Critique of Nudism: Nakedness, Nudity, Ideology.

i once saw a stand-up comedian perform
live who opened his act with the declaration that it's always easier to laugh when it's someone else's religion being made fun of and the sequence of jokes he told thereafter were a total flop he completely failed to prove his point and i ended up sitting there in the audience reflecting that really public sensitivities about mockery of religion are quite different from what the stand-up comedian uh proposed but of course there's another sense in which we all understand this point it's easy to perceive something as absurd when you don't believe in it yourself and the people who do believe in it the people who are committed to it the absurdities to them are invisible what to us seems self-evidently unreasonable to them passes by unquestioned and in this sense nudism is believe it or not for a significant minority of people here on the internet their religion and people look regardless of everybody checks out everybody i don't think there's anything wrong with having a look but so long as you're not doing it with like an agenda like it's not doing in a creepy way but like is this cube right now should i just take this off i really do understand that even if they joke around about it a lot of the people on the other side of this debate take this tremendously seriously i grew up with a whole lot of tremendously serious nudists in my own family so i've heard it all before what you will encounter again and again if you try to talk about nudism with nudists face to face is the insistence that any objection you have to nudism must be based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the term so you know the discussion of these topics very rarely goes beyond clarifying the meaning of the term and many nudists live with the delusion that if only people really understood what nudism means they couldn't possibly disagree with it the only other philosophy of encounter that's like this are the people who believe in determinism because it's not just that they believe in it they believe that if other people understood the meaning of the word determinism they couldn't possibly disagree with it this is a further step into into self-disciples evolution it's very hard to get across to notice no no no i understand your definition of the term i you don't need to clarify anymore i understand what you really mean i just actually genuinely disagree with you so what they'll say again and again is nudism is not exhibitionism you know nudism is not about sexuality at all it's about nature it's about freedom like in every other political context we would then challenge an appeal to nature fallacy right but never with nudism oh no nature is the self-evident you know the transcendental criterion that justifies why climbing a tree when naked is tremendously meaningful rewarding and climbing a tree wearing clothes you're somehow cut off from nature whatever there's just meaning of nature not question meaning of freedom in no way pinned down or specified of course what the rush to explain to you is that nudism is not about showing off that it's not about ego that it's not about actually being beautiful that if you're ugly or fat you can still be a nudist i've been to my share of nudist colonies i've been to my share of new beaches i assure you that part is true you will meet and encounter many many people who are very overweight uh enjoying the privileges of nudism but again part of the problem is that when you engage in discussion with nudists this tends to go into a downward spiral of self-justification with this unending pretense that anyone who disagrees with nudism is merely failing to understand the full range of meaning of the term they don't understand the implicit meaning of the term they understand the profound meaning of the term or they are ascribing to nudism exhibitionists or sexual overtones undertones implications that just couldn't possibly be there there should should instead be a discussion about nature and freedom i am just barely old enough to remember crossing swords with people who humorlessly advance the hypothesis that everyone on earth is gay that the people who think of themselves as heterosexual are repressed homosexuals i think this philosophy has dwindled away to its last few followers probably you can still find them somewhere on reddit somewhere but let me tell you there were people on this world uh just a few decades ago there were a whole lot of them who got into this mindset of of justifying their own feelings and their own identity by insisting that everyone else felt that way too and a couple of them um it's just not the topic of this video it's not going to do but a couple of them became notorious cult leaders and then part of their cult was reaching out to people and explaining oh no no you think you feel this way but you've been brainwashed into thinking you're straight and really you're a repressed homosexual i met people uh with phds who still clung to the hypothesis that was much more popular and said the 1970s that everyone was bisexual right and there's a similar psychological pattern of self-justification there like oh like everyone's bisexual they just don't know it yet and it ultimately comes down to the absurdity of saying you don't know how you feel i know how you really feel and not because i know you but because i know a universal principle that i'm claiming to be true in all instances for everyone right like the conclusions of my philosophy are universal and apply to everyone including you so your