I think we all like vintage images, and vintage naturism is no different. You seem to enjoy vintage naturism too, judging from the topics searched for on the blog.

I thought it might be time for another ‘vintage’ post, so I went searching online as usual. The images above are almost all certainly from a period between the wars, and probably all German in origin.

It was, briefly, a time of naturism’s ‘darkest hour’ as it became briefly entangled with Nazism. The mottos of the early naturist movement, which sought to link naturism with good health (true) through exercise, were pithy little things like ‘Light and Life’ and ‘Sun into Life’.There was nothing wrong with that, but they too readily lent themselves to the Nazis’ desire to build a strong, healthy Germany.

Strength through Joy, a Nazi leisure organisation, sounds like it could have been named out of a naturist guidebook.

Some imagery of Hitler Youth doesn’t seem too far removed from…

…some pre-war naturist photography.

Researching vintage naturism has, disturbingly, through clicking back through sources of the photography, or exploring sites where they’ve been shared, begun to be linked again via odious right-wing sites (mainly tumblr ones). The traffic is all in one direction, as far as I can gather. It’s the right wing hate-sites that are appropriating naturist imagery. I don’t see any evidence (although my research is hardly conclusive) of naturist pages picking up images from the far-right, thankfully.

I don’t think that some of these sites are publishing material with any sense of irony. Gifs of young women (from today, not from history) giving Nazi salutes can be ironic when it’s surrounded by dozens, hundreds of similar images. Although, as is always the case with the far right, they amusingly lack any self-awareness of their ridiculous posturing, so in the middle of a love-in for Nazism we get this…

…which is clearly operating on the ‘But Hitler loved dogs!’ level.

Naturism isn’t the prime focus, of course, much of the appropriated naturist material is a side-issue in a much larger body of hate, but almost every far-right tumblr site I visited had used early naturist material so spread their filthy message.

Of course, well done to the far-right cretin whose tumblr blog, month after month of swastika related imagery, also included pictures of a couple of naked black and Asian women. Comedy gold. I should have screen-shot and posted it, just to give you a belly laugh as well.

My message is that naturism is a thing of beauty, and was one between the wars during its first golden era, and that it needs to be kept as far away from the far-right, in all circumstances, as is humanly possible.

Ella

We’ve covered Brazil and its naturism sporadically over the years, mostly through the eyes of Pookes, Trine and guest contributor Natalia.

I’m delighted to say that Natalia still uses Second Life, and I’ve been able to hook up with her via IM in recent weeks and asked if she’d like to let us know about the state of play for Brazilian naturists right now.

She didn’t come back with anything related to naturism per se, but has provided a very interesting account of a theatrical group in Brazil who perform much of their productions nude, and often features ‘audience participation’ with the audience freely stripping off to join in the performances. Over to Natalia…

Teatro Oficina is a theatre group based in Sao Paolo, Brazil, a city I moved to from my home city of Recife around a year ago. Recife is a couple of hours drive south of one of Brazil’s famous Tambaba naturist beach (both are on the Atlantic coastline), and Tambaba is where I became naturist some years ago for the first time.

Scenes from Tambaba beach

I so enjoyed the feeling of freedom that I then began to take holidays near Tambaba, and use the beach daily. Sometimes, after work finished on Friday, we would drive up to spend the weekends at Tambaba.

I was sad when I moved to Sao Paolo because my home in Recife, my family there and my naturist paradise are now 3000kms, or about 3 hours flying time, away. Yes, there is naturist beaches a little closer to my new home, but nothing as beautiful as Tambaba, and still a long drive away (further than Recife to Tambaba).

It seemed as if there was no social nudity available to me in Sao Paolo, until I discovered Teatro Oficina! I know I am not comparing exact naked experiences. But naked, we all feel a sense of freedoms and it is good for my soul to experience it on the beach or at home or anywhere else.

Let me tell you a little about the theatre group as much as I can tell.

Their theatre is a long, narrow building that is very ‘industrial’ in appearance. Not a typical theatre. Much of the performance takes place on a long ‘stage’ (the wooden strip you can see in the photo above : Ella) with the audience sat at the side of that.

One of their productions, Macumba Antropófaga, essentially tells the story of interaction between the indigenous peoples of Brazil and European invaders. This provides a pretext for nudity amongst many of the actors. 

Teatro Oficina have a Twitter account where you can find links to their performances.

Please note : Teatro Oficina performances are long….this one from a few days ago last six hours!

The audience are encouraged to strip and join in, which is exactly what I did when I attended a performance several weeks ago. It was an exhausting but thrilling experience. As Teatro Oficina streams their performances I shall have to see if I can find myself and post photos.

