Tag Archives: naturist beach

Vive les naturistes!

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The Saudi total family have cut short their trip to France, following protests by locals, including local naturists.

We reported on how a naturist beach close the the family’s holiday residence was being closed for the duration of his holiday, but a petition of 150,000, plus the compromising of the ‘security’ situation (using power and money to trample over the opinions of locals certainly raised the profile of what, previously, could well have been a lower profile bolt-hole) has led to the royal family cutting short their stay in France.

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Beaten! By the naturists!

ضرب! الناس عارية!

A rare victory for people-power, I think.

Ella

 

 

Naturist beach closed to accommodate wealth and power

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Before I got distracted by the spike in viewing figures, discussed in a previous post, I’d logged in to comment on the following story. It appears that members of the Saudi royal family have ordered the closure of a French naturist beach ‘for their security’.

One needs to be exceptionally careful with the Daily Mail, a paper that will do anything it can to demonise Muslims. As a result, it reports that the closure (of a public, municipal beach) is for ‘security reasons’, with its readers then given free reign to comment on how the real reason might be the nudity and how this shows that western values can be trumped by money.

The Saudi royal family own the villa next to the beach, of course, and have every right to stay there within the house and grounds of their own property. But as they’ve owned the property since 1979 and the concept of ‘security’ is now only becoming an issue, once suspects that ‘politics’ is playing a key part in this. How might the closure of a beach on which, let’s face it, users are unlikely to be carrying anything concealed, improve the security? And what ever happened to the spirit of the French Revolution? Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite? Some people would appear to be more free if they’ve got wads of cash to make things happen, and the French seem ready to set aside the tenets of their Revolution in order to do politics. How might bending over backwards to Saudi Arabia, for example, fuel the sales of French fighter jets?

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The Daily Telegraph has been reporting this too, and surprisingly is a little more candid about the reasons for the closure. It is, according to locals, to allow the Saudi Royals to have the beach to themselves. Ah! So it’s not security? It’s not even the presence of naturists? It’s money, power and a replication of the reasons as to why Marie Antoinette got her head chopped off.

 Ella

 

 

 

Beach promenading

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With the sea closed for bathing, a morning ‘promenade’ of the naturist beach is the first action of the day. Sylvia and I were heading down to the beach earlier when we ran into neighbours from a few apartments away. I don’t often appear to be in the resort at the same time as this Dutch couple, who speak excellent English, but they’ve been here this week and of course Sylvia has been happy to chat away to them.

When we reached the beach Sylvia and Sanne, the wife of the couple, decided that cafe con leche, milky coffee, was preferable to a stroll, leaving Johannes and myself to walk to the naturist beach’s boundary. Cheeky Sylvia also snapped the photo (above) as we headed off, and others as we returned…but I’m not going to post those! 🙂

It should provide a sense of the unspoilt naturist beach here, though.

Ella

Beach tunic: a virtual naturist suitcase posting

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I’m grateful to the Sweet Pitulandia blog for posting this item, and something that will go into my virtual naturist suitcase as well as already being something I own in real life and which is one of the first items that goes into the real life suitcase.

Yes, it’s a gorgeous beach tunic, and as I say it’s an item I own and use almost daily on my naturist holidays. It can be chilly first thing in the morning, even in Spain in summer, so if I wake early a tunic like this is something I’ll throw on while making a nice cup of tea to drink on the terrace while also drinking in the atmosphere. I’ve risen before dawn, often, and the bats can be seen flitting around in blue-black light before the birds begin their morning symphony. It’s memories like this that money can’t buy.

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The tunic comes with a bikini in a matching colour. Yes, I own and pack one of those too, you never know when you may end up in a textile situation, even on naturist vacations, but I’ve not bothered to unpack it or wear it for SL purposes.

The tunic can be found at the Emporium Showroom event, and it and the bikini are priced at L$100 for all three items. While I was there, I managed to spot some poses. I’m a sucker for poses. L$65 for the pose being struck in the photo above, and there’s a naturist holiday reason why it captured my imagination.

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The tides near Vera Playa tend to erode the beach, and to prevent this happening further, the authorities built a breakwater (see the photo above). Naturists being naturists, it was turned into a landmark, and day and daily you will see naturists posing to take photographs of one another at the end of the breakwater. And yes, I’ve had my own photograph taken there.

