Nudity can be erotic and naturists should not have to deny it.

[ithildin]

The whole worry about erections in nudism seems to be both a symptom and a cause of the anti-sexual fixation. If people weren't so uptight about separation of sexuality and nudism, then an erection would just be an erection; people get those in real life in a lot of situations and it's sometimes obvious there, too, and it's not the existence of an erection that's the problem, it's when someone uses it to sexually harass someone. And similiarly, if people are continuously worried about getting erections, they worry about the sexuality that could ever come up for fear it will prompt one.

And with the idea that one needs to be really clear about the separation between nudism and sexuality when they're introduced, let me bring you another example. The anime convention scene can sometimes have a few reputations, one of which is that, since you have thousands of often socially isolated young adults and teenagers without outside supervision of judgement jammed into hotels with people whom they'll most easily connect with, sex is going to happen. A lot. But the vast majority of people at the convention aren't going to have casual sex, let alone go there for it. And if when inviting a friend to a convention I started immediately and emphatically talking about how no it's not sexual it's just hanging out except everyone's in costume, and they hadn't prompted anything along this line, how is that going to look?

I totally agree.

On the long run you can't fight the public opinion of nudists being a horde of swingers who have sex all the time by denying and turning everything sexual into a taboo.

[elnudio]

Everything "Infinity Biscuit" has said here I 100% completely agree with.

[seamus]

I think the question of whether or not someone is clothed has limited bearing on their erotic appeal. Fashion is designed to be erotic – either by what it shows or what it doesn’t. Granted there are clothes that are inherently un-”sexy”, but generally society follows a sexualized trajectory. Look at the Greek and Roman phallic art, or the covert (but rampant) sexual exploration of the Victorian era. Our society is no different.

I think the heart of this article is right: naturists have gone so far to deny that there could be any hint of sexual feeling involved in a naked gathering that it almost becomes suspicious. Denying any amount of sexuality in a naturist situation is like denying that anyone could be thinking about airplanes. It might not be happening, but it might be. Either way, that is not the purpose of the experience.

From a personal place, I would be lying to say that there isn’t something erotic about seeing my wife laying naked on a beach. But there are appropriate times and places to explore that eroticism. A public arena isn’t one of them – and this is an understanding that I think most adults share.

I think it’s a pity that the naturist community seems to be almost more obsessed with this question then others are. We seek so fervently to disprove it that we inadvertently validate the claim. I agree with what has been said before – nudity is erotic, because we are sexual beings. That being said, I think it is no more or less erotic then the majority of other social interactions we have. Nudity may add another layer of thought, but ultimately it’s something that we as a community need to be able to wrestle with. In so doing, we may have to look at and assess the sexual components of any interaction – which is not something most people seem overly keen to do.