I’ve already done a post on Howie’s Hallowe’en Party, and more photos may well follow. As I say, this year it began as a costumed, clothing optional party with a Hallowe’en theme.

As we often do posts on real life situations which we reimagine in an SL context, I thought it might be nice to find a few photos of people in Hallowe’en costumes and reimagine Howie’s party brought to life, with all manner of naturists initially turning up in costume.

Ella

Grausame Tochter’s ‘Ich liebe meine vagina’ (I love my vagina) video, with English lyric subtitles)

Grausame Tochters, or Cruel Daughters in English, are a German ‘Industrial’ band I was informed about this week. I have to say that the ‘industrial’ music scene isn’t something about which I’m remotely familiar, but I was advised that they could be something I’d find interesting in the context of this blog, and how right that person was!

Not naturist at all, but certainly within the remit of the blog in the sense that they’re normalising nudity to some extent (or titillating a mainly teenage, male audience?). Either way, singer Aranea Peel and bass guitarist Era Kreuz aren’t afraid to perform nude, as the photos show.

We’ve had quite a bit of fun replicating RL in SL with this blog entry. Thanks to Becca and Jax for fulfilling the roles of Era Kreuz and Aranea Peel so enthusiastically.

Industrial techno isn’t quite my chosen genre of music, so I can’t say how good they are within their chosen field, but their video, their message and their image are powerful. If you watch the video at the top of the page, you’ll also see how aspects of SL are very, very familiar within their work. It’s almost as if SL, or another virtual world platform, was used for the video.

Ella

I’ve never quite got Hallowe’en. I put that down to being born in England, where we celebrated Guy Fawkes night, a celebration of a failed attempt to blow up parliament in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605

Elsewhere in the UK, certainly here in Scotland or across the sea in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Hallowe’en, the night before All Hallows/All Saints, prevail as the primary celebration of that week. It’s also closely aligned with the Gaelic/Celtic festival of Samhain.

Hallowe’en is also huge in north America while it’s celebrated in places like Mexico as Dia de los Muertos, the day of the dead.

When I say I don’t get it, of course I understand it. It’s just that not having grown up in a culture where it was celebrated, I don’t readily identify with it, although that has changed since I was a child, with England increasingly celebrating it (more for commercial reasons and shifting turnip lanterns and other seasonal tat).

And of course Hallowe’en is huge in Second Life with many sims bedecked with pumpkins and the like. Add in a splash of autumnal colour and it becomes one of the most photogenic times of the SL year.

If Hallowe’en is your thing, there’s plenty of outfit choice to be had on a dollarbie/free basis. Below, I’m wearing a Hallowe’en outfit from Brii Underground, worn to one of Howie’s irregular naturist soirees. This year it started off as a clothing optional event, provided the clothing had a Hallowe’en theme, but hey, we’re all naturists who are invited to his events, so we inevitably ended up nude in his pool at midnight anyway, watching a firework display he arranged.

Lydia and SLN photographer Harry picked up free ‘witch’ and ‘witch hunter’ outfits available at Blue Moon Enterprises (L$0, no group join fee) although Harry doesn’t appear to be doing much witch-hunting here, and appears to be more under Lydia’s spell! 🙂 

Jenny and Hank had picked up pumpkin heads to wear in acknowledgement of the Naked Pumpkin run, a long standing Hallowe’en event in the US (see photos above and below). These are a free gift at Kaju at the Darkness Monthly Event.

We’ve extensively covered the Naked Pumpkin run before at SLN, Pookes reporting on it in 2012, with two blog entries on our own SL version of it. The real life version was blogged, again by Pookes, in 2014.

I have to say that the accessories  for SL’s pumpkin run have vastly improved in the past five years!

Evie’s costume was another of Brii Underground’s dollarbie outfits.

I didn’t get the chance to ask her dancing partner where he got his minimalist outfit. Watch out you don’t burn the burgers!

Naturist blogger/youtuber Christine presents her countdown to Halloween 2017!

Mary Clare from Terra Cotta naturist resort

It’s not something I plan on blogging about much because it’s not really something that grabs me and also because there’s no real naturist perspective.

