In contemporary society, many women often feel they are viewed as sex objects, judged by onlookers. When we each start to strip, the gaze of others is a look that does not judge, according to experts.
We are taught, at a very young age, the shame of the naked body. We live in a society obsessed with the nude body because it is never seen in public, only in the privacy of ones home.
It pushes people to show their body off, in unnecessary and quite often degrading circumstances, such as pornography. Naturism is an antidote to pornography but also to Puritanism, according to the founder of the Quebec Federation of Naturism, two poisons are in need from each other.
"It creates a lot of values of respect and solidarity. Feminism and naturism are very similar in terms of reclaiming the body. My body belongs to me, here I am and I dare to be who I am. That's feminism as well."expressed Diane Archambault.
Anarchism and naturism
(to be translated)
"The gymnosophic movement is indeed the logical continuation and consummation of the woman's movement, for it at last brings woman into the man's world and man into the woman's world, so that they can see each other as they really are."
ReplyDeleteFrom The New Gymnosophy by Maurice Parmalee Ph.D. (1926)
Among peoples that go naked, as among animals, the difference between the sexes is less accentuated than in our climates. Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.
ReplyDeleteOn Tahiti the breezes from forest and sea strengthen the lungs, they broaden the shoulders and hips. Neither men nor women are sheltered from the rays of the sun nor the pebbles of the sea-shore. Together they engage in the same tasks with the same activity or the same indolence. There is something virile in the women and something feminine in the men.
This similarity of the sexes make their relations the easier. Their continual state of nakedness has kept their minds free from the dangerous pre-occupation with the "mystery" and from the excessive stress which among civilized people is laid upon the "happy accident" and the clandestine and sadistic colors of love. It has given their manners a natural innocence, a perfect purity. Man and woman are comrades, friends rather than lovers, dwelling together almost without cease, in pain as in pleasure, and even the very idea of vice is unknown to them.
From Noa Noa published in 1919 by Paul Gauguin.
(Translated from the original French by O. F. Theis)