It has been pointed out that of the entire animal kingdom, we are the only species that has conditioned ourselves to take offence at the sight of our own nudity. But what caused this in the first place. It can't be that we sat down one day and decided that we should learn to find our own bodies repugnant and offensive.
Recently, I sent this pic to a WhatsApp group of my former classmates and one of them replied, 'How sad. Would've been a lovely photo if not for the nudity.' Someone else replied, 'The dogs should've been clothed?' What was meant in jest should in fact be looked at in earnest. Why indeed should the nudity of only one species ruin a photo? What made us pick ourselves as the only species whose body is so repulsive that it can ruin a photo if it's not covered up?
The answer is as clear to me as the midday sun in a cloudless sky. It's something I've been talking about for years. We naturists are to blame for this. It's the lack of naturist photos on the internet. We should flood the Internet with our decent naturist photos. Just think about it for a minute. Every photo you see online that shows a naked person is almost always porn. How is the world not to think of nudity as sexual if the majority of people who call themselves naturists are ashamed to show their nudity online? These are the closet nudists I'm talking about. Some of them want to post their nude photos but they hide their faces and identity. Others insist on a camera ban in any place that they appear naked in.
These closet nudists are the ones who tell the whole world that nudity is shameful or wrong or offensive and they don't want to be identified with it. They reinforce in the collective conscience of the non-naturist world the false notion that human nudity is to be discouraged because it's indecent. As one of my non-naturist friends once told me, 'Even nudists know it's wrong not to cover their genitals'. He told me there were two kinds of nudists - first are the normal ones who know nudity is wrong and they will never post photos of themselves naked. The second are the idiots who really believe the lie that nudity is decent and they stupidly expose themselves to the world thereby ruining themselves for ever. He calls closet nudists 'normal' because to him, a closet nudist is really no different from a non-naturist like himself.
Some closet nudists look upon nudity as a sexual activity. They actually get their sexual gratification by being nude which explains why they only do it furtively. These are people with a weird sexual-nudity perversion. They have a sexual need from time to time to get their sex fix by going to a nudist resort.
But I must be clear about one thing. Not all closet nudists are people with sexual-nudity perversion. Some closet nudists are genuine nudists who because of circumstances beyond their control are forced to live their naturist lives in the closet. I know someone who is a genuine naturist. But he's very careful when he sees a camera and I'm one who's rarely separated from the camera. He has to be cautious because he's a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Citizens of Muslim countries or countries with a Muslim majority will of course have to consider the serious consequences of their nude photos going viral. I asked him what the penalty would be and he said he didn't know but in Saudi, the punishment usually ranges from years of imprisonment with severe flogging to the death penalty. I totally support closet nudism for such people.
Should all naturist groups and resort allow free photography to get rid of people who make use of naturism to gratify their sexual-nudity perversion needs? Nudist resorts won't ever do that because they want to collect as much money as they can and this group of closet nudists is easily much larger than the number of true naturists.
There is also the problem of discouraging closet nudists who are true naturists but who are still new to nudity and have genuine fears of the possible repercussion of having their photos go viral. Even though there is zero repercussion and I can testify to that, the fear is real and if you tell them that all naturists will be photographed and the photos posted online, many of them may not wish to join in our activities.
Where do we go from here? I live in a country where naturism is strictly illegal. There are of course no nude beaches. If you swim in the nude in the sea even though you are on a deserted stretch of the beach, you can be sure that the police will be waiting for you on the beach to arrest you. This has been reported before in the press. The police are super-efficient. Of all the people I know, from my school to my university to my colleagues to my entire profession, not a single one of them is a naturist. The same goes for my church - I am the only naturist in all my circles. You would have thought it would be impossible for me to be open about my naturism and I thought the same at first. I thought breaking the news would be difficult but I have always valued honesty and as soon as I participated for the first time in social naturism, I announced it to my entire world, complete with photos. I expected to be condemned and ostracised and I was prepared for it. I hate lies and I didn't want to live a dishonest life where people were only nice to you because they didn't know you were a naturist. I thought that if people were to ostracise me if they knew I was a naturist, then it's only fair for them to have the liberty to do so.
But as I have already written about my experiences, there was no serious consequence at all as long as people understood what naturism was all about. Many did not have a clear understanding of naturism. Their objections were always sexual and the moment they knew that naturism was not sexual, even the church had nothing negative to say to me. If anything, the church is probably more concerned about my lack of belief than my naturism.
If you are an open naturist and you are equally concerned about how the whole concept of nudity is being perverted by the world, I urge you to flood the Internet with your decent nude photos. If every naturist does this and the Internet is full of decent nude pics, the non-naturist world will begin to see that there is a huge chasm between naturist nudity and porn nudity. And the world will realise how deluded it had been all this while to immediately associate the human body with porn.
Only we naturists can change the tide. The day may come when the world when viewing the above photo, will accept that there is nothing offensive about the nudity of the three of us in the photo.
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