SunnyDay's Message Board
Hi! Welcome to my message board! Use it to contact me or others or to post questions and share ideas and experiences. The topic should always be related to nudism / naturism. Feel free to respond to posts from others in a respectful way if you have something helpful or meaningful to contribute. Let's keep it light, lively, and most of all, fun! Thanks!
Good questions, Computerstation.
No, one bad experience (and my UTI may not even have been due to the heavy rainstorm washing fertilizer into a river that ended up in a cove of a large lake) isn't enough to get me to give up swimming. It wasn't really the farmer's fault either. Unexpected heavy rain washed away valuable fertilizer he needed. If we're going to swim in open water — rivers, lakes, ocean beaches — we have to accept the water comes from places we know nothing about. I'm not willing to restrict myself to heavily chlorinated pools. Even in pools, unless we own the pool and maintain the water filtration system and the pool chemicals, we don't know if they are being run right. At even the best-maintained public pools, one parent who wasn't monitoring their child's bowel or urine needs, or a child who doesn't "fess up" to an accident, can create a problem that may never be detected, or if it is detected, won't be until after everyone in the pool has been swimming in something much more likely to cause problems for humans than a highly diluted fertilizer runoff. The big problem with fertilizer runoff is it promotes growth of algae and other unwanted plant life. In a long inlet or cove with somewhat restricted water circulation, it can take a while to flush algae blooms or unwanted plant growth out of the cove and into the main body of the lake, where it will dissipate quickly due to water currents.
The next question you didn’t ask but others have asked who wonder about potential problems of nudism — swimming nude almost certainly made no difference in acquiring that UTI and nude swimming may have helped me prevent many others.
Unlike men, women have a fairly large opening "down there," and it's warm and moist inside. That means there are very real risks to women wearing a damp swimsuit for hours on end, especially one that is tightly fitting with padding intended to conceal the outline of women's pubic area and prevent the swimsuit fabric from rubbing against or irritating sensitive skin. Most people are familiar with padding on the upper part of women's swimsuits to conceal the nipples, and on men's swimsuits so the penis won't be obvious, but bikini bottoms or even one-pieces that are designed to fit snugly in the pubic area may have padding. Some women who regularly have UTIs while swimming wear looser-fitting swim shorts, but unless we're going to wear an industrial strength wetsuit designed for diving into sewage, nothing will keep water and bacteria from getting inside "down there." Water penetrates any swimsuit and whatever is in the water goes with it.
What can help is taking off the swimsuit after swimming instead of keeping it on all day, which is why women who have trouble with UTIs or yeast infections or other issues while swimming sometimes go inside the house, take off their swimsuit and dry themselves off, and then change their bottoms to a dry set or put on a loose-fitting skirt or shorts.
What works much better than putting dry swimsuit bottoms on a still-damp body is letting things dry out down there by suntanning nude, and what works best of all is never putting on a swimsuit at all and swimming nude so the fabric never collects bacteria and puts it next to a moist opening down there. E. coli, the bacteria that most commonly causes UTIs, does live in open water in nature, but it's much more likely to get into women's urinary tracts by transfer from their own anus. Think of what happens when a swimsuit gets wet, and stays in close contact with women's bodies for hours, and how easy it becomes for bacteria to migrate a few inches through wet fabric.
Or maybe it's better not to think about what can be growing inside bikini bottoms. It's pretty gross.
Maybe it's better to think of the UTI risk as a great reason for women to swim without a swimsuit and let things "air out" down there.
Think of that: a health campaign encouraging nude swimming to avoid infections caused by unhealthy swimsuits. Maybe (in a different world) we could start by encouraging swimming pools and beaches to be clothing-optional for health reasons, and someday get to the point that pools and beaches would start to ban swimsuits as a health risk, like most places today ban smoking cigarettes.
The more I think about this, the more I like the idea. It's totally unrealistic in today’s world and I know it, but tons of women have suffered unnecessarily with UTIs due to wet swimsuits, and at least some of those women would be open to swimming nude if more beaches and swimming pools allowed it and it became socially acceptable as a good health practice. Long ago men were required to swim nude in public pools for health reasons, so maybe it could happen again.
