Birthday Suits are the Best Kind

 

You know the drill: get up in the morning, pound your alarm clock into a pulp and agonize over what to wear. Such a difficult decision to make, isn’t it? Eventually, you choose the skintight black jeans paired with a cleavage baring tank top. You slither into those godforsaken pants, manage to stuff one thigh into a leg, then start on squeezing in the other. You jump around your room, trying to zip up the fly and button the top button, sucking in until your organs hurt. Next comes the shirt. You pull it on as quickly as possible, trying to avoid getting deodorant stains all striped down the sides. It’s wrinkled, skeejawed, and unflattering. You have a muffin top from your too-tight pants. After ten minutes, you’re fully dressed. This goes on for every day of your life, no matter your outfit choices, and each morning’s the same: stressful, tiring and over-stimulating.

Now, imagine this: you’re a nudist. Your morning’s suddenly opened right up.

Remember corsetry? From the Elizabethan Age up to the 1920’s, it was commonplace for women to constrict their abdomens to circumferences as impossible as eight inches. The average waist circumference today is around thirty inches (http://www.hhs.gov). These primitive contraptions cracked ribs, compressed organs, and caused many a fainting spell. It was not until recently that corsets fell out of everyday use. “Women have had many health problems and have died from the restrictive, impractical corset,” according to urbandictionary.com; “many homes in the Victorian era had fainting rooms for women who had been laced up too tightly.” Looking back, corsets seem like a stupid idea, not unlike the 17th Century Chinese practice of foot binding.  The women of both eras would have been better off naked.

Corsets didn’t only cause innumerable injuries to European women, but they allowed the subjugation of females as well. Rendered incapable of strenuous activity, women were forced to become nothing more than caged birds, completing mundane domestic tasks. Now, think about those too-small pants you put on every day. Sure, they don’t crack your ribs, but it sure is difficult concentrating on a lecture when you’re not getting adequate blood flow to your feet. Practicing nudism eliminates all clothing-related discomfort.

Opponents of nudism claim that it’s “uncivilized,” “unclean,” and “uncomfortable”.  Uncivilized? Great nations from all over Asia, Australia and The Americas existed in the near nude for hundreds of years before those Imperial European prudes took over. Great artists like DaVinci and Michelangelo drew their subjects in the nude, preferring the natural beauty of the human body to the artificial prettiness of frilly fabric. European and South American countries that support designated nude beaches possess overall healthier communities with low rates of obesity, cancer, and heart disease (http://www.sante-jeunesse-sports.gouv.fr).

Inhabitants of nudist camps give nothing but praise for their lifestyle. Although they at first feel a little uncomfortable with the idea of living in a nudist community, people new to the lifestyle soon warm up to the idea. According to Lisa, nudist since 1980, “I'd never seen my mother in her slip and he wants me to go to a nudist club?... But off my clothes came, no problem… You have to show people that the inside of a nudist club is different from what they have in mind” (http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=632998). Even a regular Barlow student, Jaclyn Pack, one of the usual clothes-wearing types, approves of the premises of nudism: “it is natural to be naked—we’re born naked! Why change?”

Unclean? Only humans wear clothes. Our close relatives, the great apes, have a higher tolerance for all harmful pathogens because of their constant exposure to germs, cold, heat, and other “grit” that obsessive-compulsive housewives would faint at the sight of.  So perhaps, “unclean”, but far from unhealthy.

Uncomfortable? It took millions of years for humans to evolve into the species we are today. We scraped by on the baking hot savannahs, in the bitter cold tundras, and everywhere between, only donning crude fur shawls when necessary. Evolution is surely more effective in creating comfort than synthetic fabrics. Even wearing shoes supposedly bastardize the perfect function of our highly evolved foot. According to Adam Sternbergh of the New York Magazine:

“Shoes are bad. I don’t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk.”

More people develop flat feet from wearing ill-fitting shoes than those who simply go barefoot and develop healthy calluses. Those horribly painful, yet oh-so-sexy pair of stilettos you wear out to dinner don’t seem so attractive anymore, do they? Even he late celebrated comedian, George Carlin, supported nudism. To paraphrase one of his acts, he claimed that there was more Eskimo rape per capita than anywhere else in the world because people living in warmer climates are practically naked all the time, anyway. The mystery caused by obscuring and constricting clothes lead to lust and violence. It’s unhealthy to conceal the human body—physically and psychologically.

Dissenters obviously have it wrong. Nudism is the practical choice.

All in all, being naked is not only natural, it’s an important part of being human. Like the people of yesteryear supporting corsets and crippling footbinding, people of the new millennium blindly accept the limiting benefits of clothing. But nudism has so many more benefits, and unlike the claims of non-supporters, it has nothing to do with sexuality. In fact, nudism can reduce the common knee-jerk reaction to connect the female body with sex. According to a recent article in the national post:

[Fred] says the first time he was able to see a woman as a person was at a nudist resort: "I could finally overcome my disability. I'd been conditioned to respond to the world in terms of sex," he says. "Sex is a game, sex is a challenge, sex is work, but nudism? Nudism is joy - it's better than sex” (www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=632998).

Do away with the clothes and don your birthday suit: nudism is what it’s all about.

 

Works Cited

Carlin, George. Napalm & Silly Putty. New York: Hyperion, 2001.

Kaplan, Ben. “Nude Dudes: A Weekend at a Nudist Colony.” National Post.

         21 October 2008. < www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=632998>

Ministère de la Santé. 20 October 2008.

< http://www.sante-jeunesse-sports.gouv.fr >

Pack, Jaclyn. Interview by Author. 20 Oct. 2008, Easton.

Sternbergh, Adam. “You Walk Wrong.” New York Magazine.com. 3 November 2008.         http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

Urban Dictionary.Com. 20 October 2008. 

         <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=corset>

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 20 October, 2008. <www.hhs.gov>