August 2015: Month of the Breast

Nudity isn't sexual.
That's one of the basic tenets of naturism. Naturists go naked, not because they want to be exhibitionists, not because they want sex, but because the naked state of the body is the most natural one, and the one most comfortable to swim, sun, and live in.
'Nudity isn't sexual' appears in the AP photo above, not with a story about naturism, but in a story about topless women - and men.
While not directly related to naturism, the topless equality movement - which says men and women should have equal rights to be topless in similar conditions - has been making giant strides over the past year, so much so that as a naturist, I have been devoting several stories to the topic.
The topless equality movement seems to have become the forefront of the non-sexual nudity movement, a twin sister of naturism.
The month of August this year seems to have turned into an outright celebration of toplessness. Just consider these events and incidents:
1. Three Canadian sisters surnamed Mohamed went cycling topless, but were stopped by police demanding they put more clothes on. Normal, many people might think, were it not that being topless is legal where the sisters cycled. The incident gave rise to last weekend's Bare With Us protest where the AP shot its photo.
2. On a less happy note, a woman who was sunbathing in a bikini - not even topless - in the French city of Reims was attacked by five reportedly Muslim women who called her indecent. If things like that can happen in the country that gave us Brigitte Bardot and Cap d'Agde, a warning bell must ring. Fortunately, many French women and men condemned the violence and took to the streets to defend women's rights.
3. The Big Latch On: a bizarre name to most of us, but it is the motto for World Breastfeeding Week, currently happening. In New York, young mothers staged a joint outside breastfeeding 'event' to underline women's right to feed their babies wherever and whenever those go hungry. Public breastfeeding has long been a topic of debate, but even so-called 'conservative' Asian societies are coming around.
4. The biggest topless-related event is coming later this month: World Go Topless Day. While concentrated in North America, the success of Lina Esco's 'Free the Nipple' movement, despite being unrelated to the Go Topless Day, has made so many people worldwide aware of the campaign for topless equality that the August 23 day is bound to be a resounding success.
While naturists believe in being fully naked socially rather than just topless and also do not approve of exhibitionism or needless provocation, I fully support the topless equality movement because it could signify a huge step forward in the acceptance of social, non-sexual nudity.
I believe naturists everywhere, men and women, can take part in Go Topless Day events and believe they did something for a good cause. I made modest financial contributions to the Free the Nipple movie and to a related Taiwanese sticker campaign. If I were living in a country where August 23 is marked as Go Topless Day, I would go and participate because I believe it will serve the cause of naturism.
Never before has a month so been dominated by news related to toplessness, so August 2015 really deserves the title of 'Month of the Breast.'

Taiwan's Naturist Passport

A Taiwanese performance artist has launched a "naturist passport" in the hope of rallying enough support for a demonstration calling for nude beaches on the island.
The story was frontpage news Saturday in the China Times, one of Taiwan's four main Chinese-language daily newspapers, and also made it on to the 24-hour television news stations.
In a frontpage picture, female performance artist Juan Jen-chu posed with a huge copy of what looked like your average Taiwanese identity card, with the national flag in one corner, but with a picture that obviously showed she wasn't wearing much clothes during the photo shoot. The passport bore the number 001, while a 70-year-old man who returned from Canada has the 002 passport.
Three articles inside the paper expanded on Juan's ideas and on the subject of naturism in Taiwan, a densely populated island of 23 million people with nevertheless still some beautiful remote sceneries and small islands. Juan gained national fame when she posed nude at a public arts festival in the southern city of Kaohsiung as part of a performance. Naturists in Taiwan are being treated like gays, she says, people respect their rights but prefer not to have one in the family. She would like to recruit "hundreds" of people to apply for the passport and hold a march for the legalization of nude beaches. Under present Taiwanese law, all public nudity is being treated as obscene and can result in legal action. Another naturist activist has declared the last Sunday of each August as "Taiwan Naturist Day," but so far without large publicity.
Most of present naturist activities take place inside small hotels and bed & breakfast places in the mountainous central county of Nantou, in sparsely populated Taitung on the southeast coast, and in the Penghu archipelago half way between Taiwan's main island and China. The country counts about three web sites dedicated to naturism, with four or five independent naturist groups with a total of 200 to 300 people, according to the China Times.
Like on all other fronts, Taiwan also makes contacts with China on the naturism front. One of the top supporters of naturism in the communist country, Fang Gang, reportedly visited Taiwan to learn from its modest experience with naturism. Fang wants an island in southern Guangdong Province, the Zhuhai Temple Bay Island near Macau, to set up a naturist beach.
As to Taiwan, Penghu once considered the possibility of a naturist beach. The islands - mostly famous for being mentioned in the movie "Spy Games" with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford - have taken a more conservative turn, the China Times reports. On the contrary, Taitung County has some supporters. The current county government chief secretary, Chen Chin-hu, says the region is extremely well suited to host relaxing and environmentally friendly activities. As long as the law is respected, he sees no problem with setting up special naturist areas in either the mountains or on the coast. County council member Huang Chiu-tsai once mentioned a special naturist area as a way to promote tourism to the region.
Two private naturist groups reportedly visit Taitung four or five times a year, a hotel owner told the paper. Such activities can be healthy, natural and legal, he concludes in the China Times report.

Italy 2009

The latest edition of the Italian naturist magazine Info Naturista www.infonaturista.org, the official publication of the Italian Naturist Federation www.fenait.org tumbled into my mailbox again recently.
The opening editorial seems to do away with the classic differentiation between naturists and nudists, where the former are often environmentalists, vegetarians, peace activists, followers of natural medicine opposed to consumerism and alcohol, and the latter are just people who take their clothes off but keep all their other vices intact.
The difference doesn't matter, the editorial says, as long as all followers respect their bodies, each other, and the environment. The main expression of naturism is nudism, the article says.
The latest issue of the magazine has general writings of a philosophical nature as well as straightforward holiday reports - such as one bilingual English-Italian report about the Vritomartis resort on the less-frequent southern coast of Crete. The naturist hotel has no fewer than six - 6! - beaches in the neighborhood where naturism is the norm. You can find more information at www.vritomartis.gr, even though that part of the world will be mostly considered too remote for us residents of Asia. Pont Rouge in the Canadian province of Quebec might be a more likely destination.
The magazine concludes with the reviews of the activities of Italy's regional naturist organizations, including the everlasting campaign to keep the Lido di Dante beach near the historic town of Ravenna in nudist hands. There is also an extensive review of the naturist resort Le Betulle near Turin, which is run by the head of Italian naturism himself, Gianfranco Ribolzi.
If only Asia could have such naturist resorts and beaches, and such naturist magazines.