feelings don't matter as much as my theory this line of reasoning to rationalize and advance nudism really implicitly relies on the assertion that everyone's asexual these people don't find it erotic arousing or stimulating to see a member of the opposite sex naked to see a member of the same sex naked that there's absolutely nothing sexual in it for them to exhibit themselves in the news or to see others exhibit themselves this just isn't stimulating them at all now i am not in a position to question their assertion if that is really how they feel i notice in examining this other youtube channel slightly crazy vegan there's some counter evidence right there are actually many videos of her giggling on camera and getting excited looking at nude images on the internet she's filming herself having reactions to things this way right she has a separate video which asks the question is it okay to send dick pics to nudists you can't really claim there's nothing erotic nothing arousing about exhibiting oneself in the nude and then turn around and say stop sending me dick pics on instagram that's gross which one is it going to be to be clear i am not making the claim that nobody can go to a beach and be surrounded by attractive members of the opposite sex who are naked or attractive members of the same sex and be naked and feel nothing not react anyway regardless as a completely non-sexual non-stimulant there are there are some people among us whether they identify as asexual or not or if they just have an incredibly low sex drive they have zinc deficiency whatever their situation is there are some people who feel that way could we also admit that there are some people who are pretending to feel that way precisely because they do enjoy going to a nude beach they do enjoy playing frisbee playing volleyball playing tennis in the nude they precisely enjoy those things a little bit more because they're looking at naked people doing those activities or they're aware that those naked people are looking at them naked while doing this can we can we admit that it's possible that more than zero percent of humanity are motivated to engage in these activities for precisely that reason and they're motivated to advance this ludicrous philosophy for that reason it depends whether that checking out then leads on to unwanted behavior that's that that could be an issue oh yeah i've told a few but few blokes who would be too over creepy in the bushes you know like so piss off like go and have a good look at yourself in the mirror you know and get some self-respect or sometimes i just like make a sandball and just throw it next to them so i just make like a pyramid and just like yep okay ammo throw there throw the answer on there look i say checking out each other's equipment is perfectly natural hey i'm a butt girl i look at bucks i can't help myself if you had a cheeky babe like i had last week in my place yeah of course we look at it you know if someone's walking past me yeah i have a look because she had headlights like a ferrari you know and it has like a model i think i've already adam braided this point clearly enough but to spell it explicitly if you're willing to take other people's subjective experiences and feelings seriously right as evidence in constructing your philosophy and constructing your worldview and advancing your political program that doesn't mean that you can discard everyone else's subjective feelings when it's convenient for your political agenda right like some people are gay and they therefore respond to certain kinds of stimulus and certain kinds of way and some people are bisexual and some people are asexual but to claim that your feelings are universal that there is nothing sexually provocative about nudity and there's no exhibitionistic element whatsoever in presenting yourself in the nude is flatly absurd and it can only be sustained it can only be supported by dogmatically insisting that other people don't feel the way that they earnestly tell you they do feel i live in canada once in a while i visit my extended family in the south of france right nudity it's publicly tolerated it's kind of it's kind of sort of legal in both places and i have the experience in canada and the south of france where my mind is on other things when i'm in france i'm taking care of my daughter and i'm setting up a picnic for my daughter or my girlfriend at the beach or something i don't i'm not thinking sexy thoughts at all i'm stressed out i'm busy or i'm trying to be entertaining for my kid i don't want to look at beautiful naked women i don't want to think about that but there they are and let me tell you something as a heterosexual man who is in absolutely no way asexual who is not suffering from zinc deficiency and who does not have a low sex drive yes it can be an unwanted and jarring interruption your day to suddenly be confronted with the sight of a beautiful naked woman and i'm not saying it's pleasant or unpleasant you know what i guess i am i'm saying it's unpleasant okay can we go with that if your political philosophy is a nudist requires you to now revile and insult me for my honesty i think that's just as ridiculous as if i as a heterosexual male were gonna revile and insult a gay male and say how dare you feel turned on by going into the showers with all the other guys on the sports team you should just be cool like i am because i can shower with a bunch of naked guys and feel nothing trust me nothing but here you are getting turned on like what am i gonna do i'm going to revile him for feeling the way he feels