What I will talk about, instead, is the type of photography used to portray it. Above are a selection of images of ‘witches’, always done in some sort of stylised, sexual form. It’s sexualising women in a specific way, in much the same way that ‘mysterious’ women are generally sexualised. Think nuns…Muslim ladies…and the slightly mysterious world of witches. ‘Fair game for portrayal as sexualised women’ appears to be the general train of ‘thought’. I’ll probably revisit this train of thought in a subsequent post, but I’ll leave it for now. Back to Howie’s clothing optional Hallowe’en party.

Barbara’s outfit evntually gets discarded as she hits the pool with friends. Anna hits the pool in a rather strange ‘clown’ mask. A lady in a batman/batgirl mask chats with another guest beside the pool

While I don’t really do Hallowe’en, just remember there’s a stack of freebie outfits out there, and you can dress up as naturist/textile as you like to be at whatever Hallowe’en parties are going on in your SL.

I’ll be blogging a further gallery from Howie’s Hallowe’en soiree in due course, but I wanted to post the links to a few outfits in advance of the day itself.

Ella

Gerhard Riebicke was a German photographer who photographed, amongst other things, the naturist movement of the 1920s/1930s, just before naturism entered its darkest hour, tainted by association, for a while, with the entire Nazi philosophy of young, energetic and Aryan.

While some of his choreographed nude photography has a dubious element of faintly echoing later, disturbing imagery of the Nazis (not, incidentally, photographed by Riebicke to my knowledge), we can marvel at his capturing of movement and shape.

Definitely worthy of being in our ‘Heroes of Naturism’ gallery.

Ella

There’s a new Taylor Swift video out later this week and much is being made, on social media, about her cyborg look in a ‘nude’ bodysuit.

Amazing how the concept of ‘nude’ still sets pulses racing, and how some people ‘aren’t ready for it’.

Ella

I’ve not posted much recently because there hasn’t been too much to report on, in terms of real world naturism.

When I’ve got inworld in the past couple of weeks I’ve occupied my time away from the naturist sims for fear of trying to force a blog post where none was realistically worth doing. As a result, I’ve been hopping around lingerie stores, more of which in a subsequent post.

While clicking around various news sites I found a naturist related story on the BBC, regarding Indonesia’s secret naturist community defying the law.

“We could face jail time if we appeared nude in public,”

Their [Indonesia’s naturist community’s]  best shot would be Bali, which is less strict than the rest of majority Muslim Indonesia. But he says the existing nudist-friendly resorts “cater to foreigners only”.

Rewind 40 years and nudity was common in places like Bali – women would often walk around topless, and bathe naked.

Nude Balinese Women in Native Attire

As is often the case, it seems as though ‘progress’ takes us backwards in terms of ‘body freedom’, wherever we are in the world.

We weren’t able to find a huge amount of traditional Indonesian/Balinese dress in SL, but our model above is wearing something called a kebaya. A blouse and dress combination sometimes worn with a Muslim hijab.

I have to say that the historical f orm of Thai/Indonesian dress seems rather more comfortable!

I was rather hoping to find the headdress known as a chadok in SL or the marketplace, but sadly this is unavailable.

A chadok

A couple of years ago, remember, a model posed in Bangkok wearing nothing but traditional dancer’s jewellery, in an episode that outraged the authorities.

Ella

This ‘Whatever’ pose is available from Helamiyo. L$0, free group join.

There’s a bunch of other L$1 poses (for singles and couples) to chooses from as well.

It feels to me that, as time goes by, more and more naturists are adopting an ‘I’m a naturist…whatever‘ attitude and ‘coming out’ to the world. 

It really shouldn’t be a ‘debate’ we’re having in 2017, or fretting about what ‘the boss’ thinks. ‘The boss’ can’t discriminate against people in terms of sexuality, gender, age or ‘disability’, so why assume s/he can or will discriminate on the basis of a type of lifestyle?

Ella

A female nipple is soon to be shown on daytime television in the UK for the first time ever. Reach for the smelling salts!

(note: the video above isn’t the actual advert, which will be aired for the first time on Monday)

11,000 people (99% female, 1% male) died of breast cancer in the UK in 2014.

Anything that might lead to a reduction in this number is to be welcomed, by undertaking regular self-checks (or, come to that, have a partner help you with that check) regardless of what a small yet very vocal band of people might inevitably say about it.

I await its broadcast, or more accurately, the reaction to its broadcast, with interest. We Brits do a very good line in sexualising the body while hypocritically fearing it being seen.

Second Life has always been very good at highlighting breast cancer, and you can visit an awareness centre inworld.  

