Editorial: When modesty gets mortified

OPINION: It's one thing to like your oysters au naturel. But what about your oystermen, asks The Southland Times in an editorial.

A bunch of stout-hearted Bluffies of various occupations and dimensions have shown their determination to give their all, or as close as damn it, to the fundraising campaign to save their community pool.

In the sure and certain knowledge that when it comes to fundraising calendars and clothes, sometimes less is more, they have put aside any personal vulnerabilities and posed for a nude calendar.

It's been done before, just not in Bluff. As far as anyone could prove, any way.

Calendar aficionados could, if so minded, have collected by now the posturings of characters from the Southland and Otago Young Farmers, the Inner Wheel of Invercargill North, and sundry Wanaka identities corralled by an art co-operative. Even shearing champions, including Winton's Darin Forde and Invercargill's Nathan Stratford, have shed their woollies for the greater good.

It doesn't always go smoothly. We all know that. Queenstown-based business MedRecruit was behind a calendar featuring naked male doctors. The original recipient charity, KidsCan, rejected the money on the grounds that it had never signed off on the idea and had concerns about the appropriateness of it all. Happily, the Prostate Foundation had no such qualms.

Typically, calendar fundraisers do seem to have happy outcomes, with the rather dismal exception of the Wings and Wheels over Waikato calendar, whose participants didn't sufficiently distinguish between risque and risky. The proposed event the calendar was to promote proved a notorious failure.

Provocative English travel writer Duncan Fallowell commends the idea of nudie calendars, not just in general, but for New Zealanders in particular. Do us the world of good, apparently.

In his book Going As Far As I Can he pondered our national code and wondered "Is it rugby that makes (New Zealanders) emotionally autistic, or is it emotional autism that drives them to the escape of rugby?"

Fallowell contrasted this with the glamorous approach taken in France, where rugby stars are rendered semi-nude gods for the Dieux de Stade calendar. Here, he suggested, may lie the cure for the – look, we're just quoting this guy, OK? – emotional constipation of New Zealand rugby and, by extension, New Zealand itself.

Before we rise to our feet to applaud, if that is indeed anybody's inclination, it should be remembered that Fallowell's commentary was so very 2008. The following year Ewen McKenzie, sacked by the Stade Francais club, ripped into his former employers with the accusation they had prioritised the recruitment of good-looking players for the calendar.

We'd hate to see the good people of Bluff go that way. By all means we wish their latest fundraising project well, and hope that when it goes on sale during the Bluff Oyster and Food Festival in May that people do buy it, and scan its pages with nothing other than kindly intent.

But it would be a pity, indeed, if in Bluff or elsewhere there was any discrimination whatsoever against those among us who, what with one thing or another, aren't calendar material.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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