or like make some universal philosophical you can't possibly feel the way you feel because nudity isn't sexual really really how deep do you want to take this discussion how deep could this discussion possibly go what we're discussing is the reality of human instinct all right and that's something that tends to remain just outside the remit of all our political philosophies it's precisely the mess of instincts we still carry with us in the modern world left over from a very different world we once inhabited if it could be established that nudism is natural we'd only have to return to the familiar trope of explaining that what is natural is not necessary and not necessarily beneficial when nudists are confronted with the absurdity of their reliance on an appeal to nature fallacy they will very often respond by trying to exaggerate to you just how functional nudism is how it's somehow so much better climbing a tree in the nude than wearing clothes this actually reminds me of the debates i have with meat eaters when they insist that there's just no material on this earth that's as effective to make clothing out of as wool or leather what i actually say in response is if those materials really were the most effective don't you think the us military would be using them why is it that the u.s military doesn't make uniforms out of wool why is it they're not using leather boots anymore after they did for decades and decades right it's because they discovered that actually leather is not a very effective material to use it's because wool it's ineffective in use and when you wash it and dry it there are all these problems there are actually really fundamentally functional reasons why almost all us military equipment maybe the exception is dress uniforms like what they wear to funerals and state functions but basically everything they use in the battlefield when it really matters happens to be made out of vegan materials there is no special advantage to wolder leather is it so hard to recognize that there's no special advantage to nudity if you really think that the us marine corps could get through their obstacle course 30 seconds faster by doing it naked rather than wearing a uniform you don't think they'd be doing it i mean when the stakes are that high when you're when you're willing to kill people you're willing to kill sheep to make wool when you're willing to kill people you're willing to kill cows to make leather boots if there were any advantage in it there isn't that's why the use military doesn't use those things i have the experience of climbing a tree naked i had the experience climbing a tree wearing clothes let me tell you something clothes are better and finally let me just say i've never known a nudist who is willing to reflect on or discuss what it is they mean by freedom in any depth or at any length what is this freedom that requires you to be naked this freedom that you are deprived of by wearing clothes when for example climbing a tree my girlfriend grew up in detroit i grew up in toronto where we come from freedom comes down to two little words car ownership right all our lives we were sold this image that what freedom means is owning a car right and we've had to grow out of that we've had to recognize no car ownership isn't freedom at best it's something just wildly unrelated to freedom your social status also is linked to owning a car now i do think one element of the philosophy of nudism is that concealment itself is somehow uh evil that by deceiving others or deceiving yourself as to how you really appear who you really are you're engaged in something perverse and self-destructive therefore wearing clothes or let's say never looking at yourself naked in the mirror is part of the psychopathology of modernity and some that didn't exist perhaps in some idealized ancient society where clothes were at least scarce um in this same sense though let's question again what's meant by freedom does freedom mean that you need to know what car i drive does freedom mean that i own a car and take a picture of myself with my car and post it on instagram to exhibit the type of car i own and drive is there something really so wrong with concealing the car with just say no that's private that's not something i'm going to show you that's not going to exhibit that's not something you need to see it's not something you need to know about to know what really matters about me what i've got under these clothes might in this same way be at least as irrelevant as whatever it is i'm hiding in my garage concealment is only evil if you're doing it in order to manipulate someone into doing something they don't want to do i suppose i could agree that if you live in a society where people remained virgins until marriage and a man had to commit to and marry a woman without ever seeing her naked something by the way written about at length in thomas moore's utopia actually was a problem in his era of uh you know protestant england uh yeah in some contexts like that you couldn't mislead someone into thinking you're thin when you're fat or fat when you're thin or thinking you have huge breasts when you've really taken cabbages and stuff them into the top part of your dress sure there could be a sense in which concealment concealment of your car or specifically concealment of your body is used to manipulate someone into doing something they otherwise wouldn't do into manipulating real world outcomes but the problem there is not the concealment it's the manipulation the problem is not the choice to refuse to exhibit your naked body