Yup. It happened.
P.Z. Walker now has his own author website. You can find it, surprisingly enough, at http://www.pzwalker.com.
This means that all links to my books that live here will point to the new site. Don’t worry, nothing you need to do, it’s all being taken care of. 🙂
It was about time that this happened. I’ve written so many books by now that a site dedicated to that is a must. Happy perusing!
According to Wikipedia:
In Wicca and Paganism/Neo-paganism, the term skyclad is used to refer to ritual nudity. Some Wiccan groups, or Traditions, perform some or all of their rituals skyclad.
Right, you probably wonder why I made you read that.
I’m a Pagan. Pagans are folks who don’t follow any of the large religions with just one god. Enough of that, though, this post is about being skyclad. Being nude, obviously, clothed in sky.
And this is a way how pagans can perform their rituals. Skyclad.
Not all of them do. It’s a matter of choice.
Why do I bring this up? Well, on the friend of all naturists and nudists, Facebook (I’ll wait for all the laughter and boo-calls to end now…) I had an interesting discussion with a Wiccan friend of mine concerning burkinis.
You know, those unfriendly slabs of cloth that Islamic women can wear to beaches. She said that she was in favour of them because that way those women could go to the beach if they wanted. “Because everyone has the right to go to the beach the way they want.”
I asked her how she felt about nude beaches. Her response was that such a thing wasn’t right, because “at some point there is enough naked flesh“.
This of course made me ask her how that mixed with her previous statement about having the right to go to the beach the way you want. This, she said, was a matter of common decency. Because being naked wasn’t decent. (Note that I know she has done plenty of skyclad rituals.)
The minds of people and their attitude towards our lifestyle keep surprising me. Even someone who isn’t against nudity in one form can pull back from nudity in another form.
I think it has to do with safety. Someone who engages in a nude ritual does so with people (s)he knows, feels safe with. People like us, who engage in nude life do so with people we know and feel safe with. We have the advantage here because we don’t have such a tiny group of people we dare to trust.
Naturists and nudists are nude for (mostly) a common goal: not wearing clothes. For feeling free. For experiencing nature in the most optimal way. The way I like to do that is having nude walks. As many as I can. Along beaches, in forests, in the mountains. As long as I can feel the air on me, move without being hindered by cloth and such.
I wonder if you, the reader of this piece, have experiences with people who condone nudity in one way but are very opposed to it the other way. I’d like to hear about them.
And in the mean time: stay happy, be nude as much as you can.
If only people would accept this as something normal…
This is an amazing book. It took me long to read it. No, I don’t usually read slowly but there is so much in this book to think about that I took time for that. Why would I run through an amazing story, past great reflections and texts when I can stroll through all that, sit down and look at it all, and think about it? That’s what I did with this book.
The story plays in Mexico and Latin America. Key components in this story are a written codex with a secret, a strange necklace with figurines, and the main actors Zé and Marisol. ‘Aglow’ is a great addition to the Naturist Library because it brings forward the reason and benefit of social nudity very well.
I don’t know how to say more about this book without going in at the deep end to spoil it all for you. I can just say: get it and read it. And enjoy.
This post was originally published on Tumblr.
Nudist in the house.It can be, and is, a real thrill to be sneaky about nudity. There’s always the chance of getting caught. There’s the risk of what might happen. A lingering question of, “How far can I go?”
But that’s not what we’re really asking. We’re really asking, “What would it be like to live like this all the time?” The issue is admitting it to ourselves and acting on it.
It’s scary admitting something personal. Especially when a game or passing fancy turns out to play a very active role in our lives. What it comes down to is knowing ourselves and our families.
Honesty is a key component of nudity and a healthy family. It’s unreasonable to be 100% honest. There are some things our families may not want to know or understand. But it doesn’t matter as long as we are being honest with ourselves.
Nudism isn’t about hiding who we are. It’s about finding out more about ourselves and enjoying our life. If we find we enjoy being nude in whatever form it takes, we need to admit it to ourselves and embrace it as part of our lives.
If nudity is a part of our life, then we should find what our families think of it. If they are okay with it then our time of sneaking about might be over. Then let’s see how far can we go?
It’s a big, brave world out there with endless possibilities. Don’t let dishonesty and fear hold you back from what you enjoy.
Text by Made in the Nude.
Note: I found this article at https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-neo-naturists-empowered-women-to-be-wild-and-free and am reposting it here.
“The Neo Naturists like taking their clothes off for the sake of it,” Christine Binnie and Wilma Johnson wrote in a 1985 manifesto—and that’s exactly what they did. A British underground art movement born out of the 1980s, the Neo Naturists were a body-painting trio of female flashers, made up of Christine, her sister Jennifer, and their friend Johnson.
The artists began to appear on the London club scene around 1981, turning up at Heaven in Soho (one of London’s first gay clubs) or the punk music venue The Fridge in Brixton, adorned in nothing but paint. They would perform on stage, chanting songs and throwing up their legs in an unruly version of the cancan. At other times, they’d simply flash at the crowd. Beneath their overcoats they had perfected a number of looks painted directly onto their bodies, including trompe l’oeil lingerie, and wild, grinning faces that transformed breasts into eyes and belly buttons into nostrils.