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x marks the spot

I’ve repeated the photograph, it’s not an upload error 🙂 because ‘x’ marks the spot where I often swim, just tucked in behind the breakwater. It’s a favoured spot because you can leave your shoes (or beach tunic, or keys) on one of the rocks that forms the breakwater, and because of the breakwater I find that even when the seas are slightly rougher it’s still a spot where you can swim without being buffeted, knocked off your feet or get out of your depth readily.

The pose in the top photograph is often one struck by naturists, particularly early in the morning, as the sun is coming up behind them and it’s a pose that seems, well, life-affirming. To be naked there as a fresh day dawns, breathing in and exhaling with pleasure at the sense of paradise that prevails…it’s almost become a naturist beach cliche. There must literally be thousands of us who’ve posed there, and in similar poses too, over the decade or so the breakwater has been in existence.

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We keep out of the sun during the hottest part of the day, but as it begins to sink down again, we’ll take the children to the beach. Once more, as shadows lengthen and parts of the beach fall into shade, a beach tunic like this can be thrown on to provide a little protection from the chill one can experience. I’m delighted to have picked these items up, and you can be sure the tunic will be in the virtual naturist suitcase.

Ella

 

 

 

A naked walk

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Wherever I’ve gone in the naturist world, the scene above is omnipresent. People will set up camp for the day on their designated spot, and sunbathe, swim and…take a stroll!

Spain, France, Croatia, Studland Beach in England, the Baltic Coast in Germany, wherever there’s a naturist beach, people will exercise their right to exercise at some point on the day and go for a walk, alone or with their partner or friend.

It’s just something we do. It’s not about exhibitionism, either, parading yourself for all to see. You’re on a nude beach. Everyone can see you already. No, this is something more about feeling vitalised, alive, by the naturist experience. The phrase I often use is that I feel ‘plugged in’, able to experience life as it should be experienced.

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If some sim builder were to create a stretch of shoreline with one of those ‘walk hand in hand as a couple’ poses that are around the SL grid, they’d be some way along the path to re-creating a very familiar RL naturist scene in SL naturism.

Pookes is already back at work, I assume, and I return tomorrow, so the posts will thin out a little bit after a ’48 hour binge’ that lasted longer than 48 hours. Thanks to Pookes for helping me clear some of the backlog of stuff, although I see that we’ve both been thrashing away on keyboards with the result that the backlog of stuff we’d like to blog hasn’t got any slimmer 🙂 This is a good thing. We aren’t remotely running out of things to write about.

I’ll be back, blogging, on Thursday afternoon.

Ella

My Nude Debut: A series (Monika grows up in the DDR)

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I am not a naturist in real life: any longer! I am not a regular naturist even in Second Life, I prefer the social interaction and shopping for clothes when I play, which isn’t a very regular occurrence. But I have been a naturist in the past in both of my lives, the real and the virtual.

Let me explain. I grew up in the DDR, the Democratic German republic, or East Germany as you might know it better, in the late 1960s and 1970s. Of course we were behind the invisible wall that divided us from western Europe, and the real wall that divided us from West Germany, the Federal German Republic as it was known then.

What you think you know about East Germany is probably mostly true, including the bit about East Germans embracing the naturist lifestyle. Of course we did. I maybe wasn’t aware of the full reasons as to why we were all so readily naked at the beach back then. Now, I know it is because it represented a little bit of freedom from what was a very structured and observed life. With the authorities watching all of us, and the Stasi spying on many of us, maybe even me, the FKK beach, the Freikoerperkultur beach, the nudist beach, was a freedom.

I grew a few kilometres outside the town of Wismar, not so far from the West German border, right on the coast of the Ostsee, the Baltic Sea, and summers were often spent at the beach perhaps just like people in West Germany, in England or in America.

I don’t remember that we ever wore swimming costumes at the beach. I don’t remember owning one. We simply went to the beach and everyone got naked to swim and enjoy the sun. I would meet schoolfriends there, male and female, and it seemed normal to see them naked. Or to see the butcher naked, or the woman who worked in the bakery, or my parents. All was normal. At home, at bath time, my brother and I would be bathed together. I cannot remember thinking that he looked so different to me that he had a penis and I did not, that I had a vagina and he did not.

