“Take off your clothes! Imagine a world like that…” This lyric keeps running through my head. I’ve just returned from a very long family road trip, and with two fifteen-year-old young women in the car, we were all bound to listen to a lot of Ariana Grande. The lyric is from her song “imagine,” which is about the yearning for an idealized love relationship (the three words that start the lyric above are “Kiss me and”). But I keep hearing the line as a call for a revolutionary nude-positive world, especially with its echoes of pose-in-the-nude John Lennon’s “Imagine.” What follows below is inspired by the power of imagination, a power exemplified by these musicians and also highly valued here at naturistfiction.org, where we are all about shaping the ways we can perceive and understand social nudism.
This post is also inspired by Nashville Naturist on Twitter, who tweeted yesterday his thoughtful engagement with the image of a 1991 article by The Naturist Society founder Lee Baxandall. In the brief article, Baxandall explains the intention of the organization’s embrace of all walks of life. The article includes the following deliberation: “How could we propose a holding action against a cruelly textile society? We believed our clothing-optional ideal could expand and become a common value for coming generations.” Imagine that.
Imagine…
Imagine that the AMA (American Medical Association – for example) decided to promote, in addition to the standards like *eat well *exercise *get enough sleep and *feed your mind, a slogan such as *LET YOUR BODY OUT*, advocating for the practice of social nudity for all the purposes we already know and that have been researched: exposure to the sun for all its benefits; positive attitude toward body acceptance; respect for one’s body, the bodies of others, and the environment; reduced dependence on textiles, their fabrication, and their cleaning, etc.
Imagine…
Now imagine that congress (yeah, right, I know… imagine) moves beyond a declaration of Nudity as a Human Right (such as the one I wrote a few years ago and posted here) in order to pass an even more comprehensive BODY AUTONOMY bill protecting the autonomy of all individuals over their own bodies, to include all the following:
*decriminalization of social nudity
*ban on genital mutilation of infants
*complete protection of a woman’s right to choose
*complete protection of transgender rights
*complete protection of sexual orientations and gender identities
*guarantee of the right to euthanasia
Are these scenarios fictitious? At present, yes. Do they sound like intriguing premises for naturist fiction? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean these scenarios can’t inform our vision of what we would like naturism or social nudism to look like in the future!
Take off your clothes! IMAGINE A WORLD LIKE THAT…
This makes me think of Tohm Lev’s song Legalize Nudity.I also imagined a reworked Legalize It by Peter Tosh,changing the theme to naturism listing the various positive benefits like Tosh’s song does for marijuana.
It would be great if Congress could do those things.Too bad the U.S. can’t do what they did in the U.K. to ease nudity laws to allow naturism to be more free from prosecution.
Thanks, Scott. “Legalize Nudity” is a song (and video) that deserves a lot more attention. I don’t think that legalizing nudity is a priority for congress, but I can certainly imagine it as part of a large body autonomy bill!
I so agree, Will!
Look at what Star Trek did for the real world. Inventions keep coming, and many of them feel like Star Trek which was originally a book series by Gene Roddenberry.
Imagine… that we are doing the same thing for social nudity…
Not to mention the Betazoid tradition of nude weddings.
Yes! Bit by bit we work to show the way – the face of naturism at present, the way it might look in the future, and even how it may have looked in the past.
Wow!
Aiming high has to be a Good Thing.
A wonderful mix of inspiration and validation.
Thanks.
Thanks for your comment, Tim!