This is probably the number one question that we are being asked (with “How do you make money?” as a close second, but that’s for another blog post). Some propose their own opinions. Are we prudes? Are we not really naturists? Are we posers who are just looking for quick fame on the internet? Are we keeping the juicy stuff to put behind a paywall?
Truth to be said, as Naked Wanderings evolved over the years, we got this question less and less. People started to trust that what we do is genuine and valuable, even without nipples or genitals. Until recently, when we started making videos on YouTube and reached a completely new audience. Our “not so naked” presence became a hot topic again, so we figured that it was time to address the elephant in the room.
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Digestible naturism
Naked Wanderings started from the idea that we could do things differently than the (then) available naturist content. Our goal was to tell the world about naturism and hopefully inspire them to give it a try one day. We figured that we could do more than the typical naturist magazine or the old-fashioned naturist website. There were a number of things that we specifically wanted to counter: The patronizing tone, the endless list of rules, the many articles about what naturism is not, and… the frontal nudity.
We wanted to create content that just shows that naturism is fun. Not with the intention to compete with the “traditional” naturist content but rather to bring an additional perspective. Most of all, we wanted our content to be easy to digest, and not using frontal nudity was an important part of that. Few people dare to read a naturist magazine on the train, fearing that the other passengers will think that they are creeps. But they can read the Naked Wanderings blog on their iPads, because other than the occasional butt, there is hardly anything that can shock the person next to them.
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Our struggles with social media
Even though we didn’t believe in the necessity of full-frontal nudity, we weren’t always as careful as we are today. If you’ve been following Naked Wanderings from the very beginning, it’s quite likely that you’ve seen some body parts that you won’t find in our pictures today. Most of the time from a distance and surrounded by nature, but they were there. Maybe you didn’t even notice it, but the social media algorithms most certainly did.
We learned about a thing called “Community Guidelines” when we received our first Facebook ban. Facebook was the first social medium we used to promote our blog and it didn’t take long before it turned against us. We figured that this was just an unlucky shot and continued doing what we had been doing before. But not for long. More bans would follow and eventually we also lost our very popular Instagram account.
We were at a crossroads. Either we should turn away from mainstream social media (except for Twitter) or we should start studying those Community Guidelines and make sure that we comply 100%. As you probably realize, we chose the latter.
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Love/Hate relation with censorship
We chose to make sure that all our content is social media proof. On one hand, we believe that we need mainstream social media to make our words fly as far as possible. But also, because we started noticing that censorship actually did come with some advantages. SAY WHAT? We know, if you’re a naturist with an online presence you probably think that we’ve gone bonkers. But you’ve also noticed the amount of crap and harassment that is happening in online naturism.
When we talked with other naturist content creators, they often complained about how the “dirty comments” regularly outnumbered the genuine comments. About how they heard “nice tits” more often than “great scenery”. We didn’t really have that experience. Of course, we did get some harassment and dick pics, but not to the extent that others used to get this. We realized that to those who are surfing the web to see nudity, we’re probably the most boring naturist couple in the world.
Another advantage came from the traditional media. Remember that we wanted to make our content easy to digest? Newspapers and magazines want the same. They love nudity because they know that those articles typically attract a larger audience which is good for their advertising income. But they too want to make sure that you won’t feel ashamed to read their paper on the train. We gave them the perfect solution and it didn’t take long before our story appeared in newspapers around the world. Goal to spread the word about naturism as far as possible… CHECK.
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What about platforms that do allow nudity?
Whenever we explain why we censor our content, this is the obvious follow-up question. A valid question indeed. We are very active on Twitter and we are co-founders of Naturist Hub. And there are several other platforms where we shouldn’t fear getting banned. So why don’t we let it all out on those? The answer is “time”. Writing blog posts, taking pictures, making videos, and setting up social media strategies takes a lot of time. If we need to add creating quality content that does include nudity to that list, we’ll either need to work more hours or work faster (and thus decrease the quality of our other content). And for what? Would uncensored content prove that we are real naturists?
But what if we could make an income from uncensored content? What about our Patreon Page? It’s not hard to see a profitable model here. If we would put uncensored content (or, why not all the way full frontal nudity?) on Patreon, it would definitely generate a much larger income. This means that we could cut down on other income streams and not have to sacrifice time or quality. It sounds like the perfect plan, and it’s something we have considered. But then our moral comes into play. Selling our nudity just feels like prostitution.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying that all naturist content creators on Patreon are online prostitutes. Our friend Hector Martinez, for example, puts a lot of focus on Patreon. But you don’t need to get a subscription if you just want to see him naked. He’s nude all over his Twitter account. Instead, on his Patreon, you’ll just find more of the same content. This is a big difference.