Natalia

Ella adds…As Natalia points out, this is not a ‘naturist’ post, but rather the normalisation of nudity in society as acceptable and welcome. I do have some reservations about Teatro Oficina, though, and while I’m posting it for the reasons just outlined, there’s elements of it that make it strictly non-naturist. 1. Sex is simulated during the performance, so it’s definitely not ‘genuine naturism’ as I would understand it. I will let that pass on the basis that Brazil was very much under the yoke of the Portuguese Empire in the past and sex, as simulated in the performance, would certainly accurately reflect the mass rape (or willing intercourse) between Portuguese invaders and the indigenous people. In that respect, simulated sex is part of the story of the rape, literally and figuratively, of Brazil. 2. I’ve seen masturbation and ejaculation, on stage, by male performers. Integral to the story? Unlikely, but I’m not someone who would ‘read’ the performance as it being a representation of something else. 3. Sex has allegedly been more than simulated onstage, with one actress reportedly becoming pregnant as a result of her ‘performance’. So this is on really, really thin ground as far as ‘naturism’ is, for us. Shifting sands beneath our feet, to be quite honest. On the other hand, I do recognise its artistic point, and the encouragement to get the audience to undress and join in, thus crossing what they call a ‘tabu’, is an interesting way of creating or encouraging naturist activity…of a sort. One would hope that the audience who’ve never been naked in public before could progress to naturist beaches and thus ‘grow’ Brazilian naturism. On the other hand, one hopes they don’t go away with the idea that being naked in public (i.e. on a naturist beach) isn’t closely associated with simulated or real sex or public masturbation.

We’re months late with this one, but I’m going to share it anyway, and almost certainly pick it up at the time of the next Beltane Fire Festival next April/May.

Beltane is the Gaelic May Day festival.

The video above has subtitles, which explains what’s going on in its enactment in Edinburgh.

Just a couple of hours drive from where I am, I’m amazed that it was only yesterday I discovered this festival, in this format, existed so close, and I suspect we’ll be taking it in next year.

The Beltane Fire Festival appears to have been long established, beginning its current incarnation in 1988, and now featuring over 300 performers.

It has its own website. 

I’ve read that it’s possible to volunteer, as a performer, steward or back office, and I’m certainly going to see if I can be part of it next year.

Every year on 30th April on Calton Hill in Edinburgh thousands of people come together for a huge celebration to mark the coming of summer. The evening begins with a procession to the top of the hill led by people dressed as the May Queen and the Green Man (ancient God and Goddess figures representing fertility and growth).

The May Queen crowns the Green Man, in a ritual similar to that carried out by Wiccan Pagans (who follow a structured set of rituals). The winter ends when the Green Man’s winter costume is taken from him and he is revealed in his spring costume. A wild dance takes place and the Green Man and the May Queen are married.

The main element of any Beltane celebration is fire. On Calton Hill torchbearers carry purifying flames and fire arches are used to represent the gateways between the earthly world and the spirit world.

Most of the imagery used in the costumes and rituals comes from the Celts and from Scottish folklore. Other influences come from indeginous people world wide. For instance, the symbol of Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, can be seen on the faces of some of the performers, and the Geisha traditions of Japan are evident in the dress of the White Women (assistants of the May Queen). Due to the ecclectic nature of the celebrations, Edinburgh’s Beltane is not recognised as a religious ritual by many practising Pagans. (from a BBC website page)

As for replicating real life in Second Life, yes, we can do that too. Red skin, L$1 on the Marketplace. Loincloth, L$20 on the marketplace. Fire at Su Casa Naturist.

Ella

A couple of years ago, when Trine was editing the blog, she covered a story about nude swimming at the YMCA (in America).

Some readers commented that boys did swim nude, and girls in costumes, but on different days.

As I wasn’t editing at that point, it was a story that largely passed me by, until I discovered some photographs online today purporting to tell the same story.

It’s hard to know what’s true. CFNM (Clothed female, nude male) is, I would suggest, a bit of a fantasy thing in the internet era. Wiki calls it ‘a genre of erotica’.

From what I can gather, nude swimming was present in the YMCA -because the clue’s in the name, Men- but was discontinued when the YMCA began admitting females. This seems to have been a fairly commonplace change in attitudes in once male-only preserves.

So some of those photos of nude male swimming teams may just be true, although I don’t really see those photos making it to the school yearbook, do you?

There’s quite a number of this type of photo around, but note, if you’re doing your own research on the topic, just how poor quality some of the photos are, and without any definite sort of detail, i.e. the school involved, where they were located and so on. Are they hiding a bit of photoshopping?

