In a world that is structured around community, there are no real individual rights. Relationships are about negotiation. I will give you this freedom, if you give up that freedom. We don’t have the right to anything, even life. Once one realises that one isn’t owed anything, one can begin to navigate the world with more safety and sanity.
Though I was born naked, I don’t have the expectation that I will be able to live naked in a community that is shared by others. Of course one could say that this isn’t true if one decides to live in a nudist community. But, one would be mistaken. Again, living in a nudist community is a negotiated agreement. One can’t simply move in and leave it at that, especially if one is a single male.
In quite a number of nudist communities only single women and couples have the “right” to join. Single men must wait until gender numbers allow for another single male to enter into the community if there is that possibility in the club’s rules. No one is “owed” the right to membership in a nudist community. Membership in the community is at the pleasure of the community.
We seem to be blinded to this fact and join in all kinds of protests to force community to honour our rights to live, work and play without the requirement of wearing clothing. We somehow feel society owes us this. One must pay the price in order to belong in a community in order to have the services and privileges of that community. Yet even when one is within the community, rights and privileges are not really coded as black and white. There are fine lines of compromise that are constantly shifting. What is a privilege today may become banned behaviour, should the community will it.
Of course, most nudists and naturists are aware of this fact of life within community as they take their desire for freedom from clothing to the privacy behind their own closed doors. There, if one is truly alone and the draperies are kept closed, one has full freedom. However, should another person live in the dwelling or enter the space that you call home, again it comes down to negotiation.
Negotiation leads to accommodation for the present but has no guarantees for the future. Because each one of us changes over time, we can never predict the nature of that change and how that change will effect our relationships and our rights in those relationships. In truth, we cannot even predict the survival of the relationships.
The right to be bare only exists at the moment of birth; from that point onward, unless we are in total isolation, we are subject to our communities and our relationships which require that we learn how to negotiate to get some small part of our unique, individual needs.