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So will you never see us naked?
We think that this is a very weird question but still we get it from time to time. “If you are naturists, why are you never naked?”. It blows our minds. What do you mean? Have you ever looked at our Instagram? We are naked in pretty much every picture! Of course, we understand where this question comes from, but if you think that we are not naked just because you can’t see our genitals, you’re probably not the audience we are trying to reach.
The question we are personally struggling with the most is whether what we do isn’t counterproductive. By using censorship, aren’t we actually sending out the wrong message? Are we in fact shaming the nude body? We truly hope that people can see through our censorship (figuratively, of course, because we’ve gotten damn good at it) and realize that we have our reasons to do this. And if you still don’t understand why we’re not just going full-frontal, please start reading this blog post again from the top.
Just kidding, we know that many naturists don’t agree with our opinion and that is totally fine. We don’t think that our way of doing things is the only right path. We only think that it’s one of the paths. So let us know what you think!
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You guys have done more to encourage naturism and bring it into the 21st century than anyone else on the planet. You’ve also done it on a way that makes us smile and feel good (not weird) about being naked. So, whatever decisions you’ve made are good ones. Please don’t let any negativity deter you. Thanks for all of it. Please keep the content coming!
Thanks a lot Colin! And don’t worry about the negativity, we didn’t write this blog post to double-check what everyone thinks of our approach, but rather to have a reference to send people to instead of having to explain this whole thing over and over again 😉
Your so carefully censored pictures are such fun, the use of props is excellent and always makes me smile.
Thank you.
That is probably the best goal of all, to make you smile 😁
As you said, you are supplying content different from other naturists sites. It’s good to have choice. If people want full frontal nudity, there are plenty of other sites which would satisfy their needs.
Keep up the good work and don’t get diverted from your mission.
Thanks a lot!
I like you guys – you rock. But I don’t understand your mission of “naturism”. In most European countries – I’d say in all countries except Italy, Malta and Cyprus – being nude is totally accepted and no big deal, secluded nude beaches everywhere. Maybe that’s the reason why naturism is hardly ever mentioned in the news and on the decline. Go to any place, have a rental car and give it a try. What’s a pity is that topless bathing and men in speedos or strings have almost disappeared in society (unless secluded beaches).
Nude camping or resorts would never be an option for me as I get bored very quickly in some gated community and just lying around.
We think that naturism on itself and the many possibilities that it provides is still often misunderstood. For example, the resorts that you mention. There are indeed naturists who never set a foot outside of the gates and spend their time lying around. But most visitors just use the campsite/resort as a base to explore the area. They don’t mind wearing clothes throughout the day to visit cities and nature. But in the evenings and mornings, they like to have a drink in the sun without clothes. They enjoy going to the public showers without needing to cover up. And they enjoy the friendly atmosphere that’s so typical at naturist resorts.
And this is one of our missions. To show the world that there are many different forms in which you can experience naturism and that it’s not just about lying naked next to the pool (or on the beach) the whole time.
Good point but for me naturist resorts are kind of the opposite of true naturism. For me personally being naked is freedom like in Germany, Denmark or Fuerteventura with its wonderful coasts and islands where you can hike for hours in the buff or take a swim without being watched like an alien and you wear your bathing suit and all fine, too. It was quite amazing to see how office people in Rostock jump naked into the sea for an “after work” swim. Maybe there are more people like me and you should report more about “wild naturism” rather than the declining market of organized nude camps (am not against it but it’s a fact that more and more close or get textile, e.g. Croatia or Germany).
My original twitter account was banned, probably for nudity. I never found out the reason. I filed several requests to be reinstated but twitter never answered a single request.
Yea, we know, which is quite strange because Twitter is very accepting when it comes to nudity except when it’s in your profile or banner picture. Our guess would be that you have been reported. You tweet a lot of other people’s content. We appreciate this very much, but maybe not everyone does.
If we ever run into you at one of our naturist holidays we’d love to be part of your “censored” photos. Not sure why anyone would think they are “not nude enough”. We’ve been nude in AANR’s monthly magazine, but it was a part of a large group (once in an article about Bare Necessities cruises where we were in a couple of group photos and once for our local camp where we were in a group who finished their 5K color run). Of course it is a closed publication for AANR members, so what you do is much more public so you have a much wider audience.
You truly inspire me!!! Love to read your post!!
As a matter of interest, who is it who takes your photographs? How big a support team do you have or is it just the two of you? Some of the pictures are amazing.
