Aligning gymnophobia with homophobia and racism: good call.
I’d like to make the case that it goes deeper than that, though. Something I observed while visiting nude resorts began my thinking about this, along with a comment I heard once from someone who had been brought up by parents who took him to nude resorts. He said he had hated going to them when he was a teenager because he was constantly afraid of getting a hard-on. It would be terribly embarrassing in itself, and, to compound the embarrassment, it would also be a violation of the park’s rules!
This accords with my observation of nudist parks: teenagers and tweens are almost non-existent. The number of people in this category I can recall seeing are surely no more than a half dozen. Out of hundreds. And I never once saw a guy with a hard-on.
All the nudist parks I have visited (a half dozen, according to my mental count) have had prominent language in their rules prohibiting “lewd behavior”, which I suppose includes having a hard-on, as well as, I’m sure, fucking and masturbating. I’m not faulting them for this, because I’m sure it’s a legal necessity, but I think it’s worth pointing out that fucking and masturbating are, in fact, normal human behaviors which, if one wanted to maintain a consistent position on naturism, should be celebrated, not censured.
Ah, but there’s the matter of “legal necessity”. Let’s give the parks a break. Let’s assume that the people who make these rules only depart from their true naturist values so they can keep their parks open and stay out of jail. Let’s instead pursue the matter back to the politicians who make the sex laws and the public that elects them to do so.
Yes, the public. The public that has been and continues to be brainwashed by the same repressivists that push textilism and gymnophobia.
Inevitably, when a discussion of nudity comes up, the words “children” or “family-oriented” will be invoked. I recently confronted this personally while taking a shower in a the “Men’s” bathroom at a (non-nudist) RV park. The place was equipped, as they all seem to be, with not only a curtain to keep the shower spray confined but a second one you could pull so no one could see you undress and dress. The purpose of this second curtain has never been clear to me, so I routinely ignore it since it only gets in the way if you have to stretch your arms while drying off or reach into your shirtsleeves to dress.
Enter the park manager, who I think just happened to come in to pee while I was in the shower. He rushed over and yanked the curtain closed, yelling, “We have children in this park!”
This evidently made sense to him, although to me it made as much sense as “We have flower gardens in this park!” which I might expect to hear from an arm-waving lunatic standing on a park bench, pissing down his pant leg. The only syllogism I could create from his outburst was that if a child possessing a cock and balls saw mine, he would be harmed in some way that I should be aware of and ashamed of myself if I wasn’t.
Well, I was neither aware nor ashamed, and I do consider him to be something of lunatic, albeit probably not intentionally: he is a victim of the brainwashing apparatus you alluded to in your discussion of the media’s unrealistic portrayals of human bodies.
But “the children” is the point I want to get to. At the core of the brainwashing canon seems to be the idea that children are harmed in some way if they are allowed to have the slightest exposure to anything related to sex. Which is ludicrous, of course, since advertising is awash with sexuality, nearly always portrayed in unhealthy, unnatural ways.
Instead of teaching our children that the good feelings at the junction of their thighs are something to be celebrated and enjoyed, the media teach them that these parts of their bodies are so loathsome they may not even be shown, for example here on Medium, or on youtube or on other “respectable” sites. They’re only shown on porn websites, where the children have to click a button affirming that they are over 18, and then they can see pussies and nipples and cocks and balls and watch portrayals of sex acts completely divorced from the complexity of human emotions and real-life situations.
This subject is so deeply embedded in so many places that it would probably take a book to do it justice. I don’t have time for that, and you might not have the patience to read it if I did, so let me get to what I think is the most salient point: in our sick society we have laws that prevent parents from helping their children explore their intense interest in sex in natural, healthy ways. (Speaking as a former child, I can attest to an intense sexual interest going back as far as I can remember.)
Daddy takes his boy (or girl) out on the front lawn with a bat and ball, and together they learn about hand-eye coordination and how it relates to making the bat connect with the ball. The parents have the kids help out in the kitchen, learning how to peel potatoes or stuff a turkey by pitching in and taking part. Recently, I read in a science magazine about how researchers have found that, given the option, children will prefer to play with grownup objects rather than toys. Human kids are genetically hard-wired to learn by doing, so that’s what they do any chance they are given.
As living creatures, we only have two imperatives: (1) Avoid death and (2) Procreate. The first mandate branches off into food gathering or growing, learning defense against attackers, medical science, and so on. The second? Although procreation includes successful childbirth and protecting the young through their early, vulnerable years, at its core it is about sex.
