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?

Topless is More

A Go Topless event

Topless Equality Hawaii spokesperson Kyllie

Topless is more but naturism is most. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I often use those phrases, with hashtags, when I post something referring to topless women, often celebrities caught on the beach, such as Celebrity Naturist of the Year Heidi Klum.
As a naturist, I look at topless as a halfway house. It's a stage between textile and naturism, a first step for women in the right direction, but one that often remains without its local conclusion, the conversion to naturism.
The reason that topless is the subject of a posting is of course the fact that next Sunday, August 25, has been proclaimed Go Topless Day by activists in the United States. In some locations, the day was held earlier, yesterday, August 17.
Their basic demand is topless equality or topfreedom, basically the right of women to be or go topless wherever and whenever men can.
Until now, most European countries and beaches are basically topless, i.e. if you're a woman - or man - and you want to be topless, you can do so. The problem lies of course with swimming pools and parks, and with beaches outside of Europe. In other continents, Asia, Africa, and even the Americas, women can still run into trouble, even when all they do is lie flat on their belly on a beach.
As a naturist, of course I believe that everybody, man or woman, should be allowed to wear or not wear the amount of clothing he or she is comfortable with in any place. Unfortunately, our societies are still too 'gymnophobe' or afraid of nudity, even when non-sexual. I know it's unrealistic to expect that in the near future, women will be allowed to walk topless around shopping streets, supermarkets and parks in the world's major cities, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try, and the beaches are of course the ideal starting point.
That's why groups of women have stood up, especially in the United States, to promote the cause of topless equality and topless freedom. Some women have already paid dearly for their insistence on non-sexual partial nudity by being forced into prison.
Fortunately, that has not scared other women from taking up the cause, with as a result the August 25, 2013 Go Topless Day, which is to be marked in several parts of the US, including Venice, California, and Boston.
The organization behind the event is Go Topless (http://gotopless.org), a group with a small religion as its background, the Raelites. Having grown up in a European country with one mainstream religion, I'm always rather suspicious of small sects or cults. In my country, people are either Catholic or non-believers, and other groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists and Mormons are being rather looked at with suspicion. If you remain aware that the creed of Rael might not be for you, then Go Topless is still a movement worth respecting.
The other movement I discovered is Topless Equality (http://toplessequality.com), which fights for the same cause and has appointed regional representatives, including in Hawaii. They have no religious agenda which could scare off some potential supporters.
No review of the topless world could be complete without a quick mention of the Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society (http://coedtoplesspulpfiction.wordpress.com, and yes, that name is far too long to memorize so I had to look at a piece of paper), a group of women who sit in New York parks to read Elmore Leonard novels while not wearing tops.
All these groups have their own ways of bringing the topless into daily lives, and while as a naturist, I would like to see those women take the final step and move on to naturism, I still believe that without being true naturists, they are making a positive contribution to the cause of non-sexual public nudity and therefore deserve our support.
See you on August 25, as topless as possible.
Pictures: on the left, a Go Topless event, on the right Topless Equality Hawaii representative Kyllie.

2 Breasts and 2 Guns

'The most gratuitous nude scene by a major actress since Halle Berry in Swordfish.' Not my words, but those of an article on the Yahoo! US site about Paula Patton in the new cop movie '2 Guns.'
Do you remember that Halle Berry scene? Swordfish was a none-too-memorable action movie with Hugh Jackman forced to work as a hacker for an evil John Travolta and his ambiguous sidekick Halle Berry. At one point, Halle is sitting by a pool reading a publication when Hugh comes up to her to ask something. It's only when she lowers the magazine to reply, that we - and Hugh - see she's actually topless. Big deal - since sitting topless by a pool or a beach should be the rule rather than the exception.
The latest news item was caused by the movie '2 Guns' - a violent buddy cop movie reportedly saved by the charming banter of Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg. A major talking point about the movie - which I haven't seen yet - is that Paula Patton appears topless after a love scene with Denzel's character.
The star of Deja Vu and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol went to the media to explain that she was actually the originator of the idea for the topless scene. She told an interview that it was completely unnatural for a man and a woman who have been making love to wake up afterward and be dressed. And you know what? I completely agree.
There have been many movies and television series where I thought - how come these two people have been in bed together, we know that they were not just sleeping, but actually making love, but still, when they wake up, the man is wearing shorts and the woman has panties on and a T-shirt or a blouse or something? I'm not saying there should be full-frontal nudity everywhere, but it's just not natural to have a scene like that. Paula Patton is absolutely right. The 'controversy' - which is a bit too much of a grand word - will no doubt fuel interest in the movie, so apart from action fans, people who 'want to see Paula Patton naked' will also go.
I could also talk about the debate between nudity and guns in movies. An often heard complaint from naturists is that US movies are so generous in showing violence against people but scare away from showing naked bodies. According to reviews, '2 Guns' has too much of the former and some of the latter. But that's a debate for another time.
For the article where Paula Patton says 'It was my idea,' look here: http://yhoo.it/1ehHEik
For the Halle Berry scene in Swordfish, look here: http://yhoo.it/1bYqcDH

