You make an interesting point about some of the "language" used to describe nudist behavior.

On a side note, I can think of several terms used that, taken in literal terms, are not entirely "correct." "Completely naked", "openly nude", and "parading around naked"; for example.

"Completely naked", is a redundant term. Because how can nakedness not be "complete"? Taken figuratively though, it may be used to emphasize that the nudity in question is from "neck to ankles" or even "head to toes." I've used the term myself to distinguish partial nudity from "complete" nudity. But I'm also aware of the fact that it's - in literal terms - nonsensical.

"Openly nude" might conjure a mental picture of being "sprawled out for all to see." Taken figuratively though, I take it to mean "social behavior devoid of body-shame and confident in being seen nude."

"Parading around naked" has been used by non-nudists to mock social nudity. As if we all walk in a line around the pool area lol! I've personally never seen a nudist parade; although some events like B to B or WNBR might fall in that category?

"Being naked in front of people"...well at the resort, my wife and I usually spend some time "making our rounds" and chatting with the many people we know at the resort - who are often lounging in lounge chairs. We are literally and physically standing "naked in front of them." But that is specific to those social interactions. I would agree that otherwise, what you said is accurate.

But I digress, as usual lol!

Hi Just Me (and everyone),

You’re right, there is more that should be said.

Carrying the subject of modesty a step further, there are way too many instances of misjudgment of others like you have described and even worse are erroneous teachings about modesty. We’ve made sure our girls understand that modesty is about intent and actions. Are you trying to be provocative and attract attention to yourself? If so, that is being immodest. Otherwise, it’s not, and you are NOT responsible for the thoughts and responses of anyone toward you. We do not want our girls to feel guilt or shame simply for being female; for having a female body with all its attributes. Guys are responsible for their own thought life. God made us male and female in His own image. We want our girls to be what He made them to be and to flourish as individuals in that knowledge. Well-intentioned influencers have taught various versions of all that that are harmful and contrary to the truth. Our girls know the truth. We got there first with it. Our oldest has had some exposure to this through youth group at church. She came to us when what they were teaching didn’t align with what she already knew. We had a good discussion about it, reiterating what we’d taught her. She knew the truth and this just helped solidify it further. She’s solid.

This prompted us to have another discussion with our youngest about it to make sure she’s ready.

Thanks for reading.

Sunny

Hi Sunny!

Your experiences with your teen/preteen children are a welcome addition to the conversation.

I can remember being 12 and 13 and having my dad right there to guide me through a couple of rough spots as I made the transition to adolescence.
Dad wasn't a naturist, but he had a similar outlook on life.
I think most of us know that girls are sometimes treated as "attractive nuisances" in church circles.
Good intentions by church leaders don't cut it. Your girls deserve better and you provided that extra guidance; your family is quietly disagreeing with the congregation (or certain individuals) on this issue while remaining in basic harmony on doctrine.
No church gets it right 100% of the time, but we have to be practical and merciful about this.

Boys may need a little more guidance than girls with communication skills, reading non-verbal cues and developing respectful relations with girls their age.
I needed that help and I got it. Some of these skills developed with practice and Mom and Dad saw to it that I had opportunities to interact with girls in a chaperoned setting. That helped too.

I am not surprised that you and Brian have anticipated some of the things your youngsters, particularly the girls would deal with.

I remember well a swim party our youth group had. The girls we had grown up with were suddenly in bikinis.
Yes we boys noticed, (and I saw a couple of my female friends noticing me), but it was a supervised setting and nothing else had changed, we knew them well, we knew their families. We played with water cannons, swam laps, had diving competitions, joked around, even cheered on a chicken fight.

Rather than leading us down a sinful path, we got accustomed to seeing one another with far less clothing, but our normal interactions remained intact.
I am so glad that our church didn't create a crisis out of this. No need for that.

I can certainly vouch for the value of being proactive as a parent. Your kids will look for and find guidance someplace. If not from you, then they will follow what their peers do. We were always clear that how you're dressed says different things in different situations and that they should be mindful of how they are portraying themselves.

