It is with some alarm that I read about a number of events and changes that seem to be limiting the rights and freedoms of individuals and may signal a less tolerant attitude to social nudity. Recently, I read an article about a surf-lifesaving club in Australia that has made the strange decision to ban nudity in their changing rooms. People are no longer allowed to shower naked and have to get in and out of swimwear without exposing themselves. The reasons given by the club were that the changes were introduced to protect children. The change in rules defies common sense and negates the single purpose and function of a changing room.
In England, the change rooms in swimming pools have all become mixed. What that means is that you can only change in a cubicle because there will always be a mum with her children in the room and in fact, the whole change room is often open to the public. My feeling is that although there is constant pressure on naturists, the very widespread use of social media sites for a wide variety of "nude" activities, including those which are pornographic, is numbing people to the horror of seeing people without clothes to such a point that it will become hard to find anyone who is actually shocked by it at all.
This may be a bit off-topic, but I offer it as a sign of hope for naked living. It comes from an item on the BBC website regarding some upcoming elections and the perils facing candidates:
******
Forget about the politics for a second - I've heard some pretty hair-raising stories about what can go wrong in that encounter. And the most common way in which the chat on the doorstep goes awry?
"It's naked people," says one MP. "There's an awful lot of naked", says a long-time political activist. A former cabinet minister remarks in a quintessentially British way that the voter's state of undress always goes unmentioned, "even when they are doing their best to take it to the limits of parental guidance".
Another MP told me he was so flummoxed when a woman in her 50s opened the door leaving little to the imagination that he blurted out, "Is your mum in?", while his fellow campaigner ran off screaming
One of their colleagues said they had to cover the eyes of their seven-year-old daughter, who was helping with door-knocking, because a man "opened the door stark naked with his dangly bits out". Another recalls, when walking up a drive one evening, "a fully naked man emerged from the garden shed and calmly said hello. I just ran off!"
what you have said is absolutely correct & your concern is valid one. Even if Twitter, one fine morning blocks the accounts of all the naturists, I hope some other social platform will emerge to fill the vacant space for the naturists.
I exactly don't know the security levels of telegram which I feel can be considered as plan B. The best option for plan B may be to be in touch with our personal mail ids. Of course I don't know as to whether it will be practically feasible or not.
I noticed a pattern a long time ago. The attitude of the authorities towards naturism is an indicator of real, not declared, freedoms for the population in these countries. You can air this statement yourself on any state and in any historical period.
I left Twitter….I don’t know, 6 or 8 months ago maybe? It just started getting weird. When some of the most interesting and intellectually meaningful naturist pages were taken down, like Stephane’s and Evan’s, I had had enough. There were other reasons too, but I won’t belabor the point. I took up residence on Tumblr. The move has been positive for the most part. As far as Tumblr….
Pros: Not character limited, naturist/nudity friendly, easy to screen Porn purveyors/seekers, easy to use.
Cons: Bots (although they are easy to screen, just tedious), absence of meaningful naturist dialog (growing little by little though), overly focused on pretty naked woman pictures (not necessarily bad, but there’s more to life than admiring a bum, no matter how phenomenal), lots of reblogging.
On my Tumblr feed, I tend to focus on sharing stories, thoughts, articles I’ve read, etc.. I encourage comments and discussions vs just “likes”. I do miss having some of the more vocal naturist advocates regularly participating, although some are there, even if they don’t use their Tumblr page much. I’m hoping the content quality continues to grow and mature. We’ll see….
I understand the fears for our future, but I think they may be overdone. The media projects what it knows about and what it thinks its readers/viewers want. It doesn’t project what it doesn’t know about or what is mundane and everyday.
For most of us, we go about our daily, mundane business as naked as we can and it never makes headlines. Lots of naturist events and gatherings and socialising take place below the media radar, or are deemed too boring to make the cut.
So the headlines we read and see are the very few that to the top.
A couple of Uk examples you’ve probably never heard of because they’ve not made it out of niche media. Near Nottingham a bunch of naturists have free run of a country park thanks to persistent efforts of a few to make friends with the authorities. There are even signs up telling people not to ring the police as the naked folk are doing nothing wrong.
A Facebook group is headed up by a chap who, some years back, had a naturist website and forum; his own naturist pastime was cycling naked round Cambridge, something the locals became used to and bored with. He’s since moved to a seaside town where he also regularly cycles and walks naked, and has become part of the local scenery.
