Lot to say, but I’m on a phone, so who knows?
I think the quarantine makes for a very appropriate time to explore more individual challenges. It’s feasible, virally safe, and…
One of the elephants in the nudity room regards where eroticism and nudity intersect. Formal nudism seems to pull a muscle, and not the fun one, insisting that this is all clean, natural, healthy, and that only someone with his mind in the gutter would dare let an erotic thought a moment of attention. (Ok, that’s a bit extreme, but sometimes you have to exaggerate to make the point.)
Nudity is not necessarily erotic, but it’s more so than many of its advocates suggest. This is my tortured way of saying that, in isolation, any kind of human engagement that may even tangentially involve that in an bright, fun, inventive way is healthy.
Regarding my interest in nudity? Always. We had Playboys around the house, and from a very, VERY early age, they triggered erections and those felt great. So, there was no way I could not associate nudity with pleasure. It didn’t take much advanced reasoning to identify what was different about Playboy and why it got different results: the people in it were naked. Thus, I associated anyone being naked, including myself, with something positive. Clothes of course were a default state, but my thought then and now when wearing them is that a special and powerful state is possible by removing them. It can still distract me from almost anything. In some ways I personally dislike the attitudes at camps and colonies because, in their effort to make it safe, they take some of the fun out of it.
The moment I was alone, I would strip. Still do. I was fascinated with a Superman comic where he was shot by some kind of alien weapon and people thought he was dead because only his costume came fluttering to Earth.
Psychotics often manifest a sense of delusional self-importance by having mental breaks and disrobing. They consider themselves beyond limits. Yes, they’re mad. But I get a little of the reasoning. Naked, I feel more confident and more myself. Not because it’s natural, but because it has an almost occult, evocative power to intrinsically acknowledge the erotic energy we have along with all of our other qualities. Clothed, we can call upon all dimensions but one of our personalities to solve problems and represent ourselves. Nudity is the state that allows us to include one more dimension and exclude nothing. How we are taken by others? That’s another matter. That, in some ways, is up to them. But the inner power of nudity is something I’ve always felt, and I feel it more and more as I age.
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