REPOST: A Post About Family Nudism/Naturalism, and learning not to be ashamed of our bodies from an early age…

A Post About Family Nudism/Naturalism, and learning not to be ashamed of our bodies from an early age…

For as long as I can remember (and many years before), long before the existence of Instagram or Tumblr or Picasa or any sort of online photo sharing/storing web service, my dad has kept meticulously organized photo albums, or “scrap books” if you want to call them that.

Most of them are simply in chronological order, with captions typed out on an actual typewriter and set into each page to describe date, location, and sometimes details about what was going on at the time, if it’s not already obvious from the pictures.

The albums he has, starting from about his late twenties when he first started as a Character Specialist at Disneyland, all the way to today (though not as much since he doesn’t have a polaroid camera anymore and is dependent on us printing out digital pictures for him to add in, which is something I’m always forgetting to do), now number about 25 with hundreds of pages (and 4 to 8 pictures each page). Four of these albums are set aside from the rest because they contain images like you see here, which our family is completely fine with and understand aren’t “sexual” in any way, but which a lot of other families unfortunately would see and automatically label as something profane and shameful.

The pictures you see above and below here are, as the dates should make obvious, of my mother, who you may remember from some of my videos, like this one where she talks about her ongoing battle with cancer, or this one where we discussed recent reactions to Trump, antifa, nazis (pre-Charlottesville!) and other current political events .

There’s literally page after page of photos like this, lovely, innocent, casual, NON-SEXUAL images of my mother comfortably embracing her own body without clothing, without shame. Because that’s what nudity is to us, as nudists/naturalists. It’s the shell you’re wearing, something beautiful and powerful, not something you should feel the need to hide away because of fear of how others might decide to view it.

The next two pages of images aren’t of my mother. They’re of me.

We were up north, in the Pacific Northwest where I now (after many years of dreaming) finally live, visiting a wonderful, magical nudist location called Lake Bronson, and I was nineteen. Even still, my parents were careful what kind of pictures they took, because puritanical assholes looking for someone to get in legal trouble or everywhere.

Even though this was over a decade ago, I still have strong, fond memories of Lake Bronson. I remember the cool, damp forest, the soft moss covering everything, the gentle roar of the waterfalls just brief wandering paths away. The wide, murky lake I could freely swim across, where I found a giant toad I picked up and jokingly named “Buford” before letting it go. The sounds of birds and wind and water and nature surrounding me.

I remember dancing naked in the middle of a rainstorm (no lighting, I’m not that dumb :p). I remember feeling brilliantly free and alive.

I honestly hope that by posting these images, that anyone viewing them will be respectful. That I can somehow achieve the impossible and discourage/avoid perverts and puritans who see all nudity, especially female nudity, as “sinful” and something that needs to be hidden away from shame. That people aren’t going to look at these lovely nude photos of my mother and use them as something to masturbate to, because you’re so driven to objectify and devalue women as nothing more than something to add to your spank bank.

I hope that fellow naturists find these images and appreciate them for the statements of freedom they are, and that anyone new to naturism but interested in learning how to disassociate from puritanical beliefs against nudity can use them as a tool of what unashamed, unobjectified nudity looks like.

Thanks for reading, and for sharing this exploration of memories with me. I hope that together we can continue the fight against topless inequality, against hangover shaming of nudity and bodies that make no sense in a society that claims civil liberties and self-autonomy, and that perhaps even within our lifetimes, we can make the world a better place.