The original version of this post appeared in June, 2011 not long after I returned with my wife from our third year of teaching in a Chinese university in a city about three hours from Shanghai. As I wander through my older posts which first existed on a blog site called Through a Jungian Lens, I am finding that there are a surprising number that included the idea of naturism. And posts such as this one which appears with a fair bit of editorial license, I chose because it appears to be relevant to my life in 2018, and the world of naturism. After all, this is a blog site that has naturism as its raison d’être.
The photo chosen in the original blog post is kept here, as it seems to combine elements of what it is to be a natural man, as well as what it is be be a civilised man. Unseen in the photo is the fact that I am wearing swimming trunks. After all, the setting was a public archaeological site with many visitors wandering through the Mayan ruins. So, in one sense, the photo hints at the natural man hidden in part by the water, but the reality was that I acted in a civilised manner, not really out of choice, but because I live in a civilised world. The two , natural man and civilised man, are separate kinds of ideas that lay in conflict with each other. When it comes to removing one’s clothing, there is a real sense that one is stepping back in time into a different universe. And the modern mind shrieks in protest.
This shrieking is heard across all of our media in today’s world as group after group have taken to declaring the natural aspect of being human with a naked human body, is unnatural and an affront to all civilised people. It is as though that the more we hide the grossness of the human body, the more we can pretend that we are civilised. We wear designer clothing, make the proper kinds of comments about the proper topics. We use every kind of antibacterial cleansers to ensure no dirt sticks to us. We wrap our children in bubble wrap to protect them from a nasty world. We even put clothing on our pets so that modesty is preserved, proving to the world just how civilised we are.
The image is chosen above is symbolic to me of times long past that are more about adolescence and young adulthood than about midlife, or now as a senior citizen. I am reminded of how over the years I celebrated naturalness in the water. In today’s world there is an element of fear attached to being natural. I admit that I am quite conflicted about the being at one in a natural state, in the world. I have been a naturist in small, private moments yet I have had to choose with care these moments because of the impact it has on others in my life. Unfortunately, I didn’t always choose well for I was seen nude by others. And the cost to me, and those around me in terms of my being considered a civilised man was challenged to no end. I mean, how can I claim to be civilised when another person sees me full frontal without clothing.
When I was younger, I didn’t care that much. Isolated beaches, forest meadows, in the privacy of home naturalism was present in small doses. My children grew up knowing the freedom of skinny-dipping and moving from bath to bedroom without body shame. We never passed a camping trip without at least one skinny-dipping night swim. Somehow, for some reason, the need to be civilised has changed all of that. Now, there is a threat to those who dare to be natural. As in the recent Calgary Swim debacle, the civilised voices shrieked loud enough to make the nude swim go away. Threats of violence, threats of removing children from their naturist parents, threats of public naming and shaming were, and continue to be real. At all costs, and by any means, we have to keep natural man under wraps at all times so that we can be safe in a civilised world.
The world has changed. It has become more charged with sexuality. With the growing ascendancy of the right, fear is reacting badly attempting to criminalise nudity. Who in today’s modern world would take a photo of their children playing in the bathtub with cousins or siblings or parents? Should someone dare this photo, it risks the photographer or owner of the photograph being charged with a criminal offence and being put on a registry of sexual offenders. Walking in the buff in one’s own home is risky if any passersby chance to look in a window and see a nude body. Rather than risk being charged with indecent exposure and being placed on a sexual offender registry, we cover our windows or cover our bodies in our own homes. In this modern civilised world, our homes are not our castles.
Many psychologists say that clothing is an extension of ourselves. The clothes we wear are an expression of who we are. The Naturist’s comfort with casual nudity, therefore, represents an attitude which is comfortable with yourself as it is in its most basic state, without modification or deceit.(Indiana Naturists Blog)
Naturism. It’s a word that is not held in high regard in the western world for the most part. Johann Lemmer, in his work, Introduction to Sexology, discusses CG Jung’s concepts in terms of sexuality and suggests that the moral issues that confront modern man are often centred around sexuality and points to the masculine and feminine images and archetypes discussed by Jung as psychology’s attempt to deal with the issues. One needs to remember that Jung’s work was built on the foundation of Freud’s work which has a significant focus on human sexuality.
“FKK” (Frei-Körper-Kultur) or “Free Body Culture”. FKK derives its roots from the philosophical works from Carl Gustav Jung (one of the founding fathers of modern psychology) and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German physicist and philosopher), who maintained nudity was a form of returning to nature. Specifically, it was a form of returning to the natural state of mankind, before clothing dictated our social status, and set standards of how much respect we pay to people based on the clothes they are wearing. (Celeste Neumann)
Good information, but how does that solve the moral dilemmas being faced by men, women, and children in both Canada and the U.S.A. And more importantly for myself, how do I navigate to liberate myself from the attitudes of those around me? I know it is my choice, that I can find the space, place and time for naturism. Yet, my choices always seem to have an impact on others, others who have meaning for me. I don’t live in a bubble and the important people in my life are subject to the same relentless barrage that demands a conformity to the collective in order to be civilised and accepted into the larger community.
As the years pass by, it seems that I am losing the battle to be even a little bit of a natural man. As one of my acquaintances has said in the past few days, “I have had a feeling our nude recreation culture, that was popular with us boomers is being lost on later generations. We had a sanctimonious religious right before. Now they are driving home their case even more as they are losing ground on nearly everything dear to them such as gay marriage, abortion, immigration, and even separation of church and state. We are one undefended prize in their agenda.”