There were four of us children. I have an older brother, two years older, and a sister one year younger and brother three years younger. When I was maybe ten years old all four of us would walk or bicycle to the beach and spend all day there, every day, in summer. At weekends our parents would accompany us.

I didn’t think I was naturist because I had no framework to say ‘this is strange compared to others in the world’. It was how things were. But I do remember starting to feel a little bit shy and embarrassed for one summer when my breasts began to grow, pubic hair appeared and I began to menstruate. For that time I was not so free with my naked body. My female school friends would have been the same. By the following summer the feels of shame or embarrassment at a changing body had gone, we were all back to being naked, every day in summer.monika1_001b

At home, too, all the year, nudity was normal in circumstances where nudity might be expected, either in the bathroom or between the bathroom and bedroom. There was no shame involved, and no shame even during the period of body change. As a young woman, rather than a girl, the act of being naked on the beach became a little more ‘cool’ with us maybe segregating by sex to spend time with a bunch of girl friends and the boys did the same. When ten years old I would have climbed naked onto the shoulders of my brother and he would throw me off and into the sea in our games. Following puberty? No. And in turn my younger brother would climb onto my shoulders and sit naked and I would do the same with him, throw him off into the sea. Games until puberty.

When the time came to choose a boyfriend I ended up with a guy in my brother’s class. Before we started dating we had long been aware of each other’s naked bodies. When the time came to make love for the first time we stripped without fear or embarrassment, already familiar with how the other one looked unclothed. It made the subsequent act of lovemaking much less difficult, I think, than for many others. My first time of sex was nice, I think, not awkward. This is a benefit of that naturist upbringing.

I moved away to Berlin, to university, and the naturism was no more. Of course I was quite accepting of the naked body. I slept nude on hot summer nights, I wandered my student apartment naked if it was warm. I was there at the Wall when people began to knock it down. It felt like such a release. Maybe it is appropriate or not to say that my boyfriend and I stood crying and laughing as it fell and my memory tells me I had an orgasm. My boyfriend and I went home and made love many times with a wildness I had not had in sex before or since.

Once free to travel, I travelled. Sometimes a naturist beach would be close and I would happily swim and sunbathe naked but I didn’t seek it out. I didn’t feel necessarily drawn to being naked. In fact, I bought my first bikini to wear on a beach because it looked sexy.monika3_001b

I have never married or had children. My partner and I now split our time between a home in Berlin and an apartment in Croatia. I sunbathe topless but rarely am I fully nude in public situations. I am not ashamed of my body, but it is a case of us not having much opportunity to be naked on beaches. We sauna together once a week and of course there is nudity there, of both sexes, but I don’t think of this as naturism.

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East German naturists, 1989

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Monika

(Received text translated via Google translate by Ella: Monika photos by Diane Toxx)

Their Nude Debut : something of a naturist beach meme

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One thought I’ve had since commencing this series is how often I’ve witnessed ‘the debut’ by others. Last year, you remember, I invited two non-naturist friends to accompany me on holiday and by the end of the week both had embraced the naturist lifestyle very easily.

Often, the only thing that appears to be holding people back from becoming naturists is a lack of opportunity. Given the right circumstances, it’s likely that an overwhelming percentage of the world’s population would quite readily embrace naturism as a lifestyle choice.

In my book, that would be a good thing. When nude, it seems that we often become more attuned to the earth’s pulse. Naturist beaches, in my experience, are spotlessly clean. Something deep within our DNA tells us that we must look after the earth we inhabit, and you will never see a naturist get up and walk away from their spot on the sand leaving behind the day’s detritus, the empty plastic bottles, the plastic bags, uneaten slices of pizza. The rubbish bins at the back end of the beach are filled, the sand and water left as they found it. This extends into the textile aspect of a naturist’s life, too. We all seem to be particularly good recyclers, and at lifting rubbish within our environment. My French neighbour in Spain will be out on the street with her brush if she sees any rubbish around, muttering under her breath about ‘les textiles’ who don’t care for our pristine Spanish paradise.

Of course there’s always going to be a few people who brand the lack of swimsuits as ‘disgusting’, but essentially my view is that where the opportunity exists for naturism, many people take it.

So much so that the shedding of the swimsuit, for the first time, is almost a naturist beach meme.

