Naturist misconceptions

[Danee]

From: https://thenaturistguy.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/naturist-misconceptions/comment-page-1/#comment-5
When people think of Naturism their often confuse it was sex and Swingers clubs.  As a newish Naturist of over just one year I can tell you it is as far away from the truth.  Naturists are normal people who choose to do everyday things but just without clothes on. It’s no different from what other people do in their leisure time.  We are as you could say as a subculture we are not anti-clothes either.  We just don’t think clothes are essential to everyday life. Some people only practice being naked while even washing up or while reading a book at home and that is the best way to start.  Then you build up your confidence to let other people see you naked.  Others only are Naturist on foreign holidays and don’t practice here.  There are so many types of ways it can be practiced.
Naturism is the perfect antidote to what you see in the media as the perfect body.  Now into the second year of being a Naturist my body confidence as grown from what it was.  Plus it does help to give you more access to Vitamin D because your body is in the sun, when it is sunny.  Naturists aren’t a sexual when we meet and can see everybody’s naked body; it is just not sexual changed as such.  Pregnancy is lower in countries were people are more relaxed about nudity. We in the United Kingdom are far too prudish about the body and still can’t throw of the Victorian baggage to catch up to a more relaxed attitude in the rest of Europe.
Despite what you might think Naturism is not illegal in England.  The Sexual Offences Act 2003 specifically excludes Naturism, though intending to upset or cause harm by being naked may well be a criminal offence. The law is a mess but the circumstances in which you can practice being a Naturist are wider than you may think e.g. World Naked Bike Ride in every summer some cities in the United Kingdom.
If you are worried about going to a Naturist club and worried what people might think of your body you don’t have to be.  Nobody stares at you or judges you for your body whatever shape or size.  It is more about feeling good about yourself and being liberated from wearing clothes.  If you want to swim naked then that is fine or go into a Jacuzzi then Sauna naked that is good too.  When the weather is good you can play Tennis outside with the sun and wind against your skin.
I have also seen children happily playing without clothes and with their family looking on. Children are not ashamed of their bodies.  That shame later gets picked up by society and what happens to be defined as the perfect body.  But within a Naturist club those societal pressures don’t apply.  All the clubs have entry gates entry requirements and to enter.  You cannot just turn up and expect to go in without any notice.  Child protection is taken extremely seriously within Naturism and clubs all have Safe Guarding policies to cover this issue.

So try taking off your clothes and allow being a Naturist to change your life.  What have you got to loose!

[Leah]

"We in the United Kingdom are far too prudish about the body and still can’t throw of the Victorian baggage to catch up to a more relaxed attitude in the rest of Europe."

Don't blame the Victorians for your culture's present day attitudes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4726028/The-naked-truth-about-Victorians.html

By Matthew Sweet
12:00AM BST 13 Oct 2001

A COUPLE of historical anecdotes for you. As they say on the exam papers, compare and contrast. In 1998, the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted a touring exhibition to display some of the treasures from its vast collection. Prominent was a plaster leaf, measuring some 15.5in across. A caption card explained its presence: this piece of artificial foliage was a modesty-preserver, crafted to hug the prodigious packet of Michelangelo's David, a cast of which had been presented to the nation by a generous Duke of Tuscany.

"On her first encounter with the cast of David," claimed a catalogue note, "Queen Victoria was so shocked by his nudity that a firm suggestion was made that something should be done. Consequently, the correctly proportioned fig leaf was created and stored in readiness for any visit Queen Victoria might make to the museum, for which occasions it was hung on the figure from two strategically implanted hooks."

Secondly, in 1853, Queen Victoria visited Gore House, the home of the art collection destined to be housed at the V & A. She was guided around by the museum's director, Henry Cole, who took her off to view a group of male and female nude life studies by William Mulready.
In his memoirs, Cole recorded: "The Queen wandered away with me, and came to the Mulready Room, and Her Majesty opened the door and entered. She exclaimed, 'What fine works!' and told me to fetch the Prince and Princess [Albert and Vicky, her husband and eldest daughter] to see them."

Richard Redgrave, art superintendent to the Government School of Design, noted these events in his diary, describing how HM was "delighted with the drawings", and that she instructed Sir Charles Eastlake to buy one from Mulready's studio, to be included in the Royal Collection, where it still resides.

Clearly, both stories cannot be accurate. Here's a clue for the waverers: Victoria's wedding present to Albert was a silver statuette of Lady Godiva.

Victorian attitudes to the body - those of the monarch and the culture to which she gave her name - have provided fertile territory for myth-making. There's a grand repertoire of phoney stories about 19th-century mores, many of which are still invoked with head-smacking regularity in both popular and academic writing.

