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
the sl naturist 
The shaving of pubic hair certainly seems to be popular in NZ. In naturist circles it is unusual to see anyone with pubic hair men and women and the age group is generally older. There is one public sauna, aside from the City Council sauna at the main swimming pool, left in Wellington and the thing that struck me this winter when I resumed taking a sauna regularly in 2014 was that everyone with the exception of myself was shaven, again males and females, and a mix of ages including some elderly males. When I last had a sauna there in 1995 I would be sure that nobody was shaved. In counter-culture circles it seems to be fashionable with women involved in circus arts. In March 2014 when I visited an old hippie community and we all went skinny dipping there was no one shaved. A few years ago, hust as an aside, there was an unusual debate in the the magazine of the NZ Naturist Federation “Go-natural’ concerning whether those members wearing genitial jewellery, such as piercings, were actually truely naked which, I must report, didn’t get very far.
That debate about ‘true naturism’ or ‘true nakedness’ has been part of a (silly) debate in British naturist circles too, Gerald. I’ve read articles in old copies of UK naturist magazine Health & Efficiency in which public hair, underarm hair, tattoos, genital (or nipple) piercings constituted proper naturist practice. The very worst ‘debate’ I ever read was someone suggesting circumcised males weren’t true naturists, a ‘debate’ that was shot down in fairly short order.