You see it so often. In Europe, at least, most women will have some experience of going topless. It’s accepted as normal beach dress. So there they are, the people who’ve arrived on holiday and maybe not been aware there is a naturist beach nearby. Its certainly something they’ll want to witness. So they arrive, bikini and board shorts clad, the female(s) probably going topless.

Bikinis and board shorts aren’t, however, readily designed to survive the rough and rumble of the waves. The swimwear is pulled this way and that, to the point where keeping bikini bottoms or board shorts on is a major task. By the time the man or woman has reached this point they’ll have been exposed to their naturist surroundings and fellow beach users for an hour or so. After arrival, they sit in the sun for a while until the heat becomes intolerable and a dip is necessary.

Off they go, bottom halves covered on the way into the water. And here they come back again from the sea, swimsuit in hand.

It is that swim, that fight with a truculent piece of fabric, that makes them conclude ‘to hell with this…I’m getting this off me now!’

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Nudist Beach

 

And yes, often it is such an exhilarating moment that, as seen above, and particularly in the era of digital photography, there will be a proud posing for their partner. I have to say that had digital technology been widely available when I was making my debut I would almost certainly have thrust a camera into my cousin’s hand and asked her to take a photo of me that first time. How lovely it would have been to look back on it, nearly twenty years later, and have that pictorial memory of that day.

I’ve asked Diane if she could experiment with bikini briefs being hand held, as opposed to worn, so we can replicate the moment in SL, and I’m also scouring the SL Marketplace for an appropriate pose so we can try to do a little gallery of SL avatars making their entrance to the world of naturism.

Ella

Topless, thonged, cotton-tailed, fully nude

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Naturism isn’t for everyone. There are people who remain anxious about exposing their genital area, and that’s fine, no one involved in genuine naturism is going to push them to fully strip off (with the caveat that naturists don’t like people remaining dressed on the naturist beach while being there for obvious perving/voyeur purposes.

We’ve all had our nervous first time, and as long as you’re easing into the lifestyle, no one blinks an eyelid. The likelihood is that you’re going to be stripped off in an hour anyway. When surrounded by naked bodies, you feel more self-conscious in a costume, and the only way to blend in and become anonymous is to stick that swimming costume into the beach bag.

In Europe, large numbers of women go topless, but the bikini briefs remain in place. It’s likely that many women don’t even think of this as being semi-nude, but just the dress code for the beach. When topless, the bikini briefs will sometimes be a full bikini brief, the lady in question thinking that she doesn’t want almost her full bottom exposed any more than she would ever want to display her intimate parts.

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Men, of course, are routinely ‘topless’ and don’t even give the process a thought, including their choice of swimwear, which more often than not seems to be of the ‘shorts’ variety more than a pair of speedos.

Even where speedos are the deal, they’re a full cut shape, covering the man’s bottom.

Then there are those ladies whose costumes are of a much higher cut, almost all of their bottom displayed, just a small triangle of fabric covering their genital area, and very much cut lower and lower so that the only thing not being shown is the vaginal lips, pubic hair almost invariably having been removed in full. These are the ‘Wicked Weasel‘ design of bikini briefs. The point?

426_317_bountyA Wicked Weasel bikini. If you’ve reached the point of wearing this, isn’t it time to embrace naturism?

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I find this sort of costume exceptionally strange. Everything else is displayed. Boobs, bum, maybe even a good portion of the mons pubis. Yet the woman hasn’t reached a point where she can say, ‘oh, to hell with it, this flimsy piece of fabric is just ridiculous’.

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To me, these costumes say ‘I really want to go nude but I can”t because…the cloth covers my most private of places’. In other instances they say ‘I’d be quite relaxed being nude, and in fact have spent time on naturist beaches, but the silly laws in place at this beach demand I have to stupidly cover my genital area’.

If nude sea/sunbathing is possible on the beach, sometimes there are those who do eventually get rid of the stupid costumes.

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‘Why have I been wearing this silly piece of pink fabric for several days?’

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Sometimes it’s that *gulp and breathe deeply…it’s only my penis/vagina on public display for the first time* moment. For others, experienced naturists included, it’s the moment when they can finally allow all of their skin to breathe freely. In naturist circles, these people whose lower body tan is maybe several days behind the rest of their body, are called ‘cottontails’, with white bottoms on display.

