Naturism is so alien, so ‘weird’ to people because society can only see ‘those bits’ in a sexualised manner. And so to divest ourselves of our last bits of clothing and put ‘those bits’ out there is something that many people can’t do because of that social conditioning. It’s brainwashing, in effect. Imagine a school somewhere in a poor region of the Balkans or middle America were to invent some sort of cult worship and taught all of its pupils that it’s the right and moral thing to do to give away part of your pocket money each week to the principal’s goddess wife, Zog, while kissing her feet and expressing gratitude for her existence. Once reported in the media, we’d be appalled, call it a cult, call it poisonous and investigate the $40k she raked in over the course of every school year (which, the media would also discover, she spent on lavish foreign holidays).

But the pupils were only doing what they had been taught to do, conditioned to do.

Teaching us shame and embarrassment about our vulvas, penises, testicles, breasts and nipples is essentially the same thing, except on an almost global scale.

Today’s Observer (i.e. the Sunday Guardian) newspaper in the UK carries a story about ‘Me and my vulva’, wherein women speak of their views and approach to an ‘intimate’ part of their body, one almost always hidden and not discussed as openly and frankly as we would our nose, our ears or our knobbly knees.

It also links through to a second article, almost two years old now, wherein men talk the same way about their penises.

Both are fascinating reads, and should be essential reading for people who are body-phobic, and who’ve not yet had the enlightened experience of freeing themselves of the cultish societal brainwashing that hasn’t allowed them to step into the light of body confidence and naturism (naturism often feeding the body confidence we initially lack when first disrobing in public).

Flo