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Male & Female … Part Four
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Tag Archives: Nudity
Our Bodies
There was no Internet when I was a young boy. Our natural curiosity about the opposite sex and our own sex mouldered in a forbidden Twilight Zone in the back of our innocent minds. If we wanted to know what’s under a girl’s clothes, we had to resort to Mom’s medical book (woefully disappointing) or a copy of National Geographic that happened to feature some remote tribe of naked Africans. To this day I haven’t figured out why the exposure of Africans and primitive Amazonian villagers are some how morally acceptable while everyone else’s is immoral and lewd.
At around age eight I got my first glimpse of what’s inside a girls panties. It happen in a friend’s backyard, in a playhouse built by the friend’s father. Aware the little girl down the street had an inclination to give the boys a peek, me and two other boys invited her to join us in my friend’s playhouse, where we right away made our desires known. She hesitated; perhaps because there were three boys and just one girl. Negotiations began. One of us would show ours if she showed hers. All three of us gave in when she insisted we all show ours, provided she goes first, which she did. Moments later, racked with apprehension about my turn coming up, my eyes widened on her little twat. She seemed perfectly delighted by our amazement, but steadfastly refused to let my more forthright friend to touch it.
The moment passed. Her panties were back up. It was our turn. The bravest of the three of us went next, at which time my friend’s mother poked her head in the door to let him know it was time for lunch. She gasped in horror. Our hearts dropped. In the blink of an eye, our feet took flight, all accept an angry mother’s son that was doomed to face the consequences. Caught and scarred for life.
Imagine a small town in 1950s Wisconsin. That’s where and when this happened. My next scarring came when I inadvertently referenced a female body part to my mother. It was during time I had been hanging around my father’s the auto parts store, listening to the teenage boys that were gathered around their Chevys, blustering about going to Texas for a little Texas pussy. Back at the house I found my mother in the kitchen and told her I was going to Texas for a little Texas pussy, then shrank to the floor when she screeched. Knowing Texas was a sunny state, I thought those boys had been talking about sunshine. I can still feel the scars from that lecture. No wonder I had reached mid-life before I got out in a public park reserved for nudist and enjoyed the feel of the sun on my skin.
So why are so many so uptight about the human body?
The human body is a sensual, mysterious, beautiful work designed by Mother Nature. Why aren’t more of us celebrating and enjoying it?
So what’s wrong with this picture?
She’s dressed for a day of sun and swimming … he’s dressed for what? A snowstorm?
So how about this … or at least something close
or better still, this …
I know … we’re not all young and beautiful. So what? Isn’t life too short not to enjoy the sensual joy of our body, even if it’s not in perfect shape? If everyone was perfect, this would be a very boring world. So why not get out there and feel alive, feel the sun, the fresh air and other people’s eyes on your skin?
I recently spent a week on the Florida west coast, a state that has 2276 miles of beaches. In the whole state, there is only one legal nude beach, Haulover near Miami. What’s up with that? Two or three city blocks out of 2276 miles! Every man I saw on the beach that I went to, young and old, was clad in those ridiculous balloony outfits. How do they swim in those? What keeps the wind from blowing them away? When they float they look like a guy that fell from the sky and landed on a parachute.
I live in Texas, a big state, millions of people. In the entire state there is just one place human beings can get naked, legally that is. McGregor Park, commonly known as Hippie Hollow, a sunny, sloping, multi-tiered shore on Lake Travis just north of Austin. My wife and I have spent weekends there: a motel room by night, sun and fresh air by day, sharing the unspoken kinship with other like-minded naked adults, looking and being looked at.
Free Spirits & Baggage-free Minds
Refreshing
Biker’s get naked for Earth Day
By Christopher Crosby in the Maine Campus
As the sun glinted off of assembled bikes, the air ripe with the smell of drying paint and the scents of spring, a slight breeze carried trills of nervous laughter and ruffled through shirts and pants scattered haphazardly on the packed dirt road.
Around me, belt and bra buckles unclasped in unison and fell to the ground.