The Heatwave of 2013

A French weather forecaster made headlines about a month ago by predicting the summer of 2013 would be one of the worst on record, at least for France and the surrounding countries. July is almost over and what do we have: heatwaves in Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands with temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius for some considerable time, interspersed only with a few violent thunderstorms with hail, 39 degrees C in Italy and Austria, and similar high temperatures in the Northeastern United States and the Kanto region of Japan, i.e. the capital Tokyo. However, the weather forecaster hasn't give up yet. He says August is yet to come.
He may be right, but the high temperatures have been good for naturism. Reports from the UK suggest that more than ever, higher temperatures and sunny skies mean people want to find out how and where they can wear fewer or no clothes. Not all people can spend time on the beach or in the water swimming, so it's only normal that people want to move beyond to a fully unclothed lifestyle. Naturism is not just about hanging around the beach naked, it's also about being naked in any possible circumstance anywhere and anytime.
The heatwave has also benefiting a new attempt to get naturism into the record books by staging a mass skinny-dip. At Vera Playa in Almeria Province, Andalusia, Spain, a total of 729 people went naked into the sea together, breaking a Guinness World Record previously set in New Zealand. Of course, Vera Playa is a perfect place to try that kind of event, because you don't have to go far to look for naturists, many of them already live there, even outside of the holiday season. If I were to search for a place where I could live as a naturist as close to 24/7 as possible, Vera Playa would be it. I've always been a fan of the Mediterranean, and now that I live in a hot country that has no naturist culture whatsoever, I am dreaming of moving to some place like that. You can find more about Vera Playa at www.veraplayafriends.com.
Nudity has always appealed to celebrities, though some of it are really into it because it makes them feel good, others because it provides them with acres of news coverage. I'm not qualified to say in which category Lady Gaga falls, but we all know she's not afraid of outlandish acts. She must have run out of ideas, because instead of wearing steaks, she is now wearing absolutely nothing on the cover of V Magazine www.vmagazine.com. The feat probably won't get her a Celebrity Naturist of the Year Award from me, because I am not convinced her deeds promote the naturist lifestyle.
Heidi Klum, German supermodel and presenter of Project Runway, might not be a true naturist either, but at least she promotes a lifestyle with fewer clothes. Tweeting holiday pics from Tahiti recently, she said she had always been sunning and swimming topless - just like thousands of other German and European women - so the latest pictures were not meant to shock or create a media stir. Her mother was the one responsible for taking the pictures, she said, so there. You can follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@heidiklum.
There is no European holiday in my near future, so I'm going to have to stick to read about how other people are enjoying the lifestyle around the world. Just follow me at www.twitter.com/@thenudeguru, where I usually tweet about naturism-related items I find in the world's press, mostly in the US, UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Taiwan.
My personal naturist experiences this summer look like remaining limited to sleeping naked and home naturism behind curtains.
Have a Great Naturist Summer of 2013.

Kate M.

Kate M.
A British woman at the height of her life, attractive, world famous, a star. Topless pictures in the media and on the Internet.
Stop.
Who is that? Well, there are two answers to that question.
The first one is Kate ... Middleton. The Princess and likely future Queen of Great Britain (and Canada, Australia, ...) was seen topless at a swimming pool. Furore, right or wrong? Right, if the furore was about the shameless invasion of her privacy, taking pictures of her without her knowing on a private property with no questions asked, no permission given. Nobody should live in fear of being photographed in a private garden, pool or home by outsiders. No ordinary person and no celebrity or royalty. Wrong, if the furore was about a princess daring to go topless. She was in sunny France, in the sunshine, by the side of a pool. What else do you expect a young European woman to be wearing in such an environment? Too bad Kate Middleton missed a chance to stand up and defend the right of women to go topless. She would have made a great spokesperson for topless equality, but even now, if shy women know that even a British princess and future queen finds it acceptable to go topless, it's a big move in the right direction.
The other woman is Kate ... Moss, of course. Already long known for not scurrying away from nude or topless photo shoots, Miss Moss joined in a campaign for a suntan cream brand I never heard of before, Saint-Tropez, of course also the name of the French Mediterranean town made famous by icon Brigitte Bardot. Yes, the blue mixed in with grey in the foreground looks a bit fake though quite fresh, and the same could be said for the blue sky. The fact that the picture went on nearly all news sites online is a tribute to its beauty. Miss Moss might not be a true naturist - and her rumored familiarity with drugs is not part of the naturist lifestyle - but she is already a world-class icon. She is model-beautiful, yes, but she is also brave enough to dare to be nude.
Harking back to Brigitte Bardot, movies about strong French women have been quite successful, just think about Piaf with Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard and Coco Avant Chanel with Audrey Tautou. If there is ever a movie about Bardot, Kate Moss - even though she is a model and not an actress - is the obvious choice for the title role. If you need a script, @KateAMoss, please let me know, I'll be more than happy to write it for you.
When it comes to Kate M., one could say that topless is more, but naturism is the most.

Topless in Taiwan 36.7 degrees

Two young European women sunbathed topless on a beach in Taiwan.
How do I know? Because Taiwan has numerous 24-hour TV news stations, and in Taiwan, a topless woman on a beach still counts as news.
The duo was spotted on a beach popular with surfers in the Chichin district of Kaohsiung, the country's second largest city, in the south. Of course, some people had their camera phones out and recorded the 'news,' which then was broadcast with the two young ladies covered up by a 'mosaic.' To be fair, so were their faces, so they will not be hassled during the rest of their stay.
The local surfers did not seem surprised or shocked, taking it all in good stride. One member of the public interviewed on television said the topless sunbathing 'did not fit in with local people's customs.' Fair enough, but in the meantime, television news broadcasts go on and on about all the 'spice girls' at one of Taiwan's biggest rock festivals, Ho Hai Yen this weekend on the island's northern coast. No topless bathing there, just a lot of bikinis, which in Taiwan still counts as 'spicy.' Some 20 years ago, you could go to a major beach resort and still see young women wade into the sea wearing long, flowery dresses, so at least, there is some progress.
The reaction of the authorities to the topless 'incident?' Send in more guards walking along the beach to prevent more such incidents from happening.
And all this while temperatures are reaching record levels for the year, 36.9 degrees centigrade on Friday and 36.7 on Saturday. Can you really blame anyone for wanting to go topless?