Start your own. Find a naturist domain, host it on something like GoDaddy, add a community program, then get a few volunteer moderators. You can't make it free because you need to pay for the hosting, and build a legal fund for the inevitable prude that can only see sex in nudity.
Apr 27, 2023·edited Apr 27, 2023Liked by BOPBadger
As usual, It's All About Money. The LOGICAL thing to do would be to have naturist social networks offered by national and international organizations. British Naturism sort of does that. Their site has a forum for discussions and also a place for naturist pictures (uncensored!). It even has occasional video chat sessions - nudity welcome - a recent one featured Victoria Bateman. But it's not structured like things such as Facebook or Twitter, which people are more familiar with. BN membership is priced about the same as U.S. and other national organizations. But as far as I know, few if any offer what BN does. (I'm a BN member though I'm in the U.S. - naturists anywhere can join.)
There are also various services like A Naturist World and Naturist Hub. Most aren't free except maybe for some sort of basic service. So the problem is that naturists even in the same country are scattered all around and can't easily communicate. And if you want to join a number of services you have to pay all of the ones you join. (This is also a BIG problem with Substack.) Oh, and there's also the problem of keeping out undesirables (voyeurs, sexual predators, etc.)
Although Mastodon (which I've not really used yet) may be sort of clunky, it has one BIG advantage: users on any particular server can communicate with any other Mastodon user regardless of what server they use. And it's free. The interface is very much like Twitter. But I don't think it has many naturist users to speak of. I know there's active work going on to develop protocols for communication among all social networks, the way Mastodon does.
Why don't more long-standing national naturist organizations offer this kind of service now? Because it's expensive to run. There's not only the basic expense of computers and communication gear, but they also need technical people to operate, moderate, and maintain/improve the software. In the U.S. there are two national organizations: TNS (which has few members now) and AANR. AANR at one time had a discussion forum, but that didn't last long, perhaps for lack of interest. (TNS never did anything of this sort.)
The underlying problem is that there just aren't enough naturists in most countries to support much of anything financially. The only long-term solution I see is to recruit MANY more naturist. But THAT needs to be organized, supported, and coordinated somehow - which probably only a largish organization could do.
Maybe I should write more about this on my own (Free!) Substack: Revitalizing Naturism. (Please excuse the plug.)
Unfortunately, and sadly, I see 'anti-nudity' becoming the big thing, at least here in the United States. I see some really sick attitudes about this. The mental health of the populace is going DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!!
In England, the change rooms in swimming pools have all become mixed. What that means is that you can only change in a cubicle because there will always be a mum with her children in the room and in fact, the whole change room is often open to the public. My feeling is that although there is constant pressure on naturists, the very widespread use of social media sites for a wide variety of "nude" activities, including those which are pornographic, is numbing people to the horror of seeing people without clothes to such a point that it will become hard to find anyone who is actually shocked by it at all.
This may be a bit off-topic, but I offer it as a sign of hope for naked living. It comes from an item on the BBC website regarding some upcoming elections and the perils facing candidates:
******
Forget about the politics for a second - I've heard some pretty hair-raising stories about what can go wrong in that encounter. And the most common way in which the chat on the doorstep goes awry?
"It's naked people," says one MP. "There's an awful lot of naked", says a long-time political activist. A former cabinet minister remarks in a quintessentially British way that the voter's state of undress always goes unmentioned, "even when they are doing their best to take it to the limits of parental guidance".
Another MP told me he was so flummoxed when a woman in her 50s opened the door leaving little to the imagination that he blurted out, "Is your mum in?", while his fellow campaigner ran off screaming
One of their colleagues said they had to cover the eyes of their seven-year-old daughter, who was helping with door-knocking, because a man "opened the door stark naked with his dangly bits out". Another recalls, when walking up a drive one evening, "a fully naked man emerged from the garden shed and calmly said hello. I just ran off!"
what you have said is absolutely correct & your concern is valid one. Even if Twitter, one fine morning blocks the accounts of all the naturists, I hope some other social platform will emerge to fill the vacant space for the naturists.
I exactly don't know the security levels of telegram which I feel can be considered as plan B. The best option for plan B may be to be in touch with our personal mail ids. Of course I don't know as to whether it will be practically feasible or not.
I noticed a pattern a long time ago. The attitude of the authorities towards naturism is an indicator of real, not declared, freedoms for the population in these countries. You can air this statement yourself on any state and in any historical period.
