Nudism, like so many emerging issues of this era of
rapid change, is being thrust upon us by the course of events. We are forced to
take cognizance of the desegregation struggle, or the perplexing problem of
nuclear arms control, or the population explosion dilemma of pornography.
Certain consequences plague the human race as a result of the hatreds which
segregation generates, of the emotional and financial exhaustion from the
endless arms race, of the poverty and privation from over population, and of the
persistence and extent of the pornography problem; and many of us are forced to
re-examine some of our basic premises in thinking about these problems. Social
nudism is symbolic of that need for reappraisal in the area of our thoughts
about the human body.
Traditionally, most of us have grown up in homes where the curious aura of silence has enveloped the total experience of what one would today call sex education. As young people we sensed not only that this area was a taboo subject but that we would bring real pain and embarrassment to our parents if we persisted in asking questions about our total bodies, how they function, what they look like, how new life is created, and what is normal behavior and what is not? Not wishing to further pain our parents in their obvious floundering and frustration in handling these questions, we, as youngsters, learned to keep quiet. But we went on learning, anyway: from older neighborhood children, from brothers and sisters, by chasing words around in dictionaries, form pornographic books and pictures going the rounds, in short, we learned from that total clandestine environment known collectively as “the gutter.” But what was truly unfortunate, we came to realize that this area of “secret sex” was how society expected us to learn about our human bodies and how they function sexually.
At the same time, we were concurrently to society’s dichotomous nature. We found out that society also expected us to grow up as wholesome young people, which meant that that we were to know right from wrong, not to get into trouble, to be able to handle our maturing sexual drives, to blush at nudity and to cheer the modesty of clothing, and in some unexplainable way to be more or less erudite during our courtships and especially on our wedding night. All of this in the face of a vacuum of sensible attitudes and discussions between parent and child over the nature and function of our physical selves.
Gradually, we became aware of the fact that there were such things as child molesters, premarital relationships, venereal diseases, teen-age marriages of necessity, a pressing pornography problem, a mounting divorce disgrace, and endless broken homes with children rejected and lost in emotional jungles. Yet, through it all, the aura of silence prevailed within most of our homes, so much so that currently seventy-nine young people out of every one hundred come from homes where parents do not discuss sex with their children, nor do the children want their parents to discuss sexual matters with them.
This is the baffling, perplexing, non-sensical world of human growth and development, variously called sex education or social hygiene. A dispassionate observer of this hypocritical area of our education would be led to believe that we had contacted the worst possible methods in trying to attain the highest ideals and practices. We aim for wholesome young people and adults but we bury the entire educative process of attainment in a smothering blanket of silence and secret sex.
Then along comes the idea of social nudism.
Under the circumstances, we are forced to take cognizance of what the social nudists are saying, for they address themselves to the same problems enumerated above, but they also claim to provide a means to partially achieve the laudable goals expected of young people and adults.
Social nudism begins with the premise that man’s physical structure –his body –is normal, decent, and therefore is acceptable. That acceptance begins by rejecting the idea of perpetual concealment. Clothes are for protection, for comfort, and for social grooming under specialized situations, but they are not a blanket badge of modesty. The nudist proposes that children be reared by allowing the infant’s natural proclivity of accepting nudity as a normal state to grow wholesomely and to keep it uncontaminated by the traditional insistence that exposure is indecency. When concealment is minimized, the curiosity about physical structure can attain a reasonable outlet, and when questions about functions arise, one is not talking about something concealed and withheld but rather about something which is visible and accepted.
This acceptance of self-both the individual’s self, and the sameness of self which can be identified with others of like kind —is perhaps the greatest single benefit to be derived from living in a nudist environment. For this type of acceptance ushers in a mood of freedom, the freedom in which one dares to be one’s self, the freedom which by its nature causes other people to accept the individual within his total physical dimensions and not merely conceive of the person as ending at the fringes of a clothes disguise.
Children accept this latitude of freedom naturally and without any type of articulation. But for adults, not raised in a nudist environment, this total feeling of bodily freedom and identification with the race and with man’s natural environment of air and sunlight, constitute the great emotional lifts which make an adult’s entry into the nudist world such an enlightening experience yet something which can be only understood by an actual social nudist experience. Words never convey the meaning of this experience and the record of almost four decades of American social nudism has proved conclusively that reticent individuals, be they male or female, never fully comprehend the social nudist experience without a first hand venture. Then it is as though a cataract had cleared in one’s mental vision and this physical body of ours becomes acceptable, comfortable, honorable, and relaxed entity for the first time. Rare is the person, who, as a member of a group socially oriented to the goals of nudism, has not experienced this feeling of rightness and at home with the world.
