It’s another rain day here in Ecuador. I have to admit that I am appreciating the break from our regular routines. And, I’m sure my skin is appreciating the respite from constant sunshine as well. Sometimes the expression, “into each life some rain must fall“, needs to be seen in a positive light. As I write this, it is just before time for lunch with my wife. I have been working on the edit of my first novel, and now have only forty pages left to complete that task. When that is done, I will then tackle the second novel to complete the conversion from the 3rd person point-of-view to the 1st person.
You might have noticed that I have continued to edit [crop] the images used in my blog site. My rationale is simply to enable sharing of these posts as much as possible in the social media which appears to be more restrictive than previously. The images don’t hide the fact of my being fully nude. They simply don’t display genitals.
Some people are offended by this cropping, something that I find a bit troubling. I mean, why does it matter. Why do they need to see the genitals when the subject of a photo is obviously naked as the day he or she was born. With these type of complaints, I suspect that it really isn’t about “purity” at all. Rather, it is about “puritanism” and fascination with human genitals.
The word naturism is loosing its identity as a non-sexual belief and lifestyle. It is being co-opted by vested interests who want to own nudity for commercial purposes. I know that you have likely searched for naturist images only to find porn and soft-porn images appear in the search, more often than not, predominating. For many trying to navigate an entry into naturism, this is what they meet up with. There is little doubt that the idea of naturism as a sex-riddled cult is reinforced in the process. So how do we reclaim our identity when the word naturist and nudist has now become synonymous with pornography?