While in some utopia, you might be able to wear your skin in all places and times, nobody lives in a utopia, and we have to be aware of what our conduct and dress are communicating. A speedo, bikini or halter top at a beach is entirely different from the same outfit at a mall, or if you wore such a thing to school.

Obviously, while they were young, we could, and did, guide and dictate standards of dress, but it's gratifying that all three have grown their own good sense about such things as adults.

DipperDave,

Certainly teaching context is an important job for parents when it comes to wardrobe.
Though kids seem to figure this out pretty quickly.

It's not always about clothes that reveal too much for the classroom setting. Some families in my high school didn't have the money to shop at high-end department stores and others did. You sort of knew who came from an affluent family and who didn't.

When your kids were in school, was flaunting name brand fashion an issue in those years or was the peer pressure for casual attire dominant?

I have heard about designer athletic shoes being a source of competition and jealousy. Some schools even had to create policies about shoes to fight this.

There's a balance to strike between allowing individualism and permitting a degree of conformity.

Is everyone wearing all black this year? If so, it's kind of hard to fight such a thing as long as it doesn't venture into poor taste.

Nudist places create something close to utopia: we generally wear the same "uniform", but the question of what naturists and nudists wear elsewhere is an interesting one.

Even in nudist settings there are fashion debates: piercings and tattoos generally cannot exceed what that particular community regards as good taste.

The two nudists I knew in school (middle school and college) dressed conventionally, not more revealing attire at school than everyone else.

I think that there's something to be said for advocating moderation in a clothed or clothing-optional setting.

Without squashing all individuality, avoiding standing out too much seems like the way to go.

Hello again, everyone... glad to see the board came back to life, but sorry to see it came back only briefly, and came back while I was away and I missed some REALLY good posts.

Thank you, JustMe, for resurrecting this old thread, and thanks to Nudony for mentioning me, and to Ramblinman for his valuable posts.

Thanks especially to SunnyDay (love to see you back posting!) for this:

And this:



There is **SO MUCH** I could say about well-intentioned people who do great damage. Some not only teach women to wear T-shirts on top of swimsuits, but even teach MEN should swim with long T-shirts just in case someone might see the outline of what's inside their swim trunks.

I came back to read this board because we're having unseasonably warm weather, not warm enough to swim (lake water stays colder much longer, and since the weather will turn wintry again soon, there's no point in filling pools this early unless we invest in a heated pool system) but warm enough to get a head start on nude suntanning. We had a great opportunity for my husband to invite a female friend and her boyfriend who've been curious about social nudity for about a year and decided they're ready to "take the plunge," even if there's no water yet in our home pool for a literal plunge. As we often do, we sent them to SunnyDay's site to learn more and realized we'd missed the January discussion.

I'll say more in my next post about the discussion between Ramblinman and Nudony, but first, on these two posts, one new and one old, by Ramblinman since they relate to SunnyDay's comment:





Ramblinman, you are SO RIGHT about this!

Seeing someone wearing much less clothing than we're used to seeing them wear can be quite distracting, to put it politely. I have work colleagues who are used to seeing me in professional business attire (blouses, skirts or slacks, heels, etc.) who can't keep their eyes off me if, as we sometimes do on nasty cold winter days, we go to a heated indoor pool near my office. Some of the guys look pretty good too if they are fit and exercise regularly. I expect that, and it has a place. Without knowing much about your church singles group, it's entirely normal, natural, and healthy for young people to enjoy seeing each other. Swimming is one of the socially acceptable ways in our culture that young people can get a good idea what the person they're dating, or a person they might consider dating, will look like if they marry.

(CONTINUED)

Continued...

