Susan Lenfestey: It's summer, and folks are busting out all over

The only thing that dragged on longer than the Democratic primaries was this wet, gray spring. It refused to concede to summer, but with the summer solstice and every vote counted, so to speak, summer was finally declared the winner.

With that, the mercury nudged above 70 degrees, and Minnesotans responded with a joyous outpouring of biking and strolling and canoodling on obscenely green lawns and parkways.

And they took off their clothes.

Not entirely, mind you -- this remains a fairly modest and Lutheran kind of place -- but they took off more than anyone my age might have once imagined. We used to blush at the sight of women's undies hanging on the line, and now grown women jog and cycle and power-walk in what looks to me like the spandex long-line girdles and cross-your-heart bras that we rejected decades ago.

And, being Minnesotans with a lot of sugar, corn and dairy in our past, and a lot of fast food in our present, there's more flesh being squeezed out of these girdles than into them. Victoria's Secret it's not.

There's a part of me that thinks this is great -- no one cares anymore about body image, and they're free to, well, let it all hang out. And surely there's a sort of gender equality in this recreational neonudity. If men can whip off their shirts and let the summer breeze riffle through the hair on their chests, why can't women do the same? OK, through their breasts.

The other half of me thinks that this is a culture gone amok. Somebody somewhere is going to point out that this excessive dermal display is the fault of narcissistic baby-boomin' feminists like me, who liberated our bosoms in the '60s from the Wagnerian cone breasts of the '50s. Trust me, like so much of what we did then, jogging in spandex girdles is not where we thought this was going. (But hey, think about all that organic food.)

Nor did we who believe in gender equality intend this to be a license to the fashion industry to market slutwear to prepubescent girls, and bondagewear to their big sisters. (And is it just me, or are the boys going baggier as the girls go skimpier? It takes a scrap of fabric for a pair of girls' shorts, and the rest of the bolt for a pair of boys' billowing low-hangers.)

It's not just young people. Women at the office are showing more, well -- lower cleavage than the plumber under the sink. Seems to me we're a culture obsessed with sex but clueless about eroticism.

If geezers like bicycling in padded crotch spandex, so be it. Mick Jagger looks silly now, too. It's the sleazewear being marketed to girls and young women, and the women who buy into it, that makes me sorry for how far we've come -- and how backwards we've gone. I have no quibble with joyous nudity and the impulse to undress in the balmy air. In Seattle there's a naked bicycle parade on the summer solstice, and hundreds of men, women and children paint their bodies, yes, naked bodies, in the most creative and clownish ways, and it's about as sexually stimulating as, well, watching grannies' bloomers blowing on the line. But it sure is fun.

It's the coy couture of faux-sexuality, the contrived message of availability printed, literally, across the behinds and breasts of young women that makes me wonder how we wound up so far off the mark. And it's the baring of so much of our intimate body parts that makes more modest countries regard us as a culture run amok.

Well, the summer solstice is past. Don't dwell on it, but the days are getting shorter. And like a killing frost bringing relief to garden run amok, the cold air will soon force all of that underwear to return to where it belongs -- beneath layers of clothing, and in our frozen northland, under burkhas of down.

Susan Lenfestey lives in Minneapolis and writes at clotheslineblog.com.