It’s just the 2 of us and we take all our pictures ourselves except for a very occasional one where we get help from someone. The thing is, whenever we take a photo, we already know how we want it to look. This is super difficult to explain to someone, especially to someone who doesn’t have a lot of photography skills. So we learned that try and error takes a lot of time to get the right shot, but explaining to someone else how we want the shot to look exactly takes even much more time 😁
Good article Nick & Lins. My partner and I have been enjoying your recent YouTube videos showing some of your adventures in Spain.
We too are content creators and have gone back and forth a few times with censoring. Show full-frontal or not? Charge directly for content, or inspire enough people that they want to support you and your message? It’s a challenge for sure.
In the end, we’ve found that censoring our content doesn’t seem to go over very well with much of the nudist community. “Full Frontal” is in our name after all.
Sure, censoring will generate some revenue from those just wanting to see the bits. However, many more people, the ones we hope to inspire, will become irritated or annoyed that a nudist site or channel is censoring.
Fortunately, we’ve gained enough ongoing support that we recently opened up our uncensored content for all to view for free, with no catch.
We are now able to reach & hopefully inspire more people than ever to experience naturism…
You make a really good point: It’s all about the people you want to reach. If your audience gets irritated by censorship, you do have to avoid it at all cause. The audience we’re trying to reach is those curious about nudism and nudists who are looking for travel destinations. To them, the nudity is not the most important part.
You guys are great, keep up the wonderful work. It is always great to see someone who enjoys what the do and shares the enjoyment with people they will most likely never meet. 🙂 🙂
Thanks a lot for those very kind words Helen!
I do not believe one has to show their genitals to prove they are naturists. In fact, any requirement to do so makes me question the motives of the person asking. No photos are necessary for me to accept you are great ambassadors for social nudity, just from your writings. It is your blog, your rules, your decision what is seen, period. Keep up your wonderful advocacy in any way you see fit.
True. Social nudity is about being naked with other people in some physical space (beach, camp, etc …). It doesn’t necessarily include sharing that moment with strangers on the internet. And one may want to be naked in some situation but not others, which is totally fine. I believe a large part of nudists don’t want to share pictures of themself on the internet, which is understandable. Being a nudist is not a black and white thing anyway, you can obviously chose in which situation you are comfortable getting naked.
Thanks a lot Gary! We also don’t believe that showing genitals is a requirement to be appreciated as a naturist. In the end, most naturists have seen so many genitals before that they don’t even notice it. We actually got this remark recently on Instagram, where somebody said that if we hadn’t started the conversation about censorship, he never had realized that we were censoring.
I find the posting of nude photos in which nudity itself is the main point a bit off-putting and think that some of them satisfy an exhibitionist need. On the other hand, photos in which nudity is incidental and the focus is in the environment, the beach or the resort for example, or the activities do wonders in normalizing nudity.
It goes from “look at me, I’m nude” to “look at me having fun at this great place, while being nude”.
I do love your playful, Austin Powers, photos. Not so fond of covering up for some other shots but I get that you don’t have the time to be creative your framing every time.
Yeah, we’ve also noticed that there’s a thin line between naturism and exhibitionism and that many exhibitionists hide behind the name “naturism”. They post these pictures that are totally focused on their genitals and call them naturist pictures. We too find this quite off-putting.
I love the ingenuity of your photos using props to cover just the right spots. You are both awesome!
Thanks Scott!
Twitter is also strengthening its rules on naturist content. Recently they started classifying lots of tweets with nude content as ‘age-restricted adult content’, unfortunately translated in some languages into ‘sexual content’. Posts without frontal nude pictures are the only sustainable way to promote the general acceptance of naturism via social media.
Continue your excellent approach to advocate naturism and make it more socially acceptable !
Yep, we know. Twitter recently got a new CEO and word on the street is that he must streamline Twitter to improve advertising income. If this is true, this most certainly doesn’t mean good things for naturism/nudity. Fingers crossed that it won’t be too bad…
We do find the censored images disconcerting, an imposition that is way weird to exist, but reality is reality, practicality practical. The bottom line is that we find your output fun, and informative. The information is out there, it is apparent that you both don’t place those silly mushy bars on yourselves out of shame. Where you are and what you are doing get the message across. Naked is fun, wholesome.
On the other end, our blog TheFreeRangeNaturist.com isn’t censored. A part of our intent is to be authentic and to inform, to break down existing mores and assumptions. It just felt defeating in the early days, to publish calls to liberation and see our bodies not liberated. We made the decision to come out and put our bodies where our mouths were. Most of the photography is illustrative; the photos of genitals, etc. are placed incidentally, like they just happen to show up in reality.