Sex is thus at the very root of everything a child needs to learn about who he or she is. And how do we deal with it? Do we give it the importance it deserves, putting it at the center of what parents teach their children? Quite the opposite! We make it illegal for parents to teach their children about sex in anything but the most abstract, non-useful ways.
I still remember “the talk”. I was, I think, maybe seven or eight, and my dad and I were walking home from an afternoon at a museum. A rain squall came up, so we huddled for a few minutes in the doorway of an apartment building. In this milieu he rattled off a few sentences to the effect that, “the way babies are made is a man puts his penis inside a woman and shoots some sperm, and it grows inside her and comes out later as a baby.” I still remember what I thought: I thought, “What on earth does this have to do anything? Why is he telling me this during a rainstorm while we’re huddled in a doorway?” I concluded that the subject of sex must be so horrid, so loathsome, that it could only be spoken of in such an isolated, hidden place. Perhaps that was right, because we never had another conversation. The only other thing I ever got was a pamphlet somebody left on my bed when I was about 12 advising me not to jack off because it would waste the energy I needed to grow up.
Of course I didn’t stop masturbating, I just felt like a pervert for doing it. How helpful!
I’m far from being a student of the literature of antiquity, so I’m sure there’s a lot I’ve missed. (Help me out, here, anyone!) But speaking as an amateur, I have to say I’m not aware of much being written about children learning about sex in ancient times. I can’t help wondering if that isn’t because it was so taken for granted that this was done in the family that it wasn’t considered important enough to waste ink and papyrus on.
Let’s face it, up until the last few hundred years, almost all of humanity lived in one-room huts, and, to offset the near certainty that many of the children wouldn’t make it to adulthood, families were large. Is it really plausible that in huts full of rugrats, parents didn’t fuck in front of their children? My sense is that this is how things were for the millennia of human existence, and only in the very recent past have we have adopted these skewed ideas about hiding sex from children because it would “confuse them” or “harm them”.
As the mind absorbs the implications of this, the question arises: “Did children fuck each other?” It’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t. That’s what kids do; they copy what they see adults doing. There again, you don’t read about people deciding that this needed to be suppressed in order to save humanity from destruction. One might infer that the silence indicates that whatever was happening was fine. Maybe kids playing openly at fucking is actually a healthy way for them to grow up.
Did parents fuck their children? Did children fuck other adults in the neighborhood? Here the mind recoils.
Modern girls (and boys) grow up and sometimes tell horror stories of such things, of the scars they carry for life from the shame, of wanting to escape but being trapped, of enduring rape after rape for years, sometimes with the complicity of their mothers (or fathers), other times with a parent who simply withdrew into helpless denial.
But all of this takes place in our modern environment of sexual shame and guilt and repression of natural functions. Would rape, not to mention related things like workplace sexual harassment, even be an issue if sex were something people indulged in as openly and commonly as having a barbecue on the patio or playing a video game?
There are the cases where a man (usually) holds a woman at knifepoint or gunpoint and rapes her in a dark place, but that isn’t as much about rape as it is physical assault, which is a separate issue that can be dealt with in its own way.
Most rape, we’re told, takes place in that gray area where people know each other but disagree on who wants to do what. Typically, a man, either physically stronger or in a stronger social position, forces himself on a woman colleague against her will, which leads to shame that causes her to keep quiet about it and feelings of guilt, typically brought on by our social sickness that claims or implies that it was her fault for allowing it to happen.
Our toxic environment consists of body shame, sexual shame … repression piled on repression. What if kids grew up unashamed, pleased with and public about the pleasures they could bring to themselves and to their play partners? What if little boys proudly showed off their hard-ons and little girls showed anyone who cared how they could make their pussies wet with their fingers? What if parents taught their children from the beginning, both in word and deed, that sex was fun but only when everybody thought it was fun, and that no one had a right to do anything with anyone who didn’t want to, regardless of their age or even if they were a priest? What if children learned this early at home, where ideas take deep roots in young minds?
If an old-era boss, seeking to vent his shameful repression, got his dick out in his office and waved it at his young, liberated female intern, what would she do? The picture I get is her laughing and saying, “Looks like you’re very proud of your dick, sir, but I need to get back to work.” And maybe she would mention in a laughing tone around the office about how proud the boss was of his dick. Traumatized? About what? It was just an amusing episode at the office.
On the other hand, if she met a co-worker who struck a chord with her, she might get naked and fuck him in her cubicle after quitting time … while others walked by, giving approving cheers on their way to the elevator.
I can’t escape the idea that a lot of what’s wrong with our society would fix itself if only we’d let go of these weird, repressed ideas we’ve built up about not only nudity but sex.
