When I presented myself at RIONAT with my wife for our admission interview, I remember that the then president, Sérgio Oliveira, told me about how the new members feel when they start to attend naturist meetings: “They are very embarrassed to take off their clothes for the first time”, he said, “then they feel more comfortable, but when they see cameras nearby, they immediately try to move away. Some time later they agree to be photographed from the back. It takes a long time for them to accept their nudity as something natural.”
At the time I realized that it had never happened to me like this. I think I was born a naturist, if that's possible in a family as formal as mine, because I always took my clothes off very comfortably wherever there were people who didn't care about my naked body, whether indoors or on beaches less frequented. That's why, perhaps, I even see with some strangeness that people feel ashamed in such a situation. My wife says that in a society like ours, which makes it a huge taboo, the “ET” is me, who thinks everything is natural, not them.
And she is right. The day is still far away when we will use clothes as an option for outerwear only when we feel like it, as in Cap D'Agde, a French naturist city, where everyone goes to the supermarket, the bank or simply walks around the city completely naked. I have several experiences in which prejudice was quite evident in my contacts with people. I will tell you some of them:
Scene 1: my wife and I were in Ponta da Trindade (coast of Rio de Janeiro). From so much camping there, we already had several friends among the residents of the region. In a circle with them, when we returned (just the two of them) from one of the beaches where naturism is tolerated, I was asked by one of our local friends: “Can you feel comfortable knowing that everyone there is seeing your wife naked? ” Detail: all the beachgoers were also naked.
Scene 2: I was getting out of a bath in the club’s sauna, when I saw two guys talking about Pinho beach (naturist stronghold in Santa Catarina): “I think if I went there”, said one of them, “I would be masturbating all the time".
Scene 3: at a friend's birthday lunch, when he found out that my wife and I were going to naturist beaches, her husband came out with this: “Oh, wait a minute! A bunch of naked women around and the guys do nothing? If I am there, I “trace” them all!”
These cases serve as banal examples of the mentality that still reigns in this country regarding shared nudity: most cannot dissociate it from sex and pornography. How, then, can we expect people to be able to tell the difference between nudist and naturist? For those who do not practice there is no difference. And for those who practice it, only true naturists make the distinction. Put that way, it even seems prejudiced, but it's not enough to take off your clothes in a group to be a naturist. That's nudism. The nudist feels good taking off his clothes and does so whenever he gets the chance. And the reasons why they practice it are the most diverse: it can be the emotion of defying the “clothed system” or the desire to get rid of social oppression and feel free, getting naked at a given moment, as if releasing a trapped scream. throat, or he may do so to gain access to other naked bodies or expose his own to give vent to his sexual fantasies. In either case, the stimulus comes from the outside in.
The naturist is someone who undresses, first of all, inside. The big difference is in what you don't see. This is the distinguishing factor: it strips itself, first of all, of the prejudices and false moralism that are so common in traditional social structures. It strips itself of social limits and is structured on moral values, since these, yes, must be the true conditions of human beings.
The former convey a false idea of ​​respect based on the physical limits imposed by clothing: this is what says what can and cannot be seen or touched. From there, people consider that they can do anything, as long as they are dressed, since clothing is their limitation. The so-called “normal” beaches are the scene of gross acts of lewdness and disrespect widely accepted – and even encouraged – by many. Nobody worries that their scantily clad wives and daughters frequent them. The skimpy bikinis protect them, at least in your head. Libertines take advantage of this to extrapolate all their limits: they leave this role for their clothes.
In a naturist environment, however, this physical limit does not exist. There is no piece of fabric, no matter how small, preventing visual or tactile access to the bodies that are there. The limit is not perceptible to the eyes: it is in people's character, and in their conception of respect for being for being – and not because society is imposing it. It is his vision focused on the natural beauty of a human body, and not on its unappreciated exploitation, that makes him different from other people.
The act of undressing, for the naturist, is the last stage of a process that began much earlier, within himself, and that changed his way of seeing the world. Before clothing, he has already stripped himself of false modesty, of the taboos of visual sex, of distorted concepts about the body. Long before clothing, he has already undressed the shame of his own body, as he sees beauty – regardless of aesthetics – as an example of the Creator's love for his creation. He has already stripped himself of the malice in the magic of the perception of another being, of the fears of loving his own freedom. He has already freed himself from the imposed limits, exchanging them for the limits of his own consciousness in the service of the true being.
For the naturist, taking off his clothes or not is a mere detail. The real battle he has already won within himself. Nudity is a mere outward expression of this act of courage towards oneself. Naturism, for him, has to be written in capital letters, because it is much more than being naked among people: it is a philosophy of life, which does not begin when he discovers his body for the first time, but when he discovers his towards an idealized, perfect world, in which people do not need imposed limits to respect each other. Where people are not governed, but are governed by natural principles of honesty, which do not classify them into two groups: those who use and those who allow themselves to be used.
Utopia? Is still! But because of idealists like the naturists of today, like Copernicus, Galileus and Joan of Arc, the world is going through surprising changes, and one day, when we least expect it, we are face to face with the great universal truths.
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The naturist these days is still a pioneer. American tradition makes a fundamental distinction between the pioneer and the settler. They say that, in the old days of pioneering in the western United States, whenever a settler arrived with his whole family to a distant and arid corner, on the wheels of a dusty wagon, he would look around and, realizing the movement of someone in the distance, cupped his hands and shouted: “Hello! Is this place safe to settle in?” And the other, in the distance, shouted in response: “Yes, you can stay!” The first to cry out, they claim, is the settler, who arrives to start taking advantage of the land. The second, the answerer, is the pioneer, who arrived at the front alone and, with his courage, faced the challenge of the unknown to provide security for future settlers.
The naturist, for a society that still needs rules to exercise respect, is this pioneer for a future generation of healthier citizens, in a world where mutual respect is directly linked to the values ​​that people develop, and not to the artificial limits imposed. From the outside in.