The great thing about social nudity is it satisfies the normal, natural, and healthy desire to see what people we are attracted to look like without their clothes. Back in college, my then-boyfriend, now husband, invited me to the nude beach when we were dating, and that experience changed my life. I’ve invited several work colleagues who couldn’t keep their eyes off me in my swimsuit to bring their girlfriends and swim nude at our home pool. What most non-nudists don’t understand is nudism doesn’t lead to unbridled sexuality; on the contrary, it satisfies healthy desires and makes it easier for men and women who are attracted to each other to relate to each other without Dave wishing he could see what’s under Sally’s blouse and Sally wishing she could see Dave without his shorts.

Even modest clothing can be and often is quite attractive. The knee-length skirt and form-fitting blouse I wear to a sales call attract men’s attention, and a work colleague swimming with me after work will pay a lot of attention to my swimsuit as we walk out of separate locker rooms at a community pool, but if our pool had a nude swim day (it doesn’t) and we were undressing together in the same locker room with his wife and my husband, we’d be "all eyes on each other" for a while, but unlike the "hour or two on the beach" it took for Ramblinman’s church singles group to get used to seeing each other in bikinis designed to call attention to certain body parts, nudism satisfies our normal, natural, and healthy desires to see each other. Even new nudists usually get comfortable being nude in 10 to 15 minutes, maybe half an hour at most.

Being nude together also promotes social bonding. Lots of women on swim teams have learned the bonding benefits of showering nude together without clothing, makeup, jewelry, etc. When women see each other in the showers, they don’t see extraneous trappings of wealth or social status or fashion, but they do see the results of hard work of physical exercise to improve their sports performance, which has health benefits and also the added benefit of making them look better both in and out of clothes.

Same for co-ed nudity, with the added factor of physical attraction. There is something very special about friends who know each other well going through what we like to call the "adorable awkwardness" of learning to be nude together. Back in college there were plenty of groups of friends, often three or four dating couples, who went down to the nude beach "on a dare."

Of course it’s scary at first when a group of friends, to quote Ramblinman but applying his comments to full nudity, not just swimsuits, "becomes accustomed to that degree of nudity and we carried on conversations, swam, sunbathed, played volleyball with very little lingering distraction. We still noticed one another, but our outward appearance wasn't some overwhelming source of temptation."

Seeing women giggling as their boyfriends and other male friends pull down their shorts, and then blushing beet red as they untie their bikinis and experience as a group what it’s like for male and female friends who know each other well to be nude together, is incredibly fun. There were usually at least one or two people in the group who had little or no experience with physical intimacy and it’s even more fun to see those people, typically female freshmen, learn to realize they are physically desirable and to slowly progress from deep embarrassment as they undress on the beach to enjoying the effect their nude bodies have on their male friends, and enjoying seeing what male bodies look like. The people who get the most benefits from social nudity, and who come to enjoy it the most, are the ones from the most inhibited family backgrounds.

While our modern culture has made nude images widely available — most men in college today have seen dozens or even hundreds of images of nude people, and the same for the majority of women — there’s still a taboo on **BEING** nude. Seeing lots of images of people nude has become normal for many teens and most young adults, no matter what parents and religious leaders may say, but actually taking off our own clothes is still scary. There are all sorts of false modesty and body shame issues.

Social nudity de-mystifies nudity by helping young people see normal human bodies, not airbrushed models. We don't live in some nudist utopia, but I wish we could make it a requirement that college freshmen have group co-ed showers in their dorms and take a nude swimming class for physical education so every young woman and every young man would have the experience my boyfriend and I did as college freshmen, learning to overcome years of well-meaning but quite harmful conditioning given to me and many other young people. Even offering optional co-ed nude swimming classes and optional co-ed showers in dorms would go a long way to improving body image.

(I have realised I have not posted in quite a while, but I can't help making little comment -- perhaps only tangentially relevant to this topic, perhaps not.)

I have noticed in this thread an elsewhere a suggestion that wearing a bikini is considered by some to be daring (if not even scandalous!) and not something done by the suitably "modest." (I agree that wearing a bikini is less than ideal -- even immodest -- though from the opposite viewpoint, of course.) I am struck by the notion that bikinis are still considered outrageous, at least for some settings.