There’s also events to raise money for Cancer charities, such as ‘Rock Your Rack’, who are currently holding an art auction (ends today, Saturday, October 14th) to raise donations for charity.

Self-examination

If you can spare a few Linden dollars (or real life ones) to support Breast cancer charities and their important research work, particularly in October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, please try to do so. Self-examination could save your life. Supporting the work undertaken by numerous charities, including one, almost certainly, where you live, is important.

Ella

Occasionally, this blog veers away from naturist related content and seems more focused on ‘equality’ or ‘women’s rights’ issues. They aren’t, in the broader sense, unconnected. Naturist rights are in largely the same place as women’s rights. That is to say, on the back burner or ignored in their entirety. So when I get angry about the treatment handed out to the naturist community, I’m identifying with other ‘minority’ groups whose rights are trampled on. That’s why LGBT rights, or women’s rights, sometime take front and centre on the blog.

I’m afraid I sort of missed it at the time (family life and all that), but thanks to reader ‘Faisal’ (not his real or SL name) who has adopted the name in solidarity with his ‘brother’ Faisal BaDughaish, who this week tweeted a photo of himself teaching his wife to drive, just days after King Salman lifted a ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia.

Faisal BaDughaish’s tweet ran as follows….

I don’t speak or read Arabic, but thankfully the BBC reported the story, and Faisal’s tweet reads “I started teaching my wife how to drive in one of the private parking spaces in a safe and legal way, preparing for the law to take effect.”

Immediately, Faisal was taken to task (but, hey, isn’t Twitter a social largely for angry people to express their anger) with comments like “Don’t you feel embarrassed or protective of her when posting her picture?. Shame on you.” (apparently in relation to the fact that Faisal’s wife’s face wasn’t covered).

Well, Mrs. BaDughaish seems entirely happy to be learning to drive and take a step on the road to personal freedom and equality. She also appears to be taking an entirely pragmatic approach to driving by abandoning her niqab to improve her peripheral vision, a thing I’d have said was relatively important when driving.

That led our ‘Faisal’ (who isn’t Saudi Arabian, incidentally, but lives in the Arab world and is a keen reader of the blog) to send me a photo he took of himself and his friend in an SL car showroom, to express support for Mr. BaDughaish and support for the change in Saudi’s laws.

‘There is a lot of misconceptions about the Arab world’, he writes, ‘and some of it justified. I know this isn’t your usual type of postings, but I’ve read some of your blog postings on female rights and I just wanted to say that not everyone in the Arab world thinks the same way on many issues, from driving bans to terrorism. Please, Ella, if you can publish my photo in support of equal rights, please do so’.

Happy to do so, ‘Faisal’

And here are Faisal and friend, buying a new car, for her, in that SL car showroom.

Ella.

Naturists often pride themselves on their individuality, and that’s true when you consider how they exist outside a conventional lifestyle. Of course I could now do a piece on ‘conventionality’ being a construct all by itself, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Instead, maybe we could focus on how, despite trumpeting their credentials as individuals, many naturists conform to an entirely different set of conventions, with shaving, for both men and women, being top of the list. These days, the existence of pubic or underarm hair is nothing more than a myth in certain naturist venues, and some voices even go as far as suggesting that a true naturist (whatever the hell that is) couldn’t seriously sport pubic (or underarm) hair.

It’s therefore a source of delight to me when I see photographs of events like a Spencer Tunick shoot or a mass skinny-dip for charity to find that pubic hair isn’t quite as ‘endangered’ as some naturists would have you believe.

So much for being able to think ‘freely’ and ‘individually’ when some vocal, blustering naturists attempt to box other naturists into their own set of preferences. One woman naturist I know generally depilates her pubic area for the summer, and goes ‘natural’ in the winter months, and was appalled to receive some derogatory remarks on arriving, hirsute, on her naturist holidays, about having gone to ‘the dark side’ simply for not shaving.

Women are often the target of online abuse, as well as everyday abuse of course, but consider the story of a Swedish model, Arvide Bystrom, who has received rape threats for being part of an advertising campaign for Adidas footwear in which her legs are unshaved.

And the comments to the video!!!!! :-O

There’s something definitely genuinely disturbing about the minds who comment in such a manner. Something definitely disturbing that these sort of people exist and might want to ‘date’ your sister, daughter or friend.

Ella