The Neo Naturists had their heyday from 1981–1986, but they have reformed this summer for a retrospective at Studio Voltaire in London. The show is an archival assemblage of paintings, slides and photographs, low-fi videos recorded in nightclubs, newspaper clippings and other ephemera—and, pressed on the gallery walls, body-prints made by the Neo Naturists themselves, some of whom painted their bodies for the first time in 20 years.
The group has its roots in the punk anarchy of 1980s London, an era marked by the ruthless free market spirit ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and the subcultures that emerged in resistance to it. One of those was a cross-dressing scene known as New Romanticism, which was a breeding ground for exquisitely androgynous club kids like Boy George and Marilyn. The Neo Naturists were part of that scene, collaborating with Marilyn as well as other now-famous artists such as Grayson Perry and filmmaker John Maybury.
As much as they were aligned with the New Romantics, they were also satirists of them, deliberately positioning themselves in opposition to the scene’s slick sophistication and skinny bodies, a form of dandyism that was largely enjoyed by men. Instead, the Neo Naturists were rebellious, curvaceous, and pagan. Their main concern was to take pleasure in the act, and to celebrate the natural forms of their bodies.
“I swapped my Flesh Tint oil paint for some blue and gold body paint and transformed her into a voluptuous version of Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus,” Johnson recalls—in the exhibition’s catalogue essay—of the first time she painted Christine. They freely incorporated materials close to hand, taping household items to their bodies, and their 1985 manifesto includes an inventory: “Boiled crab, shrimps, tin foil, gold leaf, paper doilies, biscuits, peanuts, bottle of wine, Scotch pancakes, contraceptive sheaths, squid, sheep’s heart, bikini briefs, sausages, bacon and eggs, freezer bag wombs, apples, burning incense, knives and forks, £10 notes, sequins, vitamins, tins of tuna, and of course, lots of Sellotape.”
In one of their most iconic works, Flashing in the British Museum (1982), Christine donned a shaggy coat and pranced through the British Museum, flashing her painted body beside Egyptian relics and Greek antiquities. (“Just wear a big coat,” she once advised would-be flashers: “It’s easy!”) Another performance, Pink Punk Yoga (1982), at The Fridge in Brixton blended the incongruous practices of punk and meditation, while Sexist Crabs (1983) at the Zap Club in Brighton was a chaotic gambol around the stage with seafood taped to their bodies.
They eschewed rehearsals, preferring ritualistic improvisation, and sometimes they simply took to the streets, as in Swimming and Walking Experiment (1984), when they cavorted in the fountains below London’s Brutalist tower block Centre Point—and got arrested by the police. Occasionally, they made the headlines, outraging some conservative hacks and delighting others. “Hooray for the Bare Binnies!” crooned the Daily Star of 1984.
For women to take such pleasure in their art was deeply subversive. Like all heretics, they didn’t play by anyone else’s rules. They opted for spontaneous exuberance, in contrast to the message of Thatcherite conservatism (be professional!) or the affected, male-dominated New Romantics (be flamboyant!).“The Neo Naturists are casual to the point of excess,” their manifesto states. “[They] believe that gorgeousness is the ultimate intelligence.”
As Studio Voltaire curator Jessica Vaughan points out, one important aspect to understand about the Neo Naturists is that their display of the female body was in no way pornographic. “What they were doing was radical,” says Vaughan, “because they were delighting in the female form in a way that isn’t titillating or sexualized, but instead is something full of humor and celebration.”
The Neo Naturists did not commodify their practice, and they were never picked up by a commercial gallery. By the end of the 1980s, they had moved out of the squat they shared and dispersed. Many of the men from their circle, however, went on to become successful British artists, including Perry, Maybury, and Michael Clark. “It’s not the first time that female artists were forgotten,” Vaughan says, “while male counterparts, who were incredibly influenced by the women around them, went on to become household names.”
There are a multitude of reasons why the Neo Naturists slipped through the net. For one, nobody quite knew what to make of them. “Feminists see us as porno sex cabaret, while your average person sees us as butch dykes,” Jennifer said in an interview in the 1980s. “We’re not either.” Their work was only obliquely political, more concerned with celebrating the personal: their friendships with one another, and their bodies. “The Neo Naturists are works of art,” the manifesto quips, “and the world is their private view.”
It wasn’t entirely over for the Neo Naturists in 1986, but they left behind a fragmented opus. Following the group’s dispersal, Christine went solo and kept the movement active well into this millennium. In the 1990s, she assembled a small archive in her east London apartment, and one of the Studio Voltaire curators’ projects has been to expand it. “We’ve been trying to get a comprehensive overview of the movement, and a secure chronology,” Vaughan says. “There’s a quite a bit of guesswork because Wilma, Jen, and Christine might all remember things differently. But looking back, they were an incredible counterpoint to the queer male voices of the time, and they mustn’t be overlooked.”
Try this kind of diverse colourful with clothes on. Clothes deliver you to the whim of the clothes designers. Body paint delivers you to the limits of your or someone else’s imagination.