No, one bad experience (and my UTI may not even have been due to the heavy rainstorm washing fertilizer into a river that ended up in a cove of a large lake) isn't enough to get me to give up swimming. It wasn't really the farmer's fault either. Unexpected heavy rain washed away valuable fertilizer he needed. If we're going to swim in open water — rivers, lakes, ocean beaches — we have to accept the water comes from places we know nothing about. I'm not willing to restrict myself to heavily chlorinated pools. Even in pools, unless we own the pool and maintain the water filtration system and the pool chemicals, we don't know if they are being run right. At even the best-maintained public pools, one parent who wasn't monitoring their child's bowel or urine needs, or a child who doesn't "fess up" to an accident, can create a problem that may never be detected, or if it is detected, won't be until after everyone in the pool has been swimming in something much more likely to cause problems for humans than a highly diluted fertilizer runoff. The big problem with fertilizer runoff is it promotes growth of algae and other unwanted plant life. In a long inlet or cove with somewhat restricted water circulation, it can take a while to flush algae blooms or unwanted plant growth out of the cove and into the main body of the lake, where it will dissipate quickly due to water currents.
The next question you didn’t ask but others have asked who wonder about potential problems of nudism — swimming nude almost certainly made no difference in acquiring that UTI and nude swimming may have helped me prevent many others.
Unlike men, women have a fairly large opening "down there," and it's warm and moist inside. That means there are very real risks to women wearing a damp swimsuit for hours on end, especially one that is tightly fitting with padding intended to conceal the outline of women's pubic area and prevent the swimsuit fabric from rubbing against or irritating sensitive skin. Most people are familiar with padding on the upper part of women's swimsuits to conceal the nipples, and on men's swimsuits so the penis won't be obvious, but bikini bottoms or even one-pieces that are designed to fit snugly in the pubic area may have padding. Some women who regularly have UTIs while swimming wear looser-fitting swim shorts, but unless we're going to wear an industrial strength wetsuit designed for diving into sewage, nothing will keep water and bacteria from getting inside "down there." Water penetrates any swimsuit and whatever is in the water goes with it.
What can help is taking off the swimsuit after swimming instead of keeping it on all day, which is why women who have trouble with UTIs or yeast infections or other issues while swimming sometimes go inside the house, take off their swimsuit and dry themselves off, and then change their bottoms to a dry set or put on a loose-fitting skirt or shorts.
What works much better than putting dry swimsuit bottoms on a still-damp body is letting things dry out down there by suntanning nude, and what works best of all is never putting on a swimsuit at all and swimming nude so the fabric never collects bacteria and puts it next to a moist opening down there. E. coli, the bacteria that most commonly causes UTIs, does live in open water in nature, but it's much more likely to get into women's urinary tracts by transfer from their own anus. Think of what happens when a swimsuit gets wet, and stays in close contact with women's bodies for hours, and how easy it becomes for bacteria to migrate a few inches through wet fabric.
Or maybe it's better not to think about what can be growing inside bikini bottoms. It's pretty gross.
Maybe it's better to think of the UTI risk as a great reason for women to swim without a swimsuit and let things "air out" down there.
Think of that: a health campaign encouraging nude swimming to avoid infections caused by unhealthy swimsuits. Maybe (in a different world) we could start by encouraging swimming pools and beaches to be clothing-optional for health reasons, and someday get to the point that pools and beaches would start to ban swimsuits as a health risk, like most places today ban smoking cigarettes.
The more I think about this, the more I like the idea. It's totally unrealistic in today’s world and I know it, but tons of women have suffered unnecessarily with UTIs due to wet swimsuits, and at least some of those women would be open to swimming nude if more beaches and swimming pools allowed it and it became socially acceptable as a good health practice. Long ago men were required to swim nude in public pools for health reasons, so maybe it could happen again.
