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.'