Author: Paul

Promoting the clothes-free lifestyle.

We could do with a new hippie-wave

This might strike you as odd, certainly if you don’t know a thing about hippies.

Hippies rose in the 1960. Flower power, free love, and yes, nudity, were some of the things that hippies promoted. They were against war (I like that) and most of them promoted a relaxed, kind, loving lifestyle.

A famous hippie song

During those times, especially in the beginning, hippies shocked most of the good people with their open way of life and their appreciation of the human body. I think it’s the nudity that was the biggest hangup for people.

A couple with matching flower body paint walks together during the Isle of Wight Festival in the UK in 1970.

As the picture above and certainly the following one show, nudity was a normal thing among hippies. They had no issues with it. That is what made me think how we could do with another hippie-wave.

Mother and child swimming in a lake. It was no problem for them.

Hippies weren’t just located in a single place, they were everywhere. San Francisco was a famous town, but also London, Amsterdam, and every other large city had their share of them, and everywhere the good people were surprised with their alternative way of life. Like we do these days.

Which suddenly gives me this thought:

Are we the new hippies?

The selfie situation

I guess several of the readers of this blog have some experience with this one. How do you take a decent selfie when you’re out and about?

Many times, at least in my situation, I’m out on a walk alone. Taking a good picture of a nice spot with myself in it often becomes a problem because: a) what fun is it to haul a tripod around all the time, and b) images using a selfie-stick always make it clear you’re using such a device.

So now I look at you, reader of this blog.

Clearly a selfie-stick user…

How do you make your pictures? Sometimes I see great shots that clearly aren’t done with a selfie-stick. Do you carry tripods around? Do you use other means to set up your camera/phone for a good shot?

Or do you use more advanced methods? For instance I could imagine that the use of a drone could be an option, but that would come down to a very expensive selfie stick, or isn’t that the case anymore?

I’m really curious about this and I am looking forward to your responses!

Fundamental human rights

A while ago I ran into this tweet:

While I do agree with the sentiment behind it, I replied to the original poster that it’s not in the list of human rights as agreed upon.

Because I like simplicity, I found this website which tells you about the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in an easy to understand form. (Yes, it’s for children. I said I like simple, right?)

I also had a problem with the claim that we are forced to buy and wear clothes. I don’t think that’s true. We’re supposed to cover up, dictated by law, in the name of ‘decency’ (theirs, not ours). Walking around in a cardboard box is also covering up, even if you found (did not buy) that box.

Perhaps this blog post is too much over such a tweet but I do like to check the facts before I make claims like the original poster made in his tweet.

Thinking further on this subject, I wonder how far one could go in the clothing arena. On textile beaches, the amount of actual textile can dwindle down to something you can’t even make a handkerchief of.

Or, like the lady on the right, would something like this go against the hairs of the textile-loving community? She is dressed, after all, and from the looks of her, the dress and the location it’s a very expensive design too.

We all know that clothing is massively overrated these days. I recall seeing people in wool hoodies when it’s so hot that birds faint in flight. Long coats and long pants when the asphalt is close to melting. These people take things a few notches too far.

Still, there is no human right to be naked (and that’s a shame…)

Nudist? Naturist? Or plain clothes-free?

Do you call yourself a nudist? A naturist? I hope you’re happy with your choice.

sunday nudist happy together

More and more I see how these ‘labels’ are abused by the porn-happy community, and that makes me think.

Is it still a good thing to call myself a naturist when that name, or title, or what have you, is being dragged through the mud so often?

The pros.

Sticking with nudist or naturist name/label is probably the strongest statement that we’re not giving in to what the porn-happy community tries to make of our lifestyle. The problem here, of course, is that we’re up against a giant ‘opposition’, even when that mostly lives online. Since more and more of our lives take place online, that’s something we can see as a battleground.

The cons.

With porn sites abusing the naturist and nudist label, it’s increasingly difficult to convince the textile world that these sites are wrong and we are right. Most certainly considering the rise of the prudes that we can witness. It’s as if the opposite of the sixties is surfacing.

Because of these things, I sometimes wonder if it’s worth sticking to one of those two labels. Perhaps “clothes-free” is a better option. After all, one would think that “clothes-free” would be a neutral enough way of describing who we are and how we would like to be.

Alas, that won’t hold water for long either, I realised, after some more thinking. Nudist was the best word long ago. Then it became naturist, be it mostly in Europe. Why change again? Whatever name we think up, there will be some crowd that finds a way to drag it through their personal kind of mud.

That is what made me decide that nudist and naturist are perfect. Let’s take pride in the history of those words, of the people who paved the way for us to be naturists and nudists.

As usual, I welcome your thoughts on this subject…

The fight against faketurists continues…

This is what we’re fighting. Almost daily, I fear.

‘Naturist’ jailed for having 80,000 child pornography images.

Isn’t that disgusting? And we all pay the price for this because it’s sensation and sensation sells. People like you and I aren’t interesting enough, apart from the fact that we like to walk around naked. The uninteresting bit about is that we don’t ‘go wild’. We don’t have sex in the street, we keep to ourselves. Heck, in general, we have the name to clean up after ourselves better than our dressed human counterparts.

A good thing in this article above is the ‘naturist’. (Note the quotes!) Obviously the source wherever this article originated knows the difference, which is something to be grateful for. (I can’t tell where the article came from, there are too many links with the same title to check.)

This kind of faketurist is hard to battle. On the few social media where we can still have some influence, we can stand up and point them out, but the hidden kind, like this individual up here, operates in darkness and then suddenly throws a bomb in our midst.

They have nothing to do with real naturism or nudism. I wish there was a way to eradicate all that ignorance once and for all…