This issue of social nudism is being thrust upon us for a variety of reasons. Most obviously is the failure of our society’s policy of silence in the area of social hygiene. There is no social hygiene when we are neither social nor hygienic in our orientation. Concealment does not confront the issue of sociality and silence imparts nothing of hygiene. So the soaring statistics of teen-age venereal disease, inept teen-age marriages, burgeoning welfare dependencies, and our expanding market for pornographic literature cause us to look to something more basic than just these superficial signs of our times. These failures are due to more than just the stresses of an insecure age or to a rapidly changing technological society. Indeed, nudists are inclined to take the position that a good case can be made out for the lack of change which is occurring in our society —a lack of change caused by a rigid status quo which accept titillating sex play in picture, word, and action, but which never permits a society to “get down to brass tacks,” as it were, in re-evaluating our living room attitudes toward social hygiene.
At the same time that nudists are saying these things, we hear corollary attitudes being expressed from widely divergent fields. Many schools of psychology caution the American family to threat nudity within the home as a matter-of-fact occurrence; to allow brother and sister to view one another under normal operating conditions in the household, as well as to see mother and father nude under similarly matter-of-fact situations –in the tub and shower, dressing in the bedroom, and passing back and forth form one room to the next.
Traditionally, most of us have grown up in homes where the curious aura of silence has enveloped the total experience of what one would today call sex education. As young people we sensed not only that this area was a taboo subject but that we would bring real pain and embarrassment to our parents if we persisted in asking questions about our total bodies, how they function, what they look like, how new life is created, and what is normal behavior and what is not? Not wishing to further pain our parents in their obvious floundering and frustration in handling these questions, we, as youngsters, learned to keep quiet. But we went on learning, anyway: from older neighborhood children, from brothers and sisters, by chasing words around in dictionaries, form pornographic books and pictures going the rounds, in short, we learned from that total clandestine environment known collectively as “the gutter.” But what was truly unfortunate, we came to realize that this area of “secret sex” was how society expected us to learn about our human bodies and how they function sexually.
At the same time, we were concurrently to society’s dichotomous nature. We found out that society also expected us to grow up as wholesome young people, which meant that that we were to know right from wrong, not to get into trouble, to be able to handle our maturing sexual drives, to blush at nudity and to cheer the modesty of clothing, and in some unexplainable way to be more or less erudite during our courtships and especially on our wedding night. All of this in the face of a vacuum of sensible attitudes and discussions between parent and child over the nature and function of our physical selves.
Gradually, we became aware of the fact that there were such things as child molesters, premarital relationships, venereal diseases, teen-age marriages of necessity, a pressing pornography problem, a mounting divorce disgrace, and endless broken homes with children rejected and lost in emotional jungles. Yet, through it all, the aura of silence prevailed within most of our homes, so much so that currently seventy-nine young people out of every one hundred come from homes where parents do not discuss sex with their children, nor do the children want their parents to discuss sexual matters with them.
This is the baffling, perplexing, non-sensical world of human growth and development, variously called sex education or social hygiene. A dispassionate observer of this hypocritical area of our education would be led to believe that we had contacted the worst possible methods in trying to attain the highest ideals and practices. We aim for wholesome young people and adults but we bury the entire educative process of attainment in a smothering blanket of silence and secret sex.
Then along comes the idea of social nudism.
Under the circumstances, we are forced to take cognizance of what the social nudists are saying, for they address themselves to the same problems enumerated above, but they also claim to provide a means to partially achieve the laudable goals expected of young people and adults.
Social nudism begins with the premise that man’s physical structure –his body –is normal, decent, and therefore is acceptable. That acceptance begins by rejecting the idea of perpetual concealment. Clothes are for protection, for comfort, and for social grooming under specialized situations, but they are not a blanket badge of modesty. The nudist proposes that children be reared by allowing the infant’s natural proclivity of accepting nudity as a normal state to grow wholesomely and to keep it uncontaminated by the traditional insistence that exposure is indecency. When concealment is minimized, the curiosity about physical structure can attain a reasonable outlet, and when questions about functions arise, one is not talking about something concealed and withheld but rather about something which is visible and accepted.
This acceptance of self-both the individual’s self, and the sameness of self which can be identified with others of like kind —is perhaps the greatest single benefit to be derived from living in a nudist environment. For this type of acceptance ushers in a mood of freedom, the freedom in which one dares to be one’s self, the freedom which by its nature causes other people to accept the individual within his total physical dimensions and not merely conceive of the person as ending at the fringes of a clothes disguise.
