One could argue that the American naturist movement reached its intellectual crescendo in the 1980s and early 1990s under the leadership of Lee Baxandall. While nudist magazines had largely dissolved into soft core pornography in the late 1960s and indeed throughout the 1970s, and many nudist parks had begun to embrace more subversive (and profitable) activities – nude pageants, lingerie dances, and swinging – Baxandall sought to reconnect the movement to a larger purpose, intertwined with feminism, environmentalism, intellectualism, and social justice, informed by his decades of work as a writer and political activist. 🪐
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The intellectual rebel
“There’s no point to having sharp images if you have fuzzy ideals.” -Jean-Luc Godard Naturism has been thoroughly commodified into an easily-digestible consumer product, almost wholly separated from (some will argue unshackled from) the principles and philosophies that once defined it. As a consumer product, naturism must now remain responsive to the ever-changing whims and desires of the marketplace to maintain and expand its customer base. Subsequently, this ever-encroaching consumerist mentality puts the movement at the mercy of an increasingly impatient and anti-intellectual market, which rejects most anything nourishing, challenging, or thought-provoking in favor of trends and fads. Contemporary naturism is whatever the market tells it to be.
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