Outtakes and Extras from
“Mooning: A Short Cultural History”

by Daniel Nester

Potatoes anthropomorphically mooning. Source: The Internets.

1. Very early draft of section 5 that attempts to outline variations of moon and mooning experience:

 
Anonymous Moon.
Bent-Over Moon.
Erotic Moon; as in: invitation for sex.
Full Moon on Glass.
Full Moon Plus Upper Thigh.
Full Moon With Red Eye, on glass.
Full Moon With Red Eye, one-cheeked.
Full Moon With Red Eye, two-cheeked on glass, enclosed with flatulence, aka Dutch Oven.
Full Moon With Red Eye, two-cheeked, with gapping.
Full Moon With Red Eye, two-cheeked.
Full Moon With Steam, partially exposed, aka One-Cheek Sneak.
Full Moon With Stick Out, plus Salad Tuck-Under
Full Moon With Stick Out.
Full Moon, standard.
Group Moon, orchestrated (see the annual Mooning of Amtrak in Orange County, CA).
Jump-in-Bed Moon.
Moon as Free Speech Statement.
Moon as Political Statement (case of Aborigine).
Moon Beside Highway.
Moon From, and Sometimes On, a Car Window.
Moon on Bet.
Moon on Dare.
Moon on Windshield.
Pantsless Moon, i.e., streaking.
Partial Moon, aka Coin Slot or Plumber’s Crack.
Paternal Moon.
Shaking Moon, aka Shakira moon.
Spanking Moon, single hand.
Spanking Moon, someone else’s hands.
Spanking Moon, two hands.
Walking Away While Pulling Down Pants Moon.
Walking/Running Moon.
Woman Moon.

 
1a. This thank-you list will appear in How to Be Inappropriate, where “Mooning: A Short Cultural History” will also appear, but wanted to use this chance to thank all for putting together an attempt at a more definitive list of mooning variations. Special thanks to “Team Moon”:

Jay Snodgrass, Chris Herbert, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Jo Miller, Kim Middleton, Michael Quattrone, Jonah Winter, Michael Robins, Matthew Lippman, Reb Livingston, Michael Miller, Davis Schneiderman, Jason Schneiderman, Marcus Slease, Eric Schnorr, Colin Challender, Clay Matthews, Jeff Crouch, Richard Allen, luckydave, Dana Lang, Michelle Bulla, Scott Waldman, Bill McCabe, Ricky Bones, Stephanie Hosmer, Geoff Bouvier, Nickole Brown, Michael Azzerad, Christopher Connelly, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

2. Mooning-related passages from folklorist Michael Licht’s article “Some Automotive Play Acitivies of Suburban Teenager,” published in The New York Folklore Quarterly, 1974 (Volume 30, pages 52-56).

The widely known practice of “shooting the moon” or “mooning” is an example of the use of this technique in social play. A carful of youths out for a drive take notice of an acquantance or stranger—often an adult authority figure—who is driving or walking in the same direction. The car pulls up alongside this target individual, and if this action doesn’t draw his attention, the horn is blown and the passenger yells. One of the youths then drops his pants and sticks his buttocks out of the window as the car speeds off.

…

If there is any question why “shooting a moon” is thought to be funny, imagine what it looks like. The element of surprise is great. When looking through a window we might reasonably expect to see a different kind of pale round object looking back at us; our expectations are, so to speak, upended. We have been shown a visual pun substituting loins for head.

The initial audience reaction is shocked disbelief and surprise at such a gross situational impropriety; the targer individual is “grossed out” by the introduction of taboo material. This is followed by the flood of laughter observed by Freud, or embarassment or shame at being caught looking, or even more rarely, outrage, depending on the ultimate situation arrived at by the audience. The loss of composure and face by the victim triggers the elated release of laughter in the youths, and the sound often helps the victim interpret the situation as humorous. The symbolic nature of violation involved in this act or anal aggression may be lost if the performer is male, as largely seems to be the case, and the victim is female: the act is then subject to interpretation as one of the compulsive psychopathic exhibitionism.

 
3.

Southern New Jersey is not known for its high culture. There are highways, strip malls, outlets, Great Adventure, ranchers, and more strip malls. This is not the New Jersey of Bon Jovi and Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen. This is the South Jersey of famous “Pine Barrens” Sopranos episode, where Christopher and Paulie get lost, existentially and geographically, in the snowy woods as they chase down a Russian mob guy. 

 Maybe that’s why, growing up in that most suburban of suburbias, the most exciting thing to do in South Jersey was mooning. I’ve mooned people since I could pull down my pants. I have mooned as an altar boy from the sanctuary, keg parties, across hallways and into classrooms. I moon at wedding receptions. I moon drivers as they ride the bumper of my wife up the Turnpike. 

 
4. From the Court of Appeal of California, Third Appellate District, January 12, 2006, in which a jury found defendant guilty of dissuading a witness by force or threat:

 Through her kitchen window, H. observed defendant blocking C.'s egress. She went outside as her husband, G., drove up. G. parked his truck and yelled at defendant to leave. Defendant smirked, put up his fists, and challenged G. to fight. As the two men approached each other, C. leaned out the window of her car and yelled to defendant, "Hey, Bob, for the life of me I can't figure out why God created you." Defendant responded by pulling down his shorts and exposing his buttocks to C.. While his pants were still down, he turned around to face Baber. Seeing his "dark frontal area," C. turned her head. H. saw half of defendant's exposed buttocks as he was pulling up his pants.

 G. and H. urged defendant to allow C. to leave, but defendant remained combative. When G. said that he was going to call the sheriff, defendant replied, "Go ahead, you chickenshit." C. asked H. to call 9-1-1; she did so, and Deputy B. W. responded. G. told W. that he saw defendant's buttocks and genitals and that he saw defendant expose them to C.. At trial, however, G. stated that he saw defendant's buttocks but did not see his penis.

 
5. From the text from one of several signed affidavits of the mooning incident described in Jeffrey S. Ravel’s “The Coachman’s Bare Rump: An Eighteenth-Century French Cover-up,” published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40 (Winter 2007): 279-308. The article described an incident January 21, 1763, when a nobleman hosted a performance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's opera, “Devin de village” in his home. After the performance, the nobleman’s coachman dropped trou behind the curtain to several servants and inadvertently mooned “to the remaining elites in the room.” 

[…]

Mrs. Coppin, for her part, could clearly see a man who had lowered his trousers, stuck out his bare rump, and slapped it with his hands to draw attention. Her daughters, for their part, stated that they had not seen this nudity, but had heard the slapping sounds and taken them to be applause for the play. … Mrs. Coppin and her daughters withdrew themselves immediately after this indecency occurred, at which point they saw the Sieur de Villers become furious when he heard the news of what had happened. They heard that others who had been in the room also withdrew, indignant.

Signed: M. Roussin; R. E. Coppin; V. Coppin