I left Twitter….I don’t know, 6 or 8 months ago maybe? It just started getting weird. When some of the most interesting and intellectually meaningful naturist pages were taken down, like Stephane’s and Evan’s, I had had enough. There were other reasons too, but I won’t belabor the point. I took up residence on Tumblr. The move has been positive for the most part. As far as Tumblr….
Pros: Not character limited, naturist/nudity friendly, easy to screen Porn purveyors/seekers, easy to use.
Cons: Bots (although they are easy to screen, just tedious), absence of meaningful naturist dialog (growing little by little though), overly focused on pretty naked woman pictures (not necessarily bad, but there’s more to life than admiring a bum, no matter how phenomenal), lots of reblogging.
On my Tumblr feed, I tend to focus on sharing stories, thoughts, articles I’ve read, etc.. I encourage comments and discussions vs just “likes”. I do miss having some of the more vocal naturist advocates regularly participating, although some are there, even if they don’t use their Tumblr page much. I’m hoping the content quality continues to grow and mature. We’ll see….
I understand the fears for our future, but I think they may be overdone. The media projects what it knows about and what it thinks its readers/viewers want. It doesn’t project what it doesn’t know about or what is mundane and everyday.
For most of us, we go about our daily, mundane business as naked as we can and it never makes headlines. Lots of naturist events and gatherings and socialising take place below the media radar, or are deemed too boring to make the cut.
So the headlines we read and see are the very few that to the top.
A couple of Uk examples you’ve probably never heard of because they’ve not made it out of niche media. Near Nottingham a bunch of naturists have free run of a country park thanks to persistent efforts of a few to make friends with the authorities. There are even signs up telling people not to ring the police as the naked folk are doing nothing wrong.
A Facebook group is headed up by a chap who, some years back, had a naturist website and forum; his own naturist pastime was cycling naked round Cambridge, something the locals became used to and bored with. He’s since moved to a seaside town where he also regularly cycles and walks naked, and has become part of the local scenery.
Any shock-horror headlines about these?
"So what is plan B? "
Start your own. Find a naturist domain, host it on something like GoDaddy, add a community program, then get a few volunteer moderators. You can't make it free because you need to pay for the hosting, and build a legal fund for the inevitable prude that can only see sex in nudity.
As usual, It's All About Money. The LOGICAL thing to do would be to have naturist social networks offered by national and international organizations. British Naturism sort of does that. Their site has a forum for discussions and also a place for naturist pictures (uncensored!). It even has occasional video chat sessions - nudity welcome - a recent one featured Victoria Bateman. But it's not structured like things such as Facebook or Twitter, which people are more familiar with. BN membership is priced about the same as U.S. and other national organizations. But as far as I know, few if any offer what BN does. (I'm a BN member though I'm in the U.S. - naturists anywhere can join.)
There are also various services like A Naturist World and Naturist Hub. Most aren't free except maybe for some sort of basic service. So the problem is that naturists even in the same country are scattered all around and can't easily communicate. And if you want to join a number of services you have to pay all of the ones you join. (This is also a BIG problem with Substack.) Oh, and there's also the problem of keeping out undesirables (voyeurs, sexual predators, etc.)
Although Mastodon (which I've not really used yet) may be sort of clunky, it has one BIG advantage: users on any particular server can communicate with any other Mastodon user regardless of what server they use. And it's free. The interface is very much like Twitter. But I don't think it has many naturist users to speak of. I know there's active work going on to develop protocols for communication among all social networks, the way Mastodon does.
Why don't more long-standing national naturist organizations offer this kind of service now? Because it's expensive to run. There's not only the basic expense of computers and communication gear, but they also need technical people to operate, moderate, and maintain/improve the software. In the U.S. there are two national organizations: TNS (which has few members now) and AANR. AANR at one time had a discussion forum, but that didn't last long, perhaps for lack of interest. (TNS never did anything of this sort.)
The underlying problem is that there just aren't enough naturists in most countries to support much of anything financially. The only long-term solution I see is to recruit MANY more naturist. But THAT needs to be organized, supported, and coordinated somehow - which probably only a largish organization could do.
Maybe I should write more about this on my own (Free!) Substack: Revitalizing Naturism. (Please excuse the plug.)
Unfortunately, and sadly, I see 'anti-nudity' becoming the big thing, at least here in the United States. I see some really sick attitudes about this. The mental health of the populace is going DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!!