The colour ones are almost certainly ‘real’ photos, but ‘modelled’ to play on this ‘genre of erotica’ more than anything else. They’re unlikely to reflect the real world.

But it was certainly a scenario, whether it ever happened in real life or not, that was simple to recreate for the blog.

Ella

My SL friend Malgorzata has often posed for us because ‘poses’ are her big thing, and she’s been collecting them for so long now she says she regularly gets modelling work (nude and non-nude) due to her capacity to locate a pose for every occasion.  She says that there are a huge number of poses out there, and her preferred method is to type ‘poses’ in the ‘places’ search tab, and then go shopping. All of the poses featured here were free, and ‘purchased’ today, July 22nd.

Malgorzata hasn’t said which came from which stores. I’ve IM’ed her and will add tps to the photos when she gets back to me.

Ella

The media often appear to report acts of terrorism in a glorified way, when the reality is that they’re the acts of morons with no morality or arguable cause.

This post has nothing to do with naturism at all, but I found it amusing to learn that the brave foot soldiers of ISIS are now so afraid of being caught by  Iraqi  forces advancing on Mosul that they’re dressing up as women to escape capture. Certainly a real life scene worth replicating in SL!

Their efforts have not always been wholly successful! 🙂

It was relatively easy to replicate transvestite terrorists…oh, how ridiculous they look, and how ridiculously they have always presented their medieval death cult ‘views’..in Second Life.

Ella

It would appear that UK newspaper The Metro is rapidly becoming my go-to place for nudity, if not exactly naturist, stories.

It’s old news, the story dates from 2016, but one blogger urges other mothers to be more relaxed about their naked form.

You can follow the blogger, Constance Hall, on Facebook if you use that thing, and she appears to have quite an enlightening approach to life and parenting.

Obviously, it’s something, as a naturist, that I advocate, teaching children there’s no mystery about naked bodies.

My older children and I (or their Dad) will shower or bath together from time to time, usually more for convenience than anything else. I’ll help with hair washing, and sometimes it’s easier to hop in the tub with them for this purpose.

Nudity is par-for-the-course in our bathroom, as well as around the home if we’re having a naturist day (i.e. weather permitting). One family who are friends of ours aren’t naturist, but I know they’ve a similarly relaxed familial-nudity-is-OK attitude at home, so perhaps it’s a little more common than imagined.

A note about the photographs: I’ve got an alt and was able to create a child-sized alt for use in the photos. It’s my desire to try and promote naturist values as healthy and family friendly. A look around any naturist campsite will reveal that it’s very much a family orientated lifestyle. Sadly, due to some sick minds, the representation of children in naturist photography has all but been eradicated, and is now often presented as ‘adults only’. I would love to present naturism as family friendly more often than I do, but even within SL some sick minds exist to fulfil their own sordid, sick fantasies through ‘age play’ (commonly, rightly, banned in many SL sims).

As a result, I’ve gone as far as pixelating the ‘child avatar’ (i.e. me using an alt) for the purposes of the photos, so not to feed those depraved minds.

Ella

Usually at this time of year the media is awash with stories about naturism, some positive, some negative, almost always with a heavy accent on double entendres.

And it’s these stories that often inform this blog, and we react to them, commenting and then determining how we’ll present the stories from an SL perspective.

This year…almost nothing, until the Metro published a story last Friday titled

I went to a naturist beach for the first time and this is what it was like

And I’m delighted to say it was factual and honest about the experience, without the need for puns.

If you’ve never experienced naturism yet, then why not follow the author’s lead and what out what it’s like.

Ella

Advertorial : An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content.

I held a ‘meet and greet’ at Eden Naturopolis last night. It was…interesting, to say the least. Not many naturists were passing through the sim, so it was unremarkable in that sense, but I did get to speak to one avatar whose story was fascinating, and involved some ‘ritual nudity’.

It’s such a long tale that I’m splitting it into two posts, one tonight, the next sometime next week.

A couple of years ago I met an avatar who had notions to create and build a Second Life religion. I met him at a naturist sim, we chatted for a while, and I logged out. I never saw anything turn up on any blogs about this, and assumed it was someone with another fanciful SL idea that never achieved fruition. Wrong.

I ran into that same avatar last night, and it would appear that he has been very active in pressing on ahead with the idea, his SL revolves around the idea but (much like this blog’s research and writing) inventing a religion takes up more time off-grid than it does on it.

