We'll always have Paris ... at least until October 15

A world where you don't have to wear clothes.
It's hot today, the sun is out, you don't have any clothing ready, and you don't really need any because it's not cold, so you step out the door and walk to the baker's, the grocer's, the supermarket, or even your work, without any clothes on.
Science fiction? I have often thought of writing such a story myself, a novel or a screenplay set in a world where being naked anywhere anytime is absolutely normal and acceptable. Or it could be the other way around, a world oppressed by excessive clothing where a handful of rebels and innovators take the lead to change the ruling mentality and 'free the masses.'
In the meantime, in the real world, there are small steps that help us in that direction. The worldwide naturist movement, the opening of naturist beaches and free beaches in more and more countries, naturism in parks in Germany, the topfreedom or Free the Nipple movement.
Paris, the capital of one of the most naturist-friendly countries in the world, is finally following the example of German cities like Munich.
A park area in the Bois de Vincennes has opened daily for use by naturists. As an experiment, it will only function in that role until October 15.
Naturism in the open air  in Paris in September and October, I hear you say? Sure, most of that time might be rather chilly, so they should have launched the project in spring and keep it going all through summer.
But it's a start, and if it works out well, if there are enough true naturists, if there are no incidents with harassment or fake nudists, then the experiment will become an example, and hopefully next year already, be expanded, both in time and space. One of the problems of naturism is often that you have to find really remote places, such as isolated beaches at the end of unmarked rocky paths, before you can enjoy the practice.
Inaugurating naturist spaces in or near major cities is a positive move forward, so I wish the Bois de Vincennes tryout  all the best.
Actually, earlier this year, another European capital, Brussels in Belgium, also faced a proposal to open an urban naturist space, but it went the other way from Paris.
Naturist beaches are already a feature of all European countries, the top equality movement is making headway in the United States, so why not join forces and campaign for more non-sexual nudity in society, not just at the edges?
(Photo courtesy of ANP, the Paris Naturists Association).

Kim Kardashian or Not

Each December, I go looking for a Celebrity Naturist of the Year who did something during the past year which might benefit the cause of naturism, i.e. non-sexual social nudity, without necessarily being a naturist himself. Over the past few year, the Free the Nipple movement has, without advocating true naturism, played a major part in normalizing the female breast, whether it be breastfeeding a child or sunbathing in the park.
Most of my past Celebrity Naturists of the Year have been famous women, actresses, stars, entertainers, because they often serve as role models, as examples to be followed. My reasoning is: if they think non-sexual nudity is allright, then maybe naturism will also get a bigger chance of being heard.
There are some stars though whose link with nudity is too sexual and whom I therefore am highly unlikely to name or even consider as Celebrity Naturist of the Year: the obvious example is Miley Cyrus, who seems to see nudity purely as provocation. Lady Gaga and Madonna also still go too far in the direction of the erotic and sexual to be considered.
However, one person recently crossed the line for me - in a positive way.
I have never been a fan of Kim Kardashian or of any other member of the Kardashian - Jenner clan. Basically, I don't understand why they're famous. They're extremely good at promoting themselves, but they're not actors, they're not singers, they're - well - entertainers I suppose. I do not like persons who only think about themselves, about promoting themselves, about making money only. The latest addition to the clan - Kim Kardashian husband Kanye West - might be a talented singer and musician, but his antics with Taylor Swift show he has a huge ego.
Still, Kim Kardashian crossed the line into 'consideration for Celebrity Naturist of the Year' for me thanks to her recent nude selfie, the most recent of many similar selfies.
Other stars such as Bette Midler and Chloe Grace Moretz inadvertently helped by condemning her. Even though she might have only posted the pic to promote herself, Kim Kardashian helped show that it's allright to be naked, to live naked. She is not and might never be a naturist, but she helped the cause of nudity and won support for it. Sharon Osbourne and Emily Ratajkowski promptly imitated her to praise her action.
Commentators talked about the third wave and the fourth wave of feminism, with the latter including a group of younger women who feel it is not sexual exploitation or pornography to be naked. They see the right to be naked or at least topless as a field where equality with men has still not been achieved. Breastfeeding in public is still being contested, topless sunbathing and swimming is still not allowed in many parts of the world, including the supposedly liberal United States.
Whatever Kim Kardashian's motives, breaking the Internet or promoting herself, she did break my barrier keeping her from being considered as a Celebrity Naturist of the Year. Whatever you think of her, she did at least one favor for the cause of naturism.
But remember: all bodies are equal, not just the beautiful ones. Naturism is not only about non-sexual social nudity, it also brings the message that everybody can be naked if he or she respects the other.

Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2015: Spencer Tunick

The Celebrity Naturist of the Year is a person who might never have visited a nude beach or a naturist resort.
But that's not the point. The point is that through his or her actions or words, he either actively or unwittingly helped promote the cause of naturism, i.e. non-sexual social nudity.
For the first time since I started announcing these awards, the winner of the Celebrity Naturist of the Year Award is a man: Spencer Tunick, the photographer famous for his mass nude ensembles of people, standing or lying anywhere in a landscape from the Dead Sea to a glacier to the Sydney Opera House.
Standing around naked on a street is not naturism in it self, but Tunick's work has helped to popularize non-sexual nudity. It has helped other people - "textiles," in the naturist language - see nudity as something natural, ordinary, common, acceptable, artistic and beautiful.
We were all born naked, and Spencer Tunick's work has brought the humanity and naturalness of nudity closer to daily life.
While naturists prefer to live together on beaches, in resorts and hotels separate from textiles, Spencer Tunick has brought us closer to a world where it doesn't matter whether you wear clothes or not in your daily life. Thanks to his work, you can imagine a world, a city, an environment, where some people were clothes and some do not, all living together without surprise or shock at each other.
The 48-year-old New Yorker (49-year-old, if you're reading this in 2016) can be compared to the Go Topless or Free the Nipple movement started by Lina Esco, a previous Celebrity Naturist of the Year. Not a naturist either, but a person generalizing the innocence of public nudity and breaking the link, still present in too many minds, that nudity equals sex.
A naturist who lives away from naturist resorts and nude beaches can still get a flavor of the lifestyle by volunteering for a Spencer Tunick shoot. That's on my bucket list.
www.spencertunick.com

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.'

June: A Month for Nude Weekends

The past weekend(s) was quite a high time for naturist and non-naturist nude activities.
As the logo above shows, the Naturist Association of Thailand held its 4th International Naturist Conference. I attended the previous conference last year, but unfortunately, due to other commitments, I could not travel to Thailand this June. NATCON is a true naturist event in one of the few Asian countries which has real naturist hotels. Even though, just like in most other Asian countries, public nudity is banned and there are no official clothesfree beaches, Thailand does allow naturist hotels with swimming pools as long as the activities are isolated from the outside world. The Bangkok area, Pattaya and Chiang Mai all have true naturist hotels.
In other news, last weekend also marked World Naked Bike Ride day in many parts of the world, including London and Manchester in Great Britain. While not real naturism, the activity does increase acceptance for non-sexual public nudity, as it allows men and women to ride bicycles naked through city centers. The original aim is to decry the lack of respect and support for environmentally friendly bicycles and to call for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, but the event has grown into a worldwide nude festival, in the style of Spencer Tunick's photography marathons.
A third recent event related to nudity was the Free the Nipple gathering on a Los Angeles beach, calling for "topfree equality," the right of women to go without top there where men are allowed to do the same. After the movie "Free the Nipple," the movement has expanded to take root in places as different as Iceland and Taiwan, where a group of young women has been printing and distributing stickers. More about that in a later post.
While some of those events have made the media, it is also important to note that even when nothing is going on, the press can still put naturism in a positive light. The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph is generally regarded as conservative, and it does support the Conservative Party, but on naturism it has been taking a mature line, often featuring positive reports. The latest was a list of seven nude beaches in the UK itself: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/11675401/Britains-best-nudist-or-naturist-beaches.html
While I still haven't made any plans for my summer holidays and I don't know whether they will include naturism, I wish my fellow naturists a glorious nude summer.

Naked Germany at CNN

 

Congratulations, CNN!

On the whole, I don't really like a lot of the international media, but in this case, CNN - at least the website, I don't know about the TV station - has brought a balanced and serious account of naturism, in Germany.

The main reason is that the story comes from an insider: a German who like most of his compatriots grew up in a family where naturism was not an ideology but a way of life. He tells the story of what naturism is, how it originated more than a century ago as a health movement, and what you can do and not do in the nude in Germany.

Freikoerperkultur - Free Body Culture, the German term for naturism - may have most of its followers in that country, but as Germans traveled all over Europe from the 1960s on, naturism expanded. It came back from the Mediterranean shores to envelop all of Europe.

