STILL MORE NUDE MUSING: Yesterday I lunched with a good pal whe had just returned from Spain. He travels internationally quite a bit, and in his recent travels something has been bothering him:

"Why is it if a woman goes topless on a beach in this country she gets arrested, but if she goes topless in most other countries nobody even notices?"

Or, as he also phrased it, "Why are we so uptight about nudity?"

We've all heard the discussions over why some forms of nether-region nudity garner a film an R or even NC-17 rating while only the most extreme forms of violence even jiggle the ratings meter. We've seen the recent stories about how TV Guide changed their recent cover shot of home-improvement hottie Paige Davis because of a so-called "nudity clause" in her contract. We've noticed that gubernatorial candidates that have had sex on camera seem to garner more publicity than most of the other candidates (save for the ones that have spun Speedos, violence, and steroids into an enviable fortune), and that major celebrities seem more concerned about squelching nude shots of themselves than in avoiding bad scripts. And closer to home, we've seen how adding the word "nude" to the end of a celebrity name can bring an uptick in traffic to a humble little blog like this one.

What's going on here? Are we trapped in the dark ages? Would a little more gratuitious nudity help us pull our heads out of our own carefully covered behinds? Would more skin lead to more or less sin? I love these questions. And I think I have an answer to why we're so uptight.

Because it pays to be uptight.

I wonder if it's not simple supply and demand at work. After all, in a society where nudity is kept scarce, you can make a lot of money peddling nudity. Larry Flynt may be annoying and amoral, but he ain't dumb. Late-night cable channels have likely made fortunes peddling porn-lite. (And some channels have made even more selling the unfiltered version of same.)

You could even make an argument that the Internet you're surfing right now is simply a wave machine whose engines run on pure porn fuel.

This is where economics gets interesting to me. Here's the question that needs exploring: In societies with more toplessness and sex on TV and nipples-on-parade, is there a larger or smaller per-capita porn market? Would topless beaches shrink the domestic skin trade? I'm curious. And it sounds like a fun study to undertake.