A recent article from the SCOPE Coalition challenging “The Culture of Panic” around nudity and the human body resonated with me on many points.
Particularly that the traditional approach of the nudist community to effectively hide themselves away and conceal their activities from prying eyes has sent entirely the wrong message about body freedom and nudity in general.
What it also brought home for me is how completely the American perspective and cultural whitewashing of every other country has been so detrimental and dominating to the point that any and all other narratives get drowned out by it.
This is particularly relevant in countries where nudity isn’t illegal but isn’t common place either. That requires a different narrative to “why isn’t simple human nudity legal?” The narrative in these countries should perhaps be “where the bloody hell are ya?” or “why bother with budgie smugglers and string bikinis? Public nudity in many places isn’t illegal!”
Instead, American culture and opinion dominate many other places so completely, that local narratives are drowned out by this overbearing noise of body shame and body shaming.
In New Zealand for example, nobody would be arrested for being naked on a regular public beach. There was a time when it wasn’t so uncommon to see people naked at beaches and streams even when the law wasn’t quite so favourable.
What I have personally observed over many years simply being naked at both clothing optional beaches and regular public beaches is that there’s a large swath of people who are neither ultra conservative nor at the other extreme identifying as nudists/naturists.
To this day I can’t identify with any of those labels because nudity isn’t a way of life for me per se, nor do I really want it to be. I’m merely human with all that entails, including nakedness.
When the weather is warm. The conditions are right I like to be free of clothes and doing something outdoors like swimming or hiking.
This is where unique narratives are being drowned out. It’s either naturists lamenting the fact they have no freedoms or nudists exhaling yet again and again how healthy and wholesome nudity is and why everyone should participate.
Fundamentally nudity shouldn’t need a rationale or a justification. It is a default state of being and the act of dressing and covering should be less obvious in many circumstances. Swimming, hiking or any physical activity where clothes are clearly more of an artificial and unnecessary encumbrance.
Ancient and traditional societies were certainly aware of this. It wasn’t until overzealous missionaries changed everybody’s attitudes that things changed. For the worse in many instances.
So why has nudity struggled to become as normalised as it once was and not causally adopted by people?
I’ve always thought it goes far deeper than nudity itself and the colonisation and Christianisation of so many indigenous cultures, many of whom never had hang-ups about nakedness.
Some of it is the over-sexualisation of everything and everybody. Some of it is the ongoing inequality among people and genders. So long as marginalised sectors of society exist, rational everyday acceptance of nudity without it being sensationalised feels like it’s a long way off.
Meanwhile, until bigger social problems come to some resolution, voices from countries where nudity isn’t illegal need better bandwidth and airtime. Individuals in these places, need to be the change they want to see by normalising nudity without trying to further sensationalise it. There’s definitely a handful of people out there right now doing that.
All in all it’s up to all individuals who truly believe in body freedom to behave in a manner that doesn’t communicate or demonstrate that nudity is an anomaly. It has to be something that feels personally genuine and not mere following the latest influencers and emulating behaviour that doesn’t feel natural and normal to the individual.
Meanwhile the unrelenting wall of cultural noise from North America is a serious problem. Maybe worse now than ever before with deep political divides and so many ultra conservative factions coming to dominate across the globe.
Change starts at the individual level. Unique narratives are as good a place as any to begin.
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