We all know the one about the doily-wrapped piano legs; the one about the critic John Ruskin, accustomed only to seeing the hairless bodies of Greek statuary, shrieking with terror at the pubic thatch under Effie Gray's petticoats; the one about the refusal of the Queen and Empress to believe in the existence of sexual relationships between women. All Freudian wishful thinking, concocted to make post-Victorians feel more self-cognisant and sophisticated than their ancestors; all feeding the widespread misapprehension that 19th-century people were pitted against the body, determined to veil its presence and obfuscate its desires.

As a new exhibition at Tate Britain will demonstrate, the Victorian era was one in which representations of the naked human form were highly visible, endlessly reproduced, widely circulated and eagerly consumed. "The nude went into the home and on to the mantelpiece. And it appeared in public monuments, too, works bought by institutions," explains the show's curator, Alison Smith. "It turned up in all kinds of different contexts: in dealers' rooms, galleries, on the streets, reproduced in shop windows and in advertising. As engravings, many of these images became icons."

Smith's exhibition will bring together a vast acreage of 19th-century flesh: Queen Victoria's Godiva statue and the Mulready drawings she so admired; Frederic Leighton's muscled bronze, An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877); Ernest Normand's huge flagellant canvas, Bondage (1895); Lewis Carroll's snaps of the sullen Lolitas of north Oxford; the first British porn films, shot in Hove in the 1890s; Leighton's The Bath of Psyche (1890), possibly Victorian Britain's most-reproduced nude image.

"Representations of the body were taken for granted," argues Smith. "People were much more accustomed to them than they are now, blase about them. Perhaps it's only when the nude became more visible in painting that such images became contentious. But those who objected to them were not part of mainstream opinion. Artists had the final say, and institutions and the state supported them. Images of the nude had huge commercial potential."

New photographic processes brought images of classical sculpture and contemporary painting to a mass audience for the first time. The same technology allowed Victorian pornographers to expand their markets from text-based productions such as Randiana (1884) and Lady Pokingham; or, They All Do It (1879), and move into hardcore daguerreotypes, magic lantern slides and movies.

Don't imagine that this stuff consisted of tame images of women in big knickers standing in front of cheese plants; all the permutations and peccadilloes of the modern form are represented in the work that has survived from the period. And it was published in monstrous quantities: in 1874, the Pimlico studio of Henry Hayler - within spitting distance of Tate Britain - was found to be loaded with 130,248 obscene photographs and 5,000 magic lantern slides, which gives some idea of the extent of its appeal.

But examples from pornography are problematic: they can easily be made to work in the service of old arguments about the prevalence of hypocrisy in the Victorian era.

The case of Eugene Sandow, however, cannot be assimilated in this way. Sandow was a Prussian body-builder who popularised physical exercise and muscle-toning in late 19th-century Britain, established his own chain of gymnasiums (or studios, as they were called, with classical pretension), lent his name to Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture and sold his own range of branded cigars.

In his performances, he would dust himself with white powder, assume a suitably classical pose, and invite women to touch him, in order to experience the strange disjunction between his marble-like appearance and the warmth of his body.

Sandow was also one of three judges at the world's first major physique competition, held at the Royal Albert Hall in the last year of Victoria's reign. A capacity crowd goggled at 60 competitors flexing and parading in leopard-skin loincloths, as Sandow and his fellow arbiters - the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - inspected the bodies of the men at close quarters. "Mr Sandow," wrote one eyewitness, "fairly went on his hands and knees to examine the nether limbs of the men, and not a point seemed to escape the judges, the audience watching with breathless interest."

Today, the Victorians seem marooned between the contempt of progressives and the sentimental adoration of reactionaries. The first group envisages 19th-century people as our moral inferiors: cruel, sexually repressed, intolerant, hypocritical, racist. The second celebrates them for these same qualities, but calls them by different names: self-reliant, decent, conservative, pragmatic, and patriotic. Both are founded on the same body of myths and betray the same self-congratulatory prejudices.

Smith hopes that her show will expose some of the hypocrisies in our own attitudes to the Victorians. "Victorian representations of children," she says, "hold up a mirror image to our own society and perhaps show that we are the new moralists. The Victorians' attitudes [to the eroticisation of the child] can appear candid in comparison."

Especially when the best-documented outbreaks of prudery and reticence are to be found in more recent times. Between 1939 and 1969, for instance, a reproduction of Michelangelo's David at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in California had its penis masked with a fig leaf: its removal brought a flurry of complaints. In November 1969, a poster image of the same sculpture was confiscated by the vice squad in Sydney, and the manager of the store charged with obscenity.

In April this year, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights successfully petitioned to have a loincloth painted on to a tiny figure of a naked Christ on a mural at Kennedy International Airport, New York.

And here's one to bring us smack up to date. Go to www.statue.com, an online sculpture store selling reproductions of classical works, and search for Michelangelo's David. Among the versions offered is one that it is claimed will fit "into any setting". I presume that I don't need to tell you what is clamped snugly over its genitals.