But is it naturism?
Honoring naturism by coexisting with nudity in all its forms
What a time to be alive!
We’re well into July now, which means we have survived another Pride Month, another June come and gone. With it, a time of celebration, liberation, solidarity, and joy for the LGBTQ community and, of course, the inevitable rounds of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that pop up like they do every year from folks who would prefer not to be aware of their LGBTQ neighbors at all, or who would prefer we all fade back into the shadows like in the good old days. No surprises there. But what has troubled me in this past couple of years, just as national tensions over LGBTQ identity, history, and healthcare have risen, is the willingness of other forward-thinking groups to throw the LGBTQ community under the bus for what amounts to a failure to live up to respectability politics exacerbated by a widening political divide. I have noted this shift from the nudist and naturist community in particular, as viral mainstream outrage over nudity at Pride parades or even overt sexual behavior taking place within gated and age-restricted premises, seem to have granted those naturists with already wavering or reluctant support of their LGBTQ brothers and sisters permission to turn their back on perhaps the only other community who supports their mission.
“Should naturists support Pride? And should we be promoting naturism at Pride?” These are the wrong questions, and frankly, their wording is far too generous to the naturist community given the long history of nudist and naturist establishments shunning and fighting against LGBTQ inclusion despite many LGBTQ people identifying with—or at least sympathizing with—the mission and way of life of the nudist and naturist community. Whether naturists decide to show up at Pride parades to promote naturism is up to them; it’s not exactly an edict coming from above that naturist groups must show up at Pride events to promote their cause, but the very fact that we, as naturists are welcomed, embraced, and validated at Pride events is remarkable in its own right. In my own experience, I have never had the pleasure of attending a Pride event where a nudist or naturist organization showed up to support and promote, though I find the idea of nudists and naturists reaching out and showing solidarity with the LGBTQ community endearing and smart. We are two communities who can accept and embrace one another for our respective ways of life, with a shared appreciation for social nudity and body liberation, and that’s not something we can afford to take for granted.
The purpose of such a naturist presence at Pride, however, should never be to force an expectation of behavior or beliefs on the rest of the participants at Pride—an event that serves to unite LGBTQ people and their allies, not to specifically promote naturism. If anything, naturist engagement with Pride should stand as a statement of solidarity with the cause of body freedom and inclusivity, to recognize the values and struggles we have in common, to acknowledge the contributions of the LGBTQ community to the nudist and naturist community, and as a beacon to let all LGBTQ people know they are welcome and safe with us. Are there acts and thoughts and beliefs and behaviors taking place at Pride that don’t align with naturist values or the expectations one would expect in a nudist setting? Absolutely. There always have been. No matter how family-friendly, unless it’s being held at a naturist park, no Pride festival or parade has ever claimed to be a naturist event. There is plenty of overlap between the body freedom and sexual liberation that are on display at Pride and the body positivity and non-sexual nudity that are embraced by the naturist community, however, and those connections lay bare the interconnectedness of all movements toward bodily autonomy and sexual freedom. It’s in that connective tissue that we can and should be supportive of one other.
This whole conversation, though, has me thinking about a bigger problem for naturists. Not how we engage with the LGBTQ community specifically, but how we engage with the world around us in general and with all those other forms of nudity, the good, the bad, and the sexy.
A life half-lived
For some context, I grew up in a very small town, in an evangelical household, attending a Seventh-Day Adventist school, in a largely conservative and religious community where everything, every piece of media, every event, every experience was filtered through a lens of Christianity and righteousness. Would Jesus approve of this music? This movie? This revealing swimsuit? This relationship? With having a glass of wine at dinner? Is this spreading the gospel? Is it making God proud? And so I grew up watching my friends, and myself miss out on major life moments, rites of passage, cultural touchstones, joys, and lessons that, as I’ve grown, I realize were not some heathen, devil-worshipping, sacrilegious acts, but just part of being a curious, angsty, spirited American kid. Things I should have been able to explore and enjoy were taboo, off-limits because an elder in the church thought Pokemon cards were demonic, or because someone in the community thought dancing was inviting sin and promiscuity into our lives, or because someone wrote in a book a hundred and fifty years ago that caffeine and bicycles were the tools of Satan. I’m telling you, I couldn’t even wear a WWJD bracelet—as was the popular thing for cool Christian kids in the 90s—because that little piece of woven polyester on my wrist was jewelry, and jewelry was also an affront to God. Peace signs, video games, Harry Potter, pop music, Disney’s Mulan, and SpongeBob SquarePants were guilt-ridden half-joys, spoiled by the thought that I was doing something ungodly, that someone would be disappointed in me.