‘Sex plays a huge role in SL’, the avatar told me, ‘you need only look at the popularity of certain sims to know it’s true. Many avatars come to SL for virtual sex. In some ways, that is the appeal for many. Now start to factor in some of the ‘minor’ interests in SL, like Gor, Game of Thrones, witchcraft, Domination and Submission sims, and sex is very much part of the equation, with a lot of nudity involved’. I couldn’t argue against that assessment.

‘Now look at popular culture, or some aspects of pornography. A lot of appeal comes from nudity in ritual settings, be it churches, the unavailability of nuns leading to a long standing art and culture theme of sexualising them. Exploitation movies involve more gratuitous nudity in the context of things like voodoo, the poor little rich girl kidnapped by natives and abused over the course of 90 minutes. I thought that there was definitely a market for some sort of SL quasi religion wherein there was a goddess, and the rituals would involve nudity. It’s not new at all, by any stretch of the imagination.

‘What held me back was  the creation of a proper back story. I felt we needed a holy book to begin with. I’m not a builder, so I’ve been putting poses and items together with the help of others. And then there was the cost of a sim, and the shadow of Sansar over Second Life. Should I create a rather expensive sim with no real prospect of income for it, or wait until Sansar arrived? Or take it to something like Open Sim?’

Hence the two/three year wait?

‘Yes. It has taken me that long to incorporate aspects of voodoo, Christianity, paganism, witchcraft, Gor and so on into The Book of Lotus, our holy book. I intend to publish it online quite soon. It’s not Biblical in length but hopefully has some sense of depth to it.’

I was then given a password to a ‘by invitation only’ blog, where I was able to read some of ‘The Book of Lotus’ with accompanying SL photos, many of which, while featuring nudity, are entirely unsuited to this blog.

What I can say is that the entire ‘religion’ hangs around the goddess Varija (it’s Hindi for ‘lotus’, apparently), and I’ll be speaking to some of its adherents in part two of these articles, a couple of whom have gravitated to the whole ‘SL quasi religion’ concept from SL naturism.

Ella

nb: at the top of the page it references ‘advertorial’. We weren’t paid to run this story. I found the whole notion of someone trying to establish some sort of new ‘religion’ within the context of SL to be interesting enough in itself, and obviously the ‘nudity in SL’ angle to it all works within the brief of this blog. I’d also be exceptionally keen to learn how immersive people are in their Second Lives, to the point where they might be vaguely keen on such an idea.

So Game of Thrones is beginning to reach its conclusion (on TV anyway) with the penultimate season about to commence broadcasting. I’ve seen some of it, the first series anyway, because when it became such a television phenomenon I bought and read the first book in the series, A song of fire and ice.

Based on that, I was given the first series on DVD. And there my interest dissipated. I found the DVDs only marginally captivating, and the book wholly uninteresting. Sorry, but I’ve said it. It read, to me, like something epic as written by an 18 year old. The writing simply wasn’t that great. Usually, books are better than the films/tv series they spawn (Tolkein’s Ring Trilogy being a case in point…although the films were epic in scale and did justice to their source material).

I persevered. Maybe I needed to read the second book, A clash of kings. Nope. Same feeling from it. Schoolboy writing, and I put the shout out not to be bought the second DVD box set.

And that was that. No more ‘Game of Thrones’ for me. Thereafter my only knowledge of it would come through newspapers as they ratcheted uptake sex, the nudity, the plot twists and turns.

Ah yes, the nudity. It seemed like most of the actresses in it appeared nude, or semi-nude at some point, and it was littered with scenes filled with topless ‘extras’. Granted, a couple of actors also appeared fully nude, and the old adage that ‘the nudity is central to the plot‘, something often rightfully sneered at by actresses over several decades, held water a little bit more than some gratuitous nudity in film, television and on stage.

When I started in Second Life, entire sims, ranges of clothing and roleplay was based on the Gor books by John Norman. There was, and remains, a lot of Gorean role play, clothes, sims around in SL. Before I played SL I’d never heard of Gor, but quickly got an education, via SL, on this. And as with GRR Martin’s Game of Thrones series, I found the writing quite childish in delivery. Indeed it was worse, because it played on that old ‘submissive female’ concept quite a lot (I know fans of Gor reject this reading: but it’s my reading of it. Your interpretation of it doesn’t impact on mine).

Gor and Game of Thrones remain very popular roleplay sims in Second Life.

I’ve not explored either in SL to discover how much nudity, specifically female nudity, is part of the role-play, but I’m guessing it does have a part to play. Whether that’s ‘gratuitous’ or not, I’m not equipped to be the judge.

Model Heather enacts scenes from fantasy novels at a Game of Thrones sim

Ella