless restaurant experience, he could go to a restaurant that caters to people who don't mind the presence of shirtless patrons.

So, if a naked man gets on a bus where nudity is forbidden by the owner, the driver has every right to keep him from getting on. The only problem with applying this line of reasoning to city buses is that city buses belong to "the city" and not anyone in particular. But that isn't a problem with this line of reasoning. That's a problem with the oxymoronic idea of "public" ownership. Things that are publicly owned are supposedly owned and run by everybody for everybody. But we know that "public" services are funded by one segment of society (not everybody), distributed by another segment of society (again, not everybody) for the benefit of a very select segment of society (again, not everybody).

But I think I can address the problem of dress standards on public transportation without opining that tax subsidies for public transportation violate individuals' property rights, or that the most efficient mass transit is private mass transit.

As I wrote above, the restaurant managers want to cater to a certain crowd, and to do that they have to have certain rules that express the dining preferences of that crowd. "No shoes, no shirt, no service" is a condition of use that expresses these preferences. If you want to be served, you have to be wearing shoes and a shirt.

In order to cater to a target ridership, the owners of public transportation services (whether they be public officials or private entrepreneurs) should be free to lay down conditions of use that express the riding preferences of that crowd. If a significant portion of the target ridership happen to be very socially conservative (as many working-class people are), then they might want to and should be free to take that social conservatism into account.

When I was taking summer classes at Cal, I drove to Fremont and took BART to downtown Berkeley. One day (I forgot whether it was the morning or afternoon) a woman and her 2-year-old daughter got on and sat right across from me. The girl was making a lot of noise, the mom was speaking to her in some Central or Eastern European language, and suddenly the girl was quiet. I looked up from my book, and saw that this woman was nursing her daughter (who was old enough to talk) on this train. They didn't hide it with a towel or anything.

Now, I didn't mind at all. If you want to nurse your kid right in front of me, you have my blessing. But you might not have the blessing of the other people on the bus or train. Luckily for her no one reacted with horror, and I doubt anyone would in the Bay Area. Even if people did dislike it, it would have to be a chronic "problem" and the number of people offended by it would have to be sufficiently large for any drop in business to be noticed.

If there are enough people who are offended by it, and if there are enough women who insist on nursing or pumping in transit, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating nursing cars or walled-off nursing sections in cars. Likewise, if there are enough people who are offended by nudity, and if there are enough people who insist on traveling nude, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating clothing-optional cars and buses. So long as people get on the proper car or bus, no one would be made a captive audience to the offending exposure.

Many urban areas in the U.S. are seeing a sharp increase in the number of conservative Muslim immigrants. Some of these women find it more appropriate to not be in any situation where their bodies are pressed against the bodies of men they aren't married to, and they would be very reluctant to get on a crowded car or bus. As of now, there aren't enough of them to make an impact, and women who prefer to not be touched by strange men just somehow make do. If transportation services in the U.S. want to cater to these women in the future, when the number of them might be drastically higher than it is now, they might want to consider designating women-and-children-only cars and buses, or women-and-children-only sections of cars and buses.

Before you spout off screaming "Segregation!", let me point out that we already have restrooms segregated by sex. Most women prefer to have a restroom experience that is free of men, and in response to this overall preference shopping malls, restaurants, train stations, and office buildings provide restrooms reserved only for women. No normal person would say that the women are discriminated against for having restrooms reserved specifically for them, or that men are discriminated against for not being allowed to use restrooms that women use.

And don't worry about this being some kind of special priviledge. It's just that in the near future there's going to be a large number of people who want a particular kind of service, just as there are large numbers of people today who want particular kinds of service, and if you can make a buck providing that kind of service then why not? So long as no one's assaulted, defrauded, burgled, or in some other way deprived of their sovereignty over themselves, the provision of special services is completely legitimate.

Another possible objection to women-only cars and buses can come from people who are bothered by social heterogeneity. If a society is to be stable, they say, then it must run on values that are shared by everyone, and allowing separate cars for women out of consideration for conservative muslim immigrants allows pockets of recent immigrants to exist as third-world peoples in an otherwise modern America. Now, whatever America's values are, social homogeneity shouldn't be one of them. We should be a people who tolerate experimentation - not just in technology, but also in ways of relating to each other. The fact that some people wear more clothes than you do, or separate themselves from the opposite gender more than you do, should be no political concern of yours. We pride ourselves in our freedom to live by the values we choose, and we even like to pretend that our nation was founded on that freedom. If other people value the segregation of sexes, then let them live according to that value. They don't violate your liberty by getting on their own train cars.

Did you ever wonder why there are a million different kinds of churches in America? It's because here we're relatively free to live according to the values we choose, so long as we allow others the same freedom. One of the main rules in "doing church" in America has been: If you don't like our rules, start your own church. And so for the past couple hundred years people have associated according to their shared ideas of what's right. We don't have an established church. No one's forced to go to any particular kind of church. We don't force everyone to adhere to the same church polity, listen to the same religious music, or keep the same dress code. If that's the freedom we're allowed in religion, why shouldn't we be allowed it in mass transit?

My radical proposal is this: allow people to choose their own rules. If they don't want naked guys on their buses, let them keep naked guys from getting on. If they want to be naked on the bus, let them have buses where they can be naked. If women want to go topless, they can get on the naked buses too. If women don't want to be touched by men they don't know, let them have women-only buses. This isn't an issue of what's appropriate in public. It's an issue of what preferences people have. And if this is to be a free country, entrepreneurs should be allowed to cater to different people's preferences.