Fifty years ago, you couldn’t watch a live televised event without the possibility that a nude person might beeline past the camera. Streaking burst onto the scene in the 1970s, when media outlets began writing about college fraternities embracing the practice, and it quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon. Streakers crashed the Oscars, the Olympics, Wimbledon, a handful of rugby games, a Pan Am flight, and a plaza on Wall Street. In 1974, a hair stylist ran through the state legislature in Hawaii and named himself the “Streaker of the House”—and he wasn’t the only one to interrupt a lawmaking session. The phenomenon became so pervasive that, in 1974, a song called “The Streak,” by Ray Stevens, spent three weeks atop the Billboard singles chart.
These days, I’m willing to bet there are few if any rogue nudists blazing across your phone or computer screen. “It seems like a dying art,” Cara Snyder, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Louisville, told me. The act “still remains on the sporting periphery,” but is fading in athletics too, says Geoffery Z. Kohe, a lecturer in sports policy and management at the University of Kent who has written about the topic. Where did all the naked dashers go?
Over the years, successfully streaking has become a lot harder—and riskier. Fewer people are watching the live TV events that catapulted streakers to fame. The number of people with cable or a live subscription through a streaming service has fallen by more than 25 million in the past decade. Of course, some televised occurrences do draw lots of viewers, but those are rarer and more heavily policed. Since 9/11, especially, stripping down and running across a stage has elicited not confused laughter but armed security. A few people still attempt it, including at several recent Super Bowls and a number of NBA games, but the footage of those naked runs is almost never shown for long on air. TV networks such as the BBC now direct their producers to zoom out so that the streaker barely appears on-screen. Streaking is about getting a reaction, which isn’t possible if no one sees you.