I hesitated, looking around at the 50 plus people in various states of undress and, taking a deep breath, I removed the last vestiges of my modesty.
For nature and journalism, I was prepared to do my part.
Whether loved or hated, the much-anticipated naked Earth Day bike ride, a University of Maine tradition, was back again.
Dating back to 1970, April 22 sees celebrations on campus of International Mother Earth Day, as it is recognized by the United Nations.
Embracing the all-natural spirit, I joined other brave souls to bare all for the planet. Disrobing, we smeared ourselves in green paint — some applying lotion to keep themselves sleek and shiny.
I arrived at the determined meeting point — the out-of-the-way intersection of Grove Street and Allagash Road — panting for breath. My trusty steed, a relic of a bicycle with two flat tires, seemed inadequate. I was sure I would end up separated from the group.
Trying to shake my trepidation, Amy M-, one of the event’s organizers, said it was the largest showing of nude bikers she had seen in her three rides.
“It’s great every year,” she said. “It’s liberating.”
Bryan Mayo, a relaxed three-year naked ride veteran and co-organizer for this year’s event, described what would be the worst-case scenario.
“Falling off your bike,” Mayo said. “It’s the only rule we really have: If one person goes down, we all wait.”
After clothes are removed and collected in a volunteer’s car, the crew sets off. John V- and Robert K- — struck by a touch of genius and wielding the shaft of a vuvuzela — lashed a chair to a platform and pulled the contraption behind a bike chariot-style.
The most adventuresome of the lot — a unicyclist whose wheel was adorned with a paper reconstruction of the earth — boldly peddled in the front of the line.
Men Having Fun
Nude Theater Going
Nudity on stage – but how about off?
From the Guardian.co.uk
A ‘clothing-optional’ performance in Toronto suggests theatres should reach out to non-traditional audiences – naturists included.
You’ve probably heard this piece of advice dished out to a nervous performer before: to relax, picture the audience naked. Last week, however, actors Maev Beaty and Erin Shields went one step further – and actually performed in front of a naked audience. In what may be a theatrical first, they held a special clothing-optional performance of their play Montparnasse at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille.
“I would say the advice should probably be rewritten,” Beaty joked to me over the weekend, confessing that, rather than relaxing her, all the naked flesh reflecting the footlights briefly made her self-conscious. “It was like a whitey-pink wall facing us. It was incredible.” Since the end of the 1960s, nudity has been a fairly common sight on stage, from Hair to Ian McKellen’s King Lear. Nudity in the audience, however, has remained the kind of thing that gets you arrested – as Pee Wee Herman learned.
Thursday night’s groundbreaking performance of Beaty and Shields’s acclaimed two-woman show about nude life-models in 1920s Paris was the result of some creative thinking about how to get bums in seats – literally, as it turned out. Wanting to reach out beyond Toronto’s usual theatre-going crowd, Groundwater Productions and Theatre Passe Muraille targeted all sorts of niche audiences: models, art students and, by programming two performances with American Sign Language interpretation, the city’s deaf community.
But the most unconventional idea was the brainchild of producer Gideon Arthurs: since Montparnasse is such a flesh-friendly show – the two actors are frequently nude as their characters pose for the likes of Picasso, Chagall, Pascin and Soutine – why not invite naturists to a private performance? Bare Oaks Family Naturist Park helped the theatre company out by creating a Facebook group, and soon naturists were buying tickets from as far afield as Ottawa, Ontario, and across the border in Buffalo, New York.
Eventually news of the clothing-optional performance leaked out to the general public on Twitter, where many mistook it for an early April Fool’s joke. “Seriously? Who’s paying to steam-clean the chairs afterwards?” tweeted local dramaturge Toby Mallone aka @shksprn. (It turns out that naturists don’t want to sit their naked bottoms down on dirty, public theatre seats either. “It was a BYOT event – bring your own towel,” Beaty explained to me.) Judging by the comments made to the actors and online, Thursday’s naturist spectators – atypical not only because they were nude, but because they were 80% male and not regular theatregoers – really appreciated being made to feel at home.
