Ohhhh, yes. Touchy topic. I know.
That’s why I pick it.
To kick in an open door: children are the future. I am quite certain that most people will agree with that.
Children, then, are also the future of naturism, nudism, the clothes-free lifestyle, or whatever label you care to slap on it.
We all (almost all?) know that kids prefer to run around naked when they’re young. Of course, there will always be exceptions, like Inuit children, but even on good days I can imagine they want to run around nude in the snow. When there’s no wind, and abundant sunshine, what’s not to like?
I think it’s strange that adults, who probably happily ran around naked when they were kids, are so persistent in trying to prevent children to ‘appear’ in a naturist environment. “Because it will mess them up,” is an expression that I once heard.
The crazy thing about this is, that it’s the adults who are already messed up (by society, norms, religion, culture etc). And it’s so bad with them that they have forgotten (repressed?) the fact that they were nude kids once themselves.
About a month ago, here in town, it was very warm. I had to go get something and crossed the central square, where since a few years a water display has been set up, with jets spouting up in unpredictable places. There was one mother who had stripped her very young daughter down to the skin, and the girl had all the fun in the world running after the jets, trying to guess where the next one came from.
I loved how lots of people laughed at her antics, and no one made any weird comments about decency and shameful behaviour. I also noticed that no one had a phone in hand to take pictures. (Had I seen that, I would have stopped that. It was not their child, after all.)
No, folks. The kids won’t be messed up being naked and among naturists. They’re being messed up by people who got messed up as adults.
Paul,
We totally agree with you on this. We raised our kids, and now our grandkids, in a healthy nudist environment and they have all turned out to be well-adjusted, honest and open people. We have also made sure they realize that there are many people who don’t view nudity as healthy due to the “bad” influences of society. We have taught them to be tolerant of those folks, and enjoy their own nudist lifestyle.
Dean
I could not agree more Paul, another example of a perfect post.
The best cure for body dysphoria and body image issues and unhealthy societal attitudes to nudity is….nudity! Having grown up nude around hundreds of people who were also nude i truly feel there is an ever present chasm of difference between those of us to whom nudity is second nature, common, and those in the textiled communities living in hypocrisy, worshipping at the altar of the “taboo” while shaming others doing the same.
Naturism for me has vastly deepened my understanding of, and contributed to my developmental understandings of social, mental and yes, even my sexual development, giving me a realistic view of the opposite sex and even my own gender, instead of the highly specific %1 of “beautiful people” and the unrealistic expectations many people foist upon themselves to their own detriment : )
This may sound a bit arrogant or pig headed perhaps but in my own way i have, every since i was very little felt a certain sense of superiority over my peers who lived in textiled families. One anecdote (which i will keep brief!) comes to mind, of going to swimming lessons in primary school, and seeing all my peers both girls and boys being (some more or less than others) highly self conscious of themselves in swimwear whereas i wore the absolute minimum as possible and even contended that i would swim better naked, to the utter horror on the face of my teacher & the swim instructor. That behaviour of being afraid of being in your own skin, or in minimal clothing is a learned behaviour, i’d argue an indoctrinated behaviour (tho i am sure many in the textiled community would say the same for us naturists without providing any other rebuttal; an immature “i know you are but what am i” response xD)
A healthy mind leads to a myriad of benefits other than just a healthy body too, through the mind-body connection. I am naturally gifted, a gift i did not work for nor earn but i will make use of though i am comfortable and humble enough to observe that i far exceed the intellect and understanding, dare i say it wisdom of my peers, and even those much older than me on occasion. My healthy life, of which Naturism is a very big part is responsible for that.
I would be interested to hear other peoples thoughts too, especially about how society, like a bite from an apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil leads to this inherent shame of our bodies, as if we’re filthy.
Testimony from ex-textile, now happily naturist and nudist since 2017. In 2018 I started to live naked. I consider myself very lucky, if I hadn’t met another nudist who then convinced me to try now I would still be textile. My previous life over 30 years was textile. I believe the shame of being seen arises in adolescence (at least for me it was like this), I think it is a natural fact also because of the sexual impulses that as a child are still dormant, so nudity becomes erotic, moreover not being used to seeing bodies naked, (having grown up in textiles all wore clothes) nudity becomes something private, forbidden and erotic. The feeling of forbidden and erotic leads to hiding the nudity now considered only erotic and therefore dirty and immoral. As a boy I took a shower after the pool always in a bathing suit, I didn’t dare take it off because showing the penis would have been embarrassing and immoral because that part of the body was now strongly sexualized and was not considered a part of the body like the others. I believe that having lived 90% of my life as a textile this attitude is unconsciously learned in the textile environment. I believe I am dressed to create this distorted vision of nudity, if everyone were naked this distortion of the body would not exist. In this sense, first nudism and then naturism have been a cure in particular for my mind but also for the body and I think that complete nudity is very important not only for the well-being it provides me but as a life teaching for those who they grew up textiles. It is important to be naked to show how the human body got there and not obscene.
I went to a mixed-gender elementary boys boarding school, where there were some girls as day students. We had an outdoor swimming pool, which was always murky because a stream fed it. One sports day, a boy won a prize for ‘putting his swimsuit on underwater’, having lost his swimsuit when he dived in at the start of a race.
I later went to a (then) all-boys boarding high school. In my first gym class, I discovered we swam nude. “I suppose that’s what the big boys do”. We only wore swimsuits when the school was open to visitors and in inter-school competitions. That’s where I discovered the joy of nude swimming, not to happen again for some forty years 🙁 The school is now mixed gender (a.k.a. co-ed). I don’t know the current custom. I doubt it is as ‘sensible’ 😉
The problem isn’t naked children, the problem is adults sexualising nudity to the point they consider even naked children to be sex objects.
And sadly that’s starting to extend to naturists as well, who ever more seem to want to exclude children from naturist venues “to prevent pedophiles from seeing them” (meaning they consider each other to be pedophiles, let that sink in).