Proponents of today's Free the Nipple movement in the United States and Asia would do well to study the lessons of naturism and follow its example. The starting points of both movements are widely different, but in the end, it is all about respect for others, for one's body, and for the freedom of non-sexual social nudity.

You can and should read the CNN article at http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/06/travel/naked-germany/

The German naturist federation is at www.dfk.org.



Free the Nipple hits Iceland

I'm a naturist, not an exhibitionist.
So, if I were a woman, would I walk down the street in Iceland with these young women and bare my breasts in close-to-zero temperatures?
You bet I would.
They're not out there to shock the world, at least not in a negative sense. They may call themselves feminists, but what they want is just a logical progression from what has been happening in Europe for the past 60 years or so: after the bikini, women started going topless on Mediterranean beaches, then they brought that habit back to Western and Northern Europe. After all, if women can go sunbathe and swim topless on foreign beaches, why can't they do so in their home countries?
The wider acceptance of women's breasts as more than something to be watched by dubious men has gained ground, with breastfeeding and advertising and topless or naturist beaches spreading the idea that breasts are, well, breasts.
The newest movement has a feminist underground not seen since the 'Burn the Bra' calls of the 1960s. While not a follower of any rigid ideologies myself, I can see women have a point: if men can be 'topless' in certain situations, why can't women?
The Iceland event started with a feminist 17-year-old posting a close-up picture of a nipple, being criticized for it by men, and then coming back in a big way, with loads of Icelandic women and even a politician posting theirs.
While I'm not naive enough to believe that women with bare breasts will be walking around major cities in Europe any time soon, let alone in other continents, I think naturism can only benefit from the movement. Naturism is the acceptance of non-sexual nudity, be it male or female, be it young or old, be it thin or obese, every body can be free.
Free the Nipple activist and director Lina Esco was my Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2013, Scout Willis was my Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2014 (see below), and Adda Smaradottir is the subject of my first post on this blog for 2015, so the Free the Nipple Movement must be doing something right.
Unlike Femen, their actions are not designed as a negative statement to shock, but as a positive measure to allow women to be themselves, in real life and on social media which too often still treat women's bodies as porn.
Thanks to one 17-year-old in Iceland, March 26 will be come another date on the calendar, in addition to World Naturism Day and the World Naked Bike Ride. They day should be known as Free the Nipple Day, not just in cold Iceland, but all over the world.

Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2014: Scout Willis

There are moments in a person's life when you stop being seen as the son or daughter of your parents. Young people today no doubt think of Stella McCartney as a designer, and not necessarily as the daughter of Paul McCartney.
That moment happened this year for Scout Willis, yes, a daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.
She put a picture on Instagram showing a piece of clothing with an image of two topless women. It got the photo removed. So instead of doing what most of us would do, swear at Instagram and do nothing, Scout Willis took action.
She walked down a New York street topless. While that might have gotten her arrested in any other town or country, in New York toplessness for women is legal. Bear witness to that a club of young women who go reading topless in parks. The difference here is that somebody famous actually benefited from that right and showed how silly Instagram's ban on topless women was.
Topless used to be something for women on holiday on Mediterranean beaches, but it has since vastly expanded to nearly all beaches in Europe, if not much beyond yet.
While running around topless in a city center is not naturism, it could be said to be the frontline of non-sexual social nudity. If the weather is hot, people should dress appropriately. No woman is going to walk around topless when there is snow on the ground, but if temperatures are high and humid, why not?
Topless activists also see a feminist and human rights dimension. If men can take off their tops to enjoy the sunshine, why are women not allowed to?
Last year, Lina Esco was named Celebrity Naturist of the Year because of her efforts to make a movie about toplessness, the product of which, Free the Nipple, recently appeared on US cinema screens.
Chelsea Handler made the news not once, but twice this year, first with her Putin 'imitation' and just ahead of my selection for Celebrity Naturist of the Year with a topless winter picture.
Topless activists are going to be around for some time, and I hope they are going to be the likes of Scout Willis, Lina Esco and Chelsea Handler rather than Femen. A member of that group recently attacked a Christmas stall and appeared inside Vatican City, but such actions are merely political provocation and do not benefit topfreedom or naturism, quite the contrary.
What we need is not violence, but the beautiful side of toplessness, such as breastfeeding, sunbathing and shopping.
Scout Willis pointed out the way to go, and her debate with Instagram can also be extended to other social media including Facebook.
For her efforts on behalf of the right of women to be topless when they choose, I named Scout Willis as the Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2014.
For her own comments and for the picture that got banned by Instagram, read this: http://www.xojane.com/issues/scout-willis-topless-instagram-protest

Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2013: Lina Esco

Lina Esco of Free the Nipple is The Nude Guru's Celebrity of the Year 2013.
Her campaign and her movie have the potential to move the acceptance of non-sexual nudity forward by one huge step. As she explains at www.freethenipple.com, women in New York have been legally allowed to walk around topfree since 1992, but in 37 US states, even topless bathing on beaches is still banned, decades after the practice became commonplace in most European countries.
Lina Esco is a producer, director and actress. Her first TV appearance was in an episode of CSI: New York, her best known work is The Cove, a movie about the killing of dolphins in Japan. Free the Nipple is also a movie, but in order to make it work and have the end product shown on screens across the US, she turned to crowdfunding at Fund Anything.
As on previous occasions, some readers might point out that Lina Esco might not be a naturist, and that walking around New York topless is not naturism. That's right, but achieving the aims that Lina Esco has set, will be taking society one huge step closer to the acceptance of naturism, i.e. non-sexual social nudity.
Previous Celebrity Naturists of the Year have included Eva Mendes, a prominent 'home nudist,' Rosario Dawson, who visited naturist beaches, and last year Chelsea Handler and Sandra Bullock for their nude shower scene, which afterward proved to have been less nude than might have been.
As you can judge from my previous posts, topless equality or topfreedom has been a major topic in 2013. The Rael religious group held its annual international Go Topless Day in late August. Although I do not oppose religion, I have the average European's traditional suspicion of cults and sects and that held me back from picking the organizers of the day as my choice. Another interesting group, Topless Equality, with activists as far away as Hawaii, vanished off the radar before the end of the year. Yet another active movement, centered on New York, is the group of coeds which holds topless book readings in the city's parks.
My biggest initial doubt about Free the Nipple was provoked by one of its supporters. Over the past year, Miley Cyrus has been anything but a symbol for wholesome nudity or for naturism, which is why I first hesitated. Her name recognition will lend the cause some popularity, but I did conclude that Free the Nipple and Lina Esco are honest about their intentions. The campaign is not about Miley, it's about allowing women everywhere to enjoy the sunshine, swimming, and the basic freedom of wearing what you want.
That is the main reason why I think Lina Esco should be this year's celebrity naturist.
You can read more about her campaign at www.freethenipple.com.

Word of the Year 2013: Topless

Topless.
To a naturist on the lookout for news, that was a word even more frequently found in 2013 than the term selfie.
There was the Ukrainian women's group Femen, which traveled around the world to protest topless everywhere against all kinds of topics, from mistreatment of animals to prostitution and bans on abortion. As a naturist, I don't think being topless is shocking, so having more and more topless protests might actually dilute the news value of those protests.
In August, there was the annual Go Topless Day organized by the religious group Rael, which is gaining news exposure worldwide. The picture above comes from their website, www.gotopless.org. The next international Go Topless Day by the way, is August 24, 2014.
Around the same time, I found out about another group active on behalf of 'topfreedom,' Topless Equality, which had spokespersons as far as Hawaii. Unfortunately, since then, something seems to have happened to this group since its website is offline and no recent tweets were issued.
The most recent topless news comes from actress and director Lina Esco, who is looking for funding for a movie about women's rights to go topless at www.freethenipple.com. Her action received the support of Miley Cyrus, who makes lots of naturists, including me, squirm with what often looks like a vulgar and sexual interpretation of nudity.
Other topless news items this past year included the continued activities of a co-ed topless reading club in New York, with topless women reading books while sunbathing in parks. While not condoning topless equality, Pope Francis seemed recently to approve of public breastfeeding, a positive step if ever there was one.
To a naturist, topless is a halfway house. It's a matter of the glass being half full or half empty. For many women, topless might be the first step on the way to true naturism, while many other women will never go further than lying topless on the beach.
As a naturist, I believe that the increasing occurrence of the acceptance of topless women is a positive trend, because it makes more people more comfortable with more nudity. Toplessness should not be about provocation, but about the acceptance of nature, of people's natural state.
As topless activists say, breasts should be decriminalized. Violence is apparent everywhere in entertainment and in the media, so why should a beautiful creation like the human breast be banned from view?