And that’s ultimately the lesson others independent theatre companies may want to take from Montparnasse’s experiment. As the near-capacity crowd proved, reaching out to non-traditional theatregoers – nudists or not – is a smart move. What other untapped, if not necessarily undressed, groups are out there just waiting to be welcomed into the theatre?
The Immoral Human Body
From KOAT (7) News in Albuquerque
SANTA FE, N.M.
Women members of Santa Fe’s city council are telling their male colleagues “no” when it comes to regulating how little people can wear in the City Different.
The Santa Fe City Finance Committee voted down the latest ordinance drafted by several male members of the council after receiving complaints about this year’s World Naked Bike Ride.
The proposed ordinance would require people to cover up their genital and buttocks areas and females to cover their breast areas. The proposed ordinance defines nudity as:
Nudity means the showing of the human male or female genitals, pubic area, or buttocks with less than a fully opaque covering, the showing of the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any part of the nipple, or the showing of the covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state.
The current law only requires coverage of the primary genitalia.
The three attending Finance Committee members are also the three female members of the council.
Councilor Patti Bushee said she voted it down because it could create discrimination based on gender and could wrap the city up in expensive lawsuits.
“It’s just unfair to mandate in a law that men can take their shirts off and women can’t,” said Bushee. “I don’t think this was that big of a problem that we even needed to get into this.”
Even though the Finance Committee voted down the ordinance, the full council could still approve it. The council could hold a public hearing and then vote on the issue as early as September.
If the women of the council remain united in their opposition to the ordinance, it would take one more council member to join them to defeat the ordinance.
Look at these immoral sinners! Just because they wanted to come together to enjoy the sun on their skin, the fresh air, to experience the uninhibited brotherhood-of-man, by some estimations they are destined for hell.
Free Souls
Ever wonder what it would be like to shed your daily trials and inhibitions and join in?
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. Breath-Taking Masters of Art
Unsigned
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Emmanuel Benner-1879-Hunters in Wait
Emmanuel Benner is one of the foremost painters of the figure, and one of the greatest masters of the nude in particular, who exhibit at the Paris Salon. He was born at Mulhausen, in Alsace, and studied under Pils in Paris. His pictures, which, like “A Study,” are usually very simple in subject, possess an extraordinary naturalness of color, and are equally lifelike in modeling and spirit.
Like his twin brother, the distinguished artist Jean Benner, Emmanuel Benner commenced his life as a designer for the mills and factories of Mulhouse in Alsace, where he was born in 1836. At the age of thirty, having amassed some means by strict economy, he devoted himself entirely to art, his masters in painting being Eck, Henner, a fellow Alsatian; and Leon Bonnat. He at first painted pictures of still life, portraits, and genre subjects, and commenced exhibiting at the Salon in 1868. In 1875 he struck out in a new direction, and his masterly paintings of the nude won him immediate favor. The character of his art has been sufficiently adverted to in Part I. of this work. Benner won his first Salon medal in 1881, with a picture very similar in character to “The Sleeper,” which was entitled “Le Repos.”
- Annibale Carracci-1583-1585-The Dead Christ
Annibale Carracci was born in Bologna, and in all likelihood first apprenticed within his family. In 1582, Annibale, his brother Agostino, and his cousin Ludovico Carracci opened a painters’ studio, initially called by some the Academy of the Desiderosi (desirous of fame and learning) and subsequently the Incamminati (progressives; literally “of those opening a new way”). While the Carraccis laid emphasis on the typically Florentine linear draftsmanship, as exemplified by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, their interest in the glimmering colours and mistier edges of objects derived from the Venetian painters, notably the works of Venetian Oil Painter Titian, which Annibale and Agostino studied during their travels around Italy in 1580-81 at the behest of the elder Caracci Lodovico. This eclecticism was to become the defining trait of the artists of the Baroque Emilian or Bolognese School.
- Annibale Carracci-1595-Sampson Imprisoned