I have not been on a textile beach for many years, except in transit if there is not direct access to a nude beach, but from what I have seen, 90% or more of females are in bikinis. Are there really places where they are still controversial?

I think it depends where you go.
We don't go much to the beach anymore, but when my wife and I were in Puerto Rico a few years back, the "style" of choice for many young women was the "string bikini." It can go as "far" as just the nipples and the vulva being covered.

My wife would consider being nude at the resort to be more "modest" than wearing a string-bikini on a regular beach. It might seem ironic.

Dino asked if it's really true that bikinis are still controversial for some.

My answer: ABSOLUTELY! 100 PERCENT!

I know women raised not only not to wear bikinis, but to wear T-shirts over their one-piece swimsuits. I know women who wear bikinis at home with families and close friends to suntan, but not to public beaches or pools. I know mothers who wore bikinis at home with their husbands and families until their older boys became teenagers and then switched to one-pieces, and told their daughters to switch to one-pieces when they started to develop. Is that good? Of course not. It teaches body shame, sending bad messages to boys and girls about their bodies.

Yes, at some beaches 90 percent of women wear bikinis. (I see a lot less than 90 percent when I visit textile beaches, but I mostly go to nude beaches so I have less experience with textile beaches.) What you're not seeing are the huge numbers of women who avoid public beaches, either because they don't think they look good enough to be seen in public on a beach, or because they've been socialized that swimming is okay with family and friends but not with "stranger guys," or because they look very good in a bikini and are afraid of cell phone cameras. Some women only go to public pools, not beaches, because unsupervised cameras are banned and badly behaved men get told to leave. Many people visiting public pools are young mothers with children, or teenagers in high school who are officially there to "babysit" their younger brothers and sisters, but actually are there to see and be seen by other high school students. It's easy to tell the teenagers flirting with each other at the public pool, and it's really fun to see young love blooming when teenagers are enjoying being attracted to each other wearing much less than in school or other places. The pool and the beach are some of the very few socially acceptable places where, as Ramblinman wrote:

Here's one example of what I mean. Back in college, one of my friends (I’ll call her Maria) was ethnically Cuban, from a quite conservative Catholic family, but had broken out of her shell when she came to college. Her parents let her go to the beach growing up but told her the bikinis had to stop once she entered high school. She didn't take much persuading because she put on a lot of weight once puberty hit and became very embarrassed about her looks.

Like many college students, she "broke out of her shell" as a freshman, and started dating another Hispanic guy who was a surfer and quite physically fit. He encouraged her to progress from paddling around in pools into serious open water swimming, which is fantastic aerobic exercise and a full-body workout, and as she saw pounds melting off, she got her body confidence back, started wearing bikinis again, and as she learned to enjoy and appreciate men complimenting her on her looks, her boyfriend suggested she might like to walk with him farther along the beach to the nude section.

Like most overly sheltered young women, she had a mix of emotions but agreed to go with him as long as they could keep their swimsuits on. Public nude beaches can't enforce nudity so they were far from the only couple walking along the beach who kept their swimsuits on. As some of the nudists on the beach greeted Maria's boyfriend, she realized it wasn't his first time on that section of the beach. As they began to walk back, she asked him directly, "You've been here before, right?" He admitted he'd been coming for years (he grew up in the area). His parents encouraged him to go to the nude section as well as the surfing section to get a realistic idea what men and women looked like. Both of his parents were occasional nudists and sometimes went to the nude part of the beach though his father was more interested in surfing and his mother mostly liked suntanning on the beach while her husband surfed.

You know how that story went. After a few more visits to the nude beach, and Maria meeting some female students on the beach who she knew, the day came when she whispered to her boyfriend, "Let's go over there behind those rocks and get naked."

Of course her boyfriend loved it, and of course Maria was terrified. I’ll write more later on that but need to check on some details with Maria before posting what I've written from what she's told me.