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Nudists and Textiles
There is a minority of people who get some kind of pleasure from wandering about in the nude and being seen. I am prepared to believe that for some of them this isn't even a form of sexual deviation. Of course for many of them it is quite clearly a fetish, a form of sexual deviance, and these people are sick but use the acceptable face of the nudist movement to hide their perversions from the public censure they so richly deserve. Many nudist beaches and the like are notorious for lewd conduct and promiscuous homosexual acts. Unfortunately the nudist and naturist movements are so small they seem to divide the whole world into us and them, nudists and “textiles” and assume everybody on their side of their line is good and all the rest are uptight prudes. This is a shame. There are some people who do feel relaxed and empowered by being naked among other naked people, they should be allowed to get on with their own thing protected from perverts spying on them or hiding within their group.
Most people do not feel greatly troubled by clothes or repressed at the thought of wearing them in public. Most people are happy to wear clothes and happier still to see other people around them wear their clothes too. Such people are normal. The majority. The majority should never be given a derogatory label by any minority which is seeking tolerance and understanding. For the nudist minority to call the majority “textiles” is highly offensive and counterproductive. Perhaps the majority of normal people should also be called warm-fuckers because of their refusal to engage in necrophilia? What inventive derogatory names would those who engage in bestiality like to confer on the majority that don't?
If a group of people go down to a lake and strip off they are turning that lake into a nudist area and deterring anybody who does not want to encounter nudity from using that resource in the way that they want to. Nudism is an aggressive act. It stakes a claim on a large piece of territory, the radius defined by the usable range of a pair of binoculars. It cannot be right that two or three people can lay claim to such a large area by their selfish actions without the rest of the community having any say in the matter at all.
If you go down to a busy public beach and lay out a beach towel and lie on it in a swimming costume that is reasonable act. People will give you a reasonable amount of space to get on with what you want to do. But you cannot expect a large group of people on a public beach to give you the space you might like to fly a stunt kite, draw up a full sized cricket pitch or indeed to lie around naked or to have a shag. There's a time and a place for everything and the community does not owe any special favours to people who want to “act naturally”.
If you want to fly your kite on the beach you have to go there early in the morning or when the sun isn't blazing down. If you want to sunbathe naked you have to find somewhere that does not inconvenience other people. And being naked is inconveniencing other people whatever you might like to think about it. You might think that other people should think like you do but the fact is they don't, and tolerance, the first step to civilization, requires that you accept that other people are not the same as you.
Nudism is a reasonable activity and it should be accommodated. That means designated areas in which clothes are optional and people seen to be spending too long gawping at the nudists should be moved on or arrested for breach of the peace. There should be no places that clothes are banned unless such places are privately owned and administered. As the vast majority of people are not nudists clothes optional areas should be relatively small and located in such a way that they can be easily avoided, they should be at the end of the footpath not right next to the car park.
The designation of areas for nudists and naturists (a term British nudists seem to prefer) should be down to the local communities, not the nudists themselves. Communities should be protected from invasion by incoming nudists imposing their culture on somewhere they think is pretty and a good place to spend a few hours and not a lot of money. Nudists don't have pockets.
Areas designated for nudity is a good idea. There is a minority who find that walking about naked is “liberating” in some non-specific way, and of course another minority of perverts who just like to see and be seen naked. But nudism is not appropriate for everywhere and everybody. Or is that every body? Most people don't have bodies that are attractive enough for them to be comfortable parading around naked. For many people clothes are a bloody good idea. Therefore I am very much against any extension of nudity into new areas without the appropriate local democratic decision making, tourists who impose their standards on foreign communities deserve a good slapping. If the locals don't say it's alright to go topless on their beaches then it is incredibly bad mannered and arrogant to just do it.
Nudity and Sexuality
Thrusting your sexuality in the faces of the wider community is not a basic human right.
Public nudity is not a basic human right. Nudity is fine in its place: in the nude spa, on the nude beach and in the home. It is not acceptable in shops, factories, schools, offices or on the street. Neither is semi-nudity, the boundary-pushing that women seem to think somehow expresses their personality. It's amazing how many women keep their personality on their chest and between their legs. |
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I would also like to see more women charged with indecent exposure. It's not on for women to go about with no knickers and short skirts or long dresses with slashes to the waist. Some women are even wearing miniskirts to work with no knickers on and complaining that men are looking at them and getting the men into trouble: absurd! That is sexual harassment and indecent exposure. I wouldn't say that knickers should be compulsory or that miniskirts should be banned but the combination certainly should not be tolerated in public, it is exhibitionism and it is incredibly antisocial behaviour. The idea that a woman can choose to wear no knickers because she wants to, can choose to wear a short skirt because she wants to and can choose to do a pirouette on the dance-floor because she wants to and if any man she doesn't fancy makes a comment about seeing her pudenda she can call him a pervert for looking at her is ridiculous.
The perverted response is not to notice.
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But don't worry, I'm not being sexist here, I'd make men in kilts wear pants too and if people of either sex want to go commando they can do so in skirts that reach below the knee. |
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The Janet Jackson nipple baring incident was just bad manners. Women do not expose their breasts on TV except late at night. Everybody knows that rule. She was just trying to get herself extra notoriety in a tried and trusted way. Remember Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct? She became in some people's view the only woman in America with a vulva. Janet was trying, and succeeding, in becoming the only woman in America with nipples. And everybody fell over themselves to see that she got exactly the notoriety she sought. Now if you think Janet Jackson you think breasts and if you see a nipple exposed accidentally you think Janet. Any commercial company trying to get that kind of effect on the world's opinion would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising. $550,000 fine? And it was CBS that paid it! She'll be laughing all the way to the bank. |
