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+--- Thread: Nudism: Outdoor hobby? Therapeutic sport? Or serious facade for lecherous games? (/thread-1214.html)
Nudism: Outdoor hobby? Therapeutic sport? Or serious facade for lecherous games? - C C - Aug 7, 2015
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/bywater_08_15.php
Book: "Naked at Lunch: The Adventures of a Reluctant Nudist"; by Mark Haskell Smith
Review: Michael Bywater
EXCERPT: [...] We should perhaps try to clarify naked versus nude. Naked is what you are when you haven't got your clothes on. Nude is what you are when you have, with intent, taken your clothes off. [...] It invites the very sexual speculation it claims to obliterate. It also implies the presence of a witness; and perhaps the transgression of public nudism is that there are multiple witnesses whose consent has not been sought.
I saw this in action when I was about eight. We went for a day to the nudist colony on Le Levant [...] It was nice to be in the warm Mediterranean [...] My father, a doctor, was happy surrounded by nude (or, to him, just naked) people for him to inspect for defects or warning signs. My mother, on the other hand, was British. She would not remove her bathing costume [...] All day a steady stream of naked men diverted oh-so-casually to pass close by her. [...]
Mark Haskell Smith is no nudist or naturist, or devotee of Freikörperkultur, nor is he interested in screwing other people's wives, which, anyway, the serious nudists all deny ever happens. But it does. I once did a radio programme on a nudist club alarmingly called Eureka in the alarmingly named Pennis Wood near the alarmingly named village of Fawkham [...]
[...] There are diverting wonders here. Nudists all seem obsessed with writing manifestos. Charles Richter, inventor of the earthquake-measuring scale, was a nudist. The guy who spearheaded the stamping out of nudist beaches round San Francisco is called Wiener. Haskell Smith goes on a nudist cruise with 3,732 naked buttocks on one boat. He goes to Palm Springs and the majestically depraved Cap d'Agde in France, not to mention Heliopolis on Le Levant. He goes to Florida - old people, sun - to find the American Nudist Research Library. At one point he finds himself in Vera Playa, Spain, in Frankie's, a bar festooned with nudists and run by a British expat called Alan. You can picture the rest.
And the original nudists themselves: what a bunch. Take Englishman Edward Carpenter, a 19th-century gay sandal-wearing vegetarian, friend of Walt Whitman, Isadora Duncan and D H Lawrence. Or the dreadful German Richard Ungewitter, who said nudism would help eugenics because you could tell if someone was really blond.
But Haskell Smith's slightly jokey narrative of harmless cranks partly disguises the bewildering complexity of our relationship with our bodies, our clothes, and others' bodies and their clothes. People are killed for wearing the 'wrong' clothes [...] think of Sophie Lancaster, beaten to death in a park in 2007 for dressing as a goth. People ridicule and often loathe the Hasidim for dressing as if they were in 18th-century Latvia. There may well be reasons to consider them schlemiels, bullies and trombeniks, but their clothes aren't a valid one. But if your dress code breaks mine, then put 'em up, pal. It's nearly universal....
RE: Nudism: Outdoor hobby? Therapeutic sport? Or serious facade for lecherous games? - Magical Realist - Aug 8, 2015
"Churchill liked to parade around naked, ambushing unsuspecting staffers and foreign dignitaries alike with his gin-blossomed twig and berries.
Apparently, anyone who had an appointment with Churchill ran the risk of walking in on him striding around his office in his pasty undulating birthday suit, conducting the business of the nation with his grundlebrush ruffling gently in the breeze.
His naked shenanigans weren't limited to just his personal staff, either -- both Franklin D. Roosevelt and his son Elliot were exposed to mini-Winnie. FDR stumbled upon a nude Churchill, only to have the prime minister remark, "You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide." Meanwhile, Elliot, responding to Churchill's specific request to meet with him, opened the door to Churchill's office to find him standing completely naked with a cigar in his mouth, dictating a letter to his male secretary.
When Sir Winston visited the White House later that same year, he made a habit of wearing absolutely nothing while in his room, seemingly oblivious to the near-constant stream of attendants that came in to serve him brandy while desperately trying to avoid eye contact."===http://www.cracked.com/article_20364_6-famous-geniuses-you-wont-believe-were-perverts.html
One mustn't overlook the ability of clothing to make the body even more erotic than when entirely nude. A beautiful woman in lingerie vs being naked? A muscular young man in a loin cloth vs being naked? A high-heeled female leg in a slit short skirt vs a naked leg? The eroticism of the human form owes much to this tantalizing dialectic of the revealed vs the concealed artfully imparted from clothing. The human reduced to mundane everyday nudism hearkens back to dumb gross animality--a mere freakish grotesque of the erotic figure which lures thru its calculated visual teasing of the desirous penetrating eye.