Thousands of people stripped to their underwear and ran through downtown Salt Lake City in a demonstration organized to protest what participants described as an overreaching Utah legislative agenda on social issues — a protest format that was simultaneously absurd, attention-generating, and pointed in its deployment of the body as a political instrument.

The Undie Run, as it became known, drew a crowd that ranged from committed political activists to people who appeared primarily interested in the novelty of running through a state capital city in their underwear. Utah's legislature had passed or was considering legislation on issues including immigration enforcement, alcohol regulations, and other matters that the organizers framed as government overreach into personal liberty.

The choice of underwear as protest attire is a well-established escalation of civil disobedience that generates disproportionate media attention relative to its actual disruption. Naked and near-naked protest has a long history precisely because it creates an immediate visual statement about the body's relationship to law and social control, and because images of large groups of people running in underwear are reliably irresistible to news organizations looking for photographs that will draw clicks.

Salt Lake City, as the center of a state with a strongly conservative political culture largely shaped by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, provided a particularly charged backdrop for a demonstration that was partly about embodiment and partly about signaling the existence of a constituency that dissents from that culture's prevailing norms.

The demonstration was peaceful, the police presence minimal, and the news coverage extensive — which is precisely what effective attention-generating protest looks like.