While walking my dog, in mid-conversation with a co-worker, or waiting for a stop light to turn green, I can pull up the most depraved sex acts on my phone (within legal bounds, of course), a scene to make the Roman Emperor Caligula blush. Whatever your fetish, there are infinite options for your viewing pleasure. Looking for something more tasteful? HBO, Netflix, and HULU offer countless hours of erotica. But despite this overabundance of smut, I am limited to just a few minutes of natural people acting naturally.
It’s a sad commentary about our Information Age that a five-guy-on-one-girl pileup is more accessible to our children than an innocently naked person. If I were a young teen in today’s world, I might think my flaccid penis a deformity or that it’s common for my girlfriend to engage in a gangbang. Shielding our youth from nipples is an absurd, paradoxical, wasted effort when we allow them to go nuts on PornHub the day they turn seventeen. We can’t expect our sons or daughters to become healthy functioning adults, without becoming addicted to porn, when we teach them their bodies are sinful yet “anything goes” so long as they’ve celebrated X number of birthdays. Nor can we expect tomorrow’s generation to navigate social media’s confusing and ever-changing moral pitfalls on their own. We can only benefit from knowing that it’s what we do with our bodies, not who sees it, that matters. But how do we accomplish a world free of shame when all Google has to offer the young and the curious is sex, sex, and more sex?
YouTubers Hector Martinez, The Nudist Blogger, and Normalizing Nudity are all defunct, exiled by YouTube’s Prude Police. Search for naturist or nudist videos, and you might stumble upon a channel yet to be removed for “indecency,” but such channels are rare gems. Call me picky, but naturist nudity, for me, doesn’t put bodies on display. Avant-garde street performers, interpretive dancers, and other obscure forms of art, using bodies as props, conjure gawkers whose only thought, too often, is simply “freaks.” And, despite my love for the human form, I have never been a fan of Spencer Tunick, the guy who poses hundreds of naked volunteers to produce a photo.
Tunick’s work is non-sexual, but again, he sends the message that the human body is an attraction. New York City allows for public nudity for the purposes of art, which is a step in the right direction, but if I were to stroll through Central Park as God made me because the breeze feels good and the day is warm, I’d get arrested.
Special news reports about nudist “colonies” that never show skin, that treat nudist interviewees like the butt of a joke, suggest we’re social pariahs to be studied from afar. And it doesn’t help when YouTubers use nudism for clickbait titles, “We went to a nude beach!” but no such beach appears, and the YouTuber never actually discards their bathing suit. Other “nudist” subjects that aren’t really nudist: topless women (let it all fly or don’t bother), people in skimpy or revealing clothing, risque fashion shows, short films where nudity is used as a metaphor (which are typically negative), or videos starring nothing but young, pretty girls.
Genitals can be blurred or cropped out tastefully, we don’t need to see them, but showing the world who we are in a direct and honest way, without sensationalism, is a must if we ever hope to normalize clothes-free living. We need normal-looking people going about their daily routines, working, playing, and hanging out, only naked. Yesterday, I discovered an Australian TV show, Wilferd, featuring a girl with nudist parents. We see mom, dad, and daughter hanging out with all of their bits hanging out. The American version starring Elijah Wood (Frodo from The Lord of the Rings) cuts the nudity scene since, I suppose, people this side of the ocean can’t handle it. Adam and Eva is a survival reality show nobody in the States is allowed to watch, apparently, since the European version of TLC doesn’t bother with censorship, even when the occasional nipple, vagina, or penis crosses the camera. In the dystopian world of Nude, clothing has been outlawed, but if you want to watch the series, you’ll have to shell out $7 a month for the France Channel. In Rédemption, another French offering, the main actress goes unabashedly full-frontal in the opening shot of this incredible trailer:
If you’re looking for innocence in the Land of the Free, you’ll have trouble finding it because here, nudity = sex = $$$. Until our society matures to the point where proper naturist films (imagine an uncensored adaptation of The Feral Girl) make it to the silver screen, we’ll have to settle with these pro-nude videos I’ve gathered over the years. It’s an absurd, backward society we live in when the human body is restricted “based on community guidelines” while so much of social media permits hate speech and violence. Maybe this country is the land of hate? But as a nudist with common sense values, I’d not hesitate to let my kids watch these videos—Hell, I hope they watch them—and so should you. Watch them while you still can, before YouTube pulls them.
Being and Nakedness 
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