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It’s well and good that we find comfort in company of the like-minded. The trouble is with the price we pay. Whatever one hand unites, we surely divide and segregate with the other. No small example of this occurs in naturism. Flocks of sun-worshippers hold a common purpose in mind – to enjoy nature’s bounty of sun, sea and fresh air. Yet we readily talk of ‘naturists’ and ‘textiles’, ‘we’ and ‘they’. We and they invest colossal significance in small differences – the ‘plumage’, rank, and designer label, or in the total lack of these empty things. Finally, each faction tends toward group identity and severance from the whole. (As if this ever achieved a productive human end?)
Of course, it is downright irritating when my wife and I have to suffer the furtive, or even blatant, scrutiny of roaming men – dressed or otherwise. The temptation to hurl my sandals at a bobbing head or two frequently afflicts me. And I suppose that irritation is marginally more so when they come accompanied by field glasses, Mac, a troop of sniggering offspring, and, presumably, a dog-eared copy of The Observer’s Book of Nipples and Dangly Bits in their back pocket.
Irritating yes, because we were certainly not put there as an entertainment, but to the uninitiated, we are allowed to be a curiosity. In fact, curiosity is fine with me. It is natural; it is healthy. It comes with a question, and questions can be answered by words or example.
More disturbing cases of an unwanted audience take the familiar form of sexual automatons. They comb the beach like lowly crustaceans, seeking scant nourishment for a hungry part of their lives. They can gaze in earnest and longing at nothing at all, scouring the horizon, marching this way and that, setting up camp over here and over there, inevitably getting nearer. To observe this spectacle at any length is to nearly become convinced that they did lose something small and valuable, there on that very beach back in the summer of ’69. Of course, they’ve been searching for it ever since. Now, by a process of diligent elimination, they have determined that the only place it can possibly be is – you’ve guessed it – right where you’re sitting, under your wife’s bottom.
So I suppose there is a ‘them’ and ‘us’ situation here, and there are individuals who, by conduct alone, ostracise themselves from the goodwill of man and community.
But let us not make too much of ‘them’ and ‘us’. For a start my non-naturist friends have no idea they belong to a club we’ve affectionately dubbed: The Textiles. Nor, I suspect, are they morally opposed to any state of undress. If they choose not to go au naturel on a beach near you it is probably because of simple shyness, or that the thought had never occurred to them.
So, I remain largely unmoved by organised naturism. To me the experience should always be a liberation, a reason to throw open doors and windows, a place to visit in mind as well as body. I cannot reconcile this understanding with a pile of discarded clothes topped merely by a membership card. I’ll continue then to take the rough with the smooth. I’ll plant my towel at the shabby end of the beach. Feel free to join us by all means. Ogle my wife at your own peril but spare the application form and the sermon. I doubt I shall ever want to hear the clunk of a ‘Members Only’ gate shutting behind me; I doubt I shall ever be a bird of easily identifiable feathers.
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