This all was very un-fun at the time, but it taught me a very valuable life lesson: Not every life experience should be filtered through this kind of respectability lens. It’s not healthy to make yourself or others feel guilty for enjoying life, and it’s not healthy to demand that every experience, fact, and piece of media align with or validate your own opinions, ideologies, or beliefs. It’s also not healthy to make that one part of yourself consume all the other parts. You deserve to be more than one thing, with more than one interest and more than one source of joy.
Nude, rude, lewd, and prude
Here is where I find myself disappointed in some of the views expressed by those in the nudist and naturist communities. I find myself reminded of the staunch unwillingness to see the other joys and beauties and silliness in life, to appreciate things that are perhaps outside of our own experiences, preferences, and beliefs, but that might serve to make us more tolerant, understanding, and compassionate people. The unnecessarily puritanical undertones that pop up from time to time within nudist and naturist circles raise my alarms. Do Pride parades serve to adequately promote naturism? No, and they shouldn’t be expected to, but we can still show love and support for our LGBTQ brothers and sisters because we value their contributions and relate to their struggles. Does the World Naked Bike Ride sufficiently promote the naturist community and its values? Honestly, no, not really, and it wasn’t claiming to! But there is a lot that we have in common, and so we rally behind these rides. Does the fashion industry uphold naturist values and beliefs? Absolutely not, but we can still appreciate design and craftsmanship and how fashion interacts with the body. Or we can just accept that we do need clothes sometimes, even most of the time, and we can appreciate when those clothes look good on us. Do sex, pornography, and sexuality help to promote naturism? No! Why would they? Why should they? That doesn’t make them bad or even in opposition to naturism or the appreciation of non-sexual nudity; it just makes them other parts of life that we can choose to enjoy or not. Does this movie or that TV show or that song promote naturist views of body positivity to our standards? I don’t know! Who cares? Maybe we should try to enjoy media for the unique stories being told and the opportunity to see a perspective other than our own rather than on a sliding scale of how much they reaffirm our own experiences and beliefs. Some of my all-time favorite movies and TV shows make stupid jokes about nudity or have moments where they shame bodies, and even though that’s not how I choose to view bodies or nudity, those perspectives are a real part of life, too.
It’s a great exercise to ponder whether this, that, or the other is aligned with naturist values, but it’s not OK to demand them to be. It’s not OK to show up to a Pride parade and sneer because other people are doing things that you wouldn’t expect to see in a naturist or nudist setting. It’s not OK to show up to a strip club and act disappointed that the strippers are not reciting pages from Maurice Parmelee’s Nudism in Modern Life. It’s not OK to show up at an orgy and shake your head in disgust at the failure to adhere to your local nudist club’s policy on public displays of affection and sexuality. It’s not OK to shame people for enjoying nudity in ways that have nothing to do with naturism in settings that have nothing to do with naturism because—here’s the moral of the story—not all nudity is naturism. This is a principle that nudists and naturists need to internalize, for their own sake and everyone else’s too. There are lots of forms of nudity that may or may not be acceptable on a nude beach or at a nudist club, and that’s great! It does not invalidate the philosophies of nudism and naturism for people—including us—to be nude without practicing naturism. Other people using their bodies in ways they enjoy that are consensual and empowering and pleasurable for them personally is nobody’s business but theirs. None of these people have any responsibility to be advocates for the naturist community, let alone to adhere to a purely or even remotely naturist set of expectations.
Confusion and conflation
And so what if someone mistakes me for anything other than a naturist? Or what if someone sees these acts of debauchery and mistakes them for naturism? What if they all get the wrong idea about naturism? I think we’re overthinking it. Why would we want all nudity to fall within this strict box of wholesome values, anyway? Does that rigidity and stigmatization not undermine the naturist ethos of freedom of choice and expression? In a way, though, we are hitting on a certain truth: There are people out there whose only exposure to nudity is through pornography, sex, medical settings, and their own shower, and sometimes those people’s view of nudity is skewed by how prevalent the sexual side of nudity weighs on their perception of nudity as a whole. But that is not a confusion between sexuality and naturism; it’s a conflation of sexuality and nudity itself. For naturists to then conflate all forms of nudity—including sexual expression—with naturism is just as unhelpful. When we as naturists fret over people viewing pornography, appreciating erotic art, attending swinging events, or expressing themselves sexually and mistaking it for good, clean, wholesome naturism, it’s we as naturists who are conflating, not the person watching pornography.