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Look! It’s a cottontail! Yes, the rabbit’s white rear is why experienced naturists sometimes refer to new naturists as ‘cottontails’

Of course, some ‘cottontails’ are experienced naturists. We can’t all have the pleasure and privilege of a private back garden in which to top up the tan prior to a naturist vacation. And sometimes (most of us on SLN are Brits, remember?) we don’t have the weather to even try.

So…thongs and cottontails in SL? Let’s have a look, shall we?

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Yes. Easily done. There are lots of free and cheap micro bikinis around the grid and on the Marketplace, and as for tan lines to ‘cottontail’ it, I wrote about the same topic back in June.

 pookes tanlines_001b pookes tanlines2_001b‘Thank goodness I’ve got rid of that ridiculous piece of cloth!’

Tanlines are free, as a group gift (L$0 joining fee) at the Black Pearl store.

 

Pookes

Single males

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Single males have, not unjustifiably sometimes, a bit of a negative reputation in naturism.

They’re sometimes the voyeur types hiding in the dunes with camera (or penis) in hand. They’re the sad, ugly guys who can’t get themselves a girl. They’re the gay men using nude beaches as a pick-up location. And naturism, without ever being homophobic, we’re too laid back to pass judgement on others’ sexuality, but well prepared to criticise displays of sexual activity on naturist beaches, be that of the gay or heterosexual variety-the last link targets doggers and swingers performing sex acts on a naturist beach- does carry a patina of anti-single men attitudes. This is particularly apparent when single men might try to join a naturist club. There’s good, logical thinking for disbarring single males, and that’s to keep a balance of the sexes in place. Men are, by nature, more likely to happily strip off in public than women, and so there’s a constant fight to ensure that a balance between the sexes remains.

Of course there’s no bar on ‘single’ (i.e. unaccompanied) males going to a naturist beach, and it’s a familiar sight to see a male arrive alone, lay out his towel, and then sunbathe without bothering anyone. Gay? Straight? It hardly matters, as he won’t be indulging in any sexual behaviour, of any type, to irritate and annoy others. He sunbathes, he swims, and he goes home.

Single females, too, are often apparent in real life naturist settings. Work ends, and they head to the beach to squeeze in a couple of hours tanning before the evening meal. Wives, widows, single women, schoolgirls reluctantly heading home to do homework, you’ll encounter them all sunning solo, without annoying anyone, without being harassed by anyone.

It’s slightly different, I have to say, in SL. Pop yourself down on a towel in world and wait for the 2-3 minutes before a ‘hi!’ IM pops up from an avatar you can’t see…and can’t even see if you pull up a mini-map to try and identify their location.

It can rapidly go downhill from there. ‘Nice tits’.

It doesn’t happen like that in RL naturism. Women will be left well alone, not subjected to sexual harassment. Which is, quite often, the behaviour all too apparent from some male avatars whether they’re clothed or not!

Me? I’ll talk to anyone, but if the conversation has ‘nice tits’ or similar in it, you can bet your bottom dollar you’re muted instantly without response.

 

 

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A rare sight in SL (in clothed or unclothed settings) is friendship between male avatars.

In RL naturism we’ll also see gaggles of people arrive for a bit of tanning, often after school gets out. A mum with her children. A teacher just finished for the day? An elderly woman with her middle-aged daughter and sometimes teenage grand-daughter turn up. A couple of guys might arrive on a moped to grab a quick swim before homework, a night out, football training, an evening job.

They, too, are ‘single’ males, except there are two of them together, but they never seem ‘seedy’ or suspect in their behaviour. The naturist beach is a means to an end. Here, we see another difference between behaviour in real and virtual settings. A couple of naturist men can turn up on the beach. Gay? Hetero? Who cares? Their behaviour is not likely to be sexual and even if there is a display of gay love, two of them kissing for example, no one will bat an eyelid any more than they would kissing between a male and female. A bit of petting…gay or straight…would be a different matter.men together4_001b

A couple of male avatars sitting together practically anywhere in SL is much less likely to occur. Male avatars rarely make friends with male avatars. It just looks ‘too gay’. Not that anyone has said as much to me, but my observations suggest that  male avatars aren’t likely to strike up ‘hi’ conversations from distance in the likelihood that the other guy is an interesting kind of guy, judging by his profile.

Fellas, I’m saying to you, don’t be afraid to start up conversations with other male avatars.

Pookes