I grew up believing in what is natural,to me it seems that some things are more “natural,” and therefore more wholesome than others. Real food instead of processed food,swimming without hindrance and spending time in nature,being barefoot; being naked. Its always felt right to me to be naked,we were born like it and as a child I wanted to be naked most of the time. It felt natural, like I was honouring my deepest and most primitive belonging to the earth.I moved away from a lot of my guiding faith in “naturalness” as I grew older, mostly out of convenience and doing the done thing like everyone else.
It’s not easy to talk about nudity in a world that body-shames and s shame-shame-shames everyone into feeling nudity is deeply, inherently wrong. I’ve always had strong feelings about natural, real-life nakedness and I think it’s a travesty that our culture doesn’t support it fully. There’s something inherently wrong to me about clothes being the default. I like being warm, but I also think that a huge amount of our cultural issues with body shaming and distorted body image can be traced back to how uncomfortable we are with real, natural nakedness.In many other cultures, you grow up seeing naked bodies around you.
Instead of seeing the real, child-bearing and life-enjoying bodies of our aunts and moms and sisters and friends, we grow up seeing only the tall, taught, tan, and totally photoshopped bodies seen in the media.
It has been shown that even brief exposure to one kind of body type or size makes the viewer immediately prefer that kind of body type. Meaning: we prefer the kind of bodies we see the most often, and in our culture we are constantly inundated with one certain kind of female body and naked photos of men are just banned period.
Most women who don’t have that size and shape of body feel so undeserving of showing their bodies in public that they cover up as much as possible, further decreasing our exposure to body diversity. Our culture’s lack of body diversity is really, really damaging to our psyches.Very rarely do you see a naked woman (men even less) who is not posing or being objectified and sexualized in some way. When’s the last time you saw a naked women just chillin’, and like… vacuuming, or gardening; not being a sexual object in any way? A man or woman being naked just for him or herself, instead of putting on a performance of sexuality, is hard to find.Our naked bodies are all fundamentally, inherently, and eternally right, and I have to challenge most people to stop running from them.
Note: Some material for this post was collected from other sources