Children accept this latitude of freedom naturally and without any type of articulation. But for adults, not raised in a nudist environment, this total feeling of bodily freedom and identification with the race and with man’s natural environment of air and sunlight, constitute the great emotional lifts which make an adult’s entry into the nudist world such an enlightening experience yet something which can be only understood by an actual social nudist experience. Words never convey the meaning of this experience and the record of almost four decades of American social nudism has proved conclusively that reticent individuals, be they male or female, never fully comprehend the social nudist experience without a first hand venture. Then it is as though a cataract had cleared in one’s mental vision and this physical body of ours becomes acceptable, comfortable, honorable, and relaxed entity for the first time. Rare is the person, who, as a member of a group socially oriented to the goals of nudism, has not experienced this feeling of rightness and at home with the world.
This issue of social nudism is being thrust upon us for a variety of reasons. Most obviously is the failure of our society’s policy of silence in the area of social hygiene. There is no social hygiene when we are neither social nor hygienic in our orientation. Concealment does not confront the issue of sociality and silence imparts nothing of hygiene. So the soaring statistics of teen-age venereal disease, inept teen-age marriages, burgeoning welfare dependencies, and our expanding market for pornographic literature cause us to look to something more basic than just these superficial signs of our times. These failures are due to more than just the stresses of an insecure age or to a rapidly changing technological society. Indeed, nudists are inclined to take the position that a good case can be made out for the lack of change which is occurring in our society —a lack of change caused by a rigid status quo which accept titillating sex play in picture, word, and action, but which never permits a society to “get down to brass tacks,” as it were, in re-evaluating our living room attitudes toward social hygiene.
At the same time that nudists are saying these things, we hear corollary attitudes being expressed from widely divergent fields. Many schools of psychology caution the American family to threat nudity within the home as a matter-of-fact occurrence; to allow brother and sister to view one another under normal operating conditions in the household, as well as to see mother and father nude under similarly matter-of-fact situations –in the tub and shower, dressing in the bedroom, and passing back and forth form one room to the next.
The building industry is now marketing private patios, actually private solarium in many cases, where nude sunbathing is feasible if not anticipated. Screened swimming pools invite nude swimming, and the American version of the Old World sauna with its nude, family-style heat baths is an open invitation to experience social nudism within the family and among one’s chosen friends. Not by accident does one such manufacturer state that his sauna “deep cleanses mind and body.” Home with central, Spanish-type patios are a clear answer for the practice of family nudity.
The roof tops of Y.M.C.A.’s and Y.W.C.A.’s have for decades permitted segregated sunbathing opportunities.
Soldiers and sailors by the tens of thousands returned home from war experiences which demonstrated to them, at least, that other peoples in other parts of the world reject our western accepts of modesty, biased as they are by a belief in bodily concealment.
The great brainwashing concern aroused by the Korean War was shown to be a simple matter of induced humiliation based upon making the G.I. feel guilt-ridden after stripping him of his clothing. This abandonment of pledged loyalty to one’s country merely when one is relieved of his clothing should have sounded some sort of alarm that our basic orientation toward nudity is wrong, perverted and numbing.
Need we cite again the anecdotes of certain great personages who accept nudity: a wartime Churchill, for example, striding nude down the upper halls of the wartime White House, or slipping off to the Florida coast for some nude swimming in the surf!
What of the dozens of summer camps where nude swimming is fostered among the children?
Those are not signs of disorganization. Rather they are the low-keyed admissions that social hygiene can be better handled than the way we do now. They are mainly examples of nudism as organized nudists use and understand the term.
Nudists are realists. They do not expect any sudden revolution. Indeed, nudist goals are achieved best in some of the ways noted earlier –in the home solarium or patio, or in the family swimming pool or sauna. If one wishes to be identified further with the nudist idea, then membership is available in a variety of local clubs, parks, and resorts spread across this land. There are nudist books and journals available for purchase and study.
But most important of all, there is your life to live in a matter which brings to you the greatest fulfillment of your inner satisfactions in being a human being whose physical dimensions are natural, decent and acceptable and whose aesthetic awareness can never be fully developed through the practice of concealment. It is not happenstance that nudity finds its most persistent and insistent expressions in the Fine Arts. Our birthright as a complete physical entity, however, is not to be realized by viewing mere representations of the human form on some art gallery pedestals or on canvases framed. Our aesthetic birthright is achieved by accepting our physical self in its natural state.
But the world moves slowly and in this question of rights the world shows no great urgency to accord mankind his rights. Man reaches for them singly and by collective action. Your experiences with social nudity can begin in your own home or apartment by your own commitment to yourself, to your family, and to your children.
What is nudism? It is all of these things coupled with your own quiet, matter-of-fact determination to make decency, acceptance, and freedom a part of your life. As Wordsworth said: “…Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
Sordidness departs only when something better is invited in its place. Social nudism could be that something better during your own short sojourn on this troubled planet.
(Source: The Nudist Newsletter, No. 140, September, 1963)
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