I promise you that nobody is watching porn, or strippers, or any of the Jackass movies, or someone on an operating table, or people in a gym shower and thinking, “Well, I guess this is an official representation of naturism because these people are naked.” I promise you that nobody is thinking about naturism as much as naturists. Most likely, nobody is thinking about naturism except naturists. And, to turn the magnifying glass around a bit, I have not come into contact with any other group of people who talk about sex and pornography as much as the chronically online naturist set. It feels obsessive, honestly, and it doesn’t solve the problem that naturists think they’re solving when we concern ourselves with policing the consensual, harmless ways that people use their own bodies or enjoy the bodies of others. If naturists start invading non-naturist settings and scolding people for not living up to the expectations appropriate for a designated naturist setting, more people might start thinking about naturism, sure, but it’s not going to be in a positive light like we would want. Rather, it positions naturists as dogmatic, puritanical, restrictive, and meddling. Suddenly, their only exposure and experience with naturism will be the time some random naked person on the internet popped into their mentions to scold them for not living up to naturist ideals. Great. People love being harassed for not adhering to some Internet stranger’s set of beliefs.
Trading disgraces
For anyone who might be open to the idea of nude recreation or who might just be generally open-minded about nudity, this approach is bound to be off-putting. And what’s the goal here? To replace their old nudity-related taboos with new nudity-related taboos? To get them to stop feeling shame about their naked body and start feeling shame about their sexuality or whatever else? This is not only unhelpful for reaching people outside of the existing nudist and naturist community but is also unhealthy for people who are already nudists and naturists, who are full human beings in their own right and deserve the freedom to also enjoy their bodies outside of naturist settings and spaces, for purposes that have nothing to do with naturism. A full appreciation of the human body does not start and end with naturism but can include all shades of sexy, silly, raunchy, goofy, artsy, and banal nudity. Every single person, naturists included, deserves to enjoy those freedoms and joys. We are doing ourselves a great disservice by failing to separate sex from nudity, but also by failing to separate nudity from naturism. In my opinion, respect for naturist values and philosophy includes a live-and-let-live celebration of nudity, one that embraces wholesome forms of non-sexual, recreational, and social nudity but that also respects that naturism is only one part of a healthy appreciation for the human body. There are plenty of other forms of nudity to enjoy, and our individual choice to engage in any or all of those forms of nudity is up to us as individuals. That freedom of choice and that respect for others’ autonomy is, at least in my opinion, what forms the foundation of nudist and naturist principles.
We cannot expect respect from others for our enjoyment of non-sexual nudity while belittling and bemoaning others’ preferred enjoyment of nudity. Whatever that may be. It is not up to us as nudists and naturists to police all nudity. I do believe, though, that if we focus less on telling others what to do and not to do with their bodies and more on presenting naturism as one of many healthy and normal ways to enjoy nudity—one that people might be surprised to find they actually really enjoy, too—we can build a reputation of being benevolent, welcoming, and tolerant people, with helpful and healthful views of the body and nudity. We can do a great job of offering people a whole extra way to enjoy their bodies, one that relieves them for a moment of the hyper-sexualization and objectification we are all so accustomed to. We can inspire people to see nudity as more than just sex and the doctor’s office, and encourage them to, sure, keep enjoying those things (or maybe not enjoying them, in the case of the doctor’s office), but also to enjoy lots of other fun and interesting and enlightening uses for nudity. Naturists should be seeking to add value to people’s lives, to increase their appreciation of the body and one another, not to take something away, not to swap one joy for another or one stigma for another.
Plenty of nudity to go around
In adopting a more tolerant approach, we might actually find that we all have a lot in common. We might find that the naturist community and all its history, struggles, and values are not so far disconnected from the sexual liberation movement, the LGBTQ rights movement, the fight against anti-obscenity laws, and the body positivity movement. We might find that there is more to life than our own experiences and preferences or that we are better people when we free ourselves and others from judgment and shame. We have a strong and powerful message to share about nudity and human connection, and there’s no reason that message should be spoiled by tying it to denigrating others and their choices.
And heck, we should not limit ourselves, either! Enjoy life, get naked, be kind to others, and do what makes you happy, naturist or not. The naturist community will be here to welcome you and anyone else whenever the joy you’re seeking is respectful, non-sexual, nude recreation. But for everything else, go have fun! 🪐
Check out Timothy’s personal blog, Almostwild, for more thoughtful meditations on social nudism and nakedness, inclusivity, social progress, and environmentalism.
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