10/31/2023 0 Comments Female streaker today![]() The beards and the hairdos and the costumes are a manifestation of grievance and anger. “The clown … of our time is trying to tell us his grievance. “The clown’s job was to tell the emperor or the royalty exactly what was wrong with the society,” he told an interviewer. He likened hippies to the medieval clown or court jester, then placed streakers in the same category of defiance. Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher and media theorist, suggested the streak was a symbolic blow at the burden of cultural hopelessness-an extension of the 1960s protest. Commentators at both ends of the political spectrum claimed the streaker as an ally. Why all this happened was a matter of much debate. After a streaker struck the telecast of the Academy Awards-host David Niven commented: “The only laugh that man will get in his life will be by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings”-the naked wave finally receded for good. “Reverse streakers” raced through a Florida nudist colony in heavy clothing. At Michigan State, a naked form distracted a class on criminal sexual deviation. ![]() It was a pretty big streak, but no match for the University of Colorado, which claimed a mass streak of 1,200.Ī streaker enlivened the 1974 telecast of the Academy Awards.Įlsewhere, innovations continued all that month and into April-streakers on bicycles and roller skates streakers in wheelchairs skydiving streakers. Finally they broke away, sprinted through the Undergraduate Library, and “inspired a rash of disunified streaks in all directions,” according to the Daily reporter. But so many people had come out to watch- The Michigan Daily estimated the number at 10,000-that the streakers were reduced to standing around in the cold and urging more students to join them. The cloak of night brought out far greater numbers at 10 p.m., but the streak nearly stalled in the massive crowd of onlookers.Īt 10 p.m., some 70 streakers of both sexes shed their clothes at the center of the Diag and prepared to run. Running on emptyĪ crowd of a thousand or more gathered for the lunchtime event, but only five streakers-three men and two women-showed up, and two dropped out before reaching the Diag. The other-the “First Annual Lucky Streak”-was to start on the Diag at 10 p.m., with a course to South and West Quads and back. at Eden Foods on Maynard Street and race through the Nickels Arcade to the Diag. One outing was promoted as the “First Annual Ann Arbor Streak-In” (which an organizer insisted was the “official” event) it was to begin at 1 p.m. This story appeared on the front page of the Michigan Daily on March 13, 1974.Ĭasting spontaneity to the wind, organizers announced plans for competing events on Tuesday, March 12, the second day back from break. Now you had to do something different, and Michigan’s answer was the mass streak. By the time students returned to Ann Arbor, the spontaneous solo streaker was all but passé. Then, in the first week of March, streakers seemed to be everywhere, with dozens of episodes reported every day, across the country.īut that was the week of U-M’s spring break, so Michigan students missed the crest of that wave. ![]() The national press began to notice in early February. The first streakers of 1974 appeared at Florida State University in January, followed by imitators in Texas, Washington state, and Maryland. (See “Panty Raid, 1952”.) But this time it was late to the race. More than 20 years earlier, Michigan had set the trend in such affairs. Indeed, streaking struck some as an uproarious effort to cast off the grim preoccupations of the Vietnam/Watergate years. campuses in that year when Richard Nixon’s presidency was spiraling down toward impeachment. Lee, as president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee), was said to have given his blessing to naked runs as a rite of passage.īut the country had never seen public nudity like the phenomenon that overtook U.S. college campuses dates back at least to the 19th century, when Robert E. The streakers of 1974 were hardly the first American students to run through public spaces with no clothes on.
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