Desiring a social revolution of sorts, it is important that people see others of their own specie’s bodies and get used to that. Frequency of nude images having fun, being natural shakes out the conditioning, the sickness of the modern social dominance. It helps nude to become a norm and acceptable in a healthy way. Someone has to place themselves out there naked. We found that once that hurdle was conquered, we became more liberated. It was done, it is out there, nothing to lose, no more fears, we have been seen. After body exposure, we were able to experience our lives better and as they should be lived, casually, comfortably nude as we desire.
So, maybe your content is geared to the newbies and informing others of possibilities and ours may be that as well. Maybe our approach is more primarily a serious next step to current naturists trapped in pens that need to get out free range like chickens from their cages. Maybe your strategy brings more viewers, as it works inside the ill-conceived structures of media censorship. It seems that both approaches are needed, each complements and overlaps and moves our world toward a world where a nude body is a healthy liberation.
Whatever works as long as we’re messaging, “I’m naked, this is wonderful, here and now. Ya jus’ gotta try this, too!”
Keep it up, please, we’re all having fun and learning and doing.
We definitely agree that both approaches are needed. If everyone would use our approach, this would be very bad for body positivity and it would totally spread the message that nudity is something to hide. And if everyone would use your approach, it would be much more difficult to reach a large mainstream audience.
You two have introduced me to some amazing places throughout the world, and whether you show a nipple or a butt cheek has had nothing to do with the enjoyment I receive from reading your blogs.
Truth be told, I have always felt a little sad/mad for you two. As a couple of naturists you clearly just want to spread the message of the joys of Naturism; but as you highlighted in this article, community guidelines and censorship have forced you to be much more careful with your posts.
I know you mention your morals and ethics as a reason not to share nice photos on Patreon, but I’d encourage not to look at it like selling your nude photos for a bit of cash, but rather a platform where you don’t have to be so cautious with carefully placed props. Don’t make it about the nude photos, make it about you being able to be who you are, and if there happens to be a peek at certain body parts then who cares on that forum.
Now I am reluctant to even offer that advice as I don’t want to come off as someone who just wants to see nude photos on the Internet. Rather I love the larger community and envy those who can be free enough (and willing to put up with enough trolls) to share who they really are without writing about censorship. Either way, love what you guys do!
Don’t worry, you don’t come off as someone who just wants to see nudity. There are many different angles to look at this problem and all of them have their pros and cons. We stand behind our approach and we feel that it’s being quite appreciated 🙂
I do think the censorship works against normalising nudity, which is what all naturist, nudist, clothes free, and nude recreation media should be striving for. Here in the UK the mainstream media are doing a good job by covering stories such as the one a few days ago about a nude man riding a bicycle through central London. The image used didn’t show his genitals but wasn’t censored. But that’s not the point. They made a clear point, as they do in all such stories now, of explaining the nudity in public (in the UK) is not illegal.
But I hold the opinion that if you want to normalise nudity you shouldn’t hide it. And that includes not censoring or hiding genitals. The fact is that anyone new to public nudity is going to see other peoples genitals. So, it should be a case of normalising genitals rather that just nudity. People are already used to seeing very scantily clad, almost nude people at beaches. Many young women are a tiny triangle of material held on by spaghetti away from being nude at any beach, pool or wherever. Some men wear equally skimpy garments on the beach. I saw an advertisement a few days ago for a new thing for men to wear at the beach. It was a bag with a cord fastening. Basically you put your penis and testicles in the bag and tie it on by tightening the cord. It looks ridiculous!
If we go nude, our genitals are visible, we should be tying to normalise that. The reat of the naked body is already normalised.
We definitely agree that censorship works against normalizing nudity. But if you’re only able to use naturist media, you’re preaching to the choir.
For example, on this blog we don’t need to use censorship. But we don’t think that the people reading our blog need to be convinced that nudity is fine/healthy/etc.
On social media, on the other hand, we can reach a lot of people who never considered the idea of non-sexual social nudity. These are the once that need to be convinced. But then we need to play by the rules of those platforms.
By the way, the expression is “preaching to the converted”, not the choir. Preaching to the choir would not be futile, because, in England anyway, many people sing in church choirs because they enjoy the social and musical, not the religious, experience. Possibly you have been unconsciously influenced by the expression “singing from the same hymn sheet”?
Thanks for the correction! In fact, “preaching to the choir” is a literal translation of the expression in Dutch
I think that your creativity in the photos communicates you are naked in these places and we the readers should join you out there.
It’s a shame that you have to censor your photos, but I understand that the audience that you are trying to reach hasn’t become comfortable with nudity yet. You censor with humor, though, which is funny (much better than a black stripe over your midsection). It is strange that women’s bathing suits seem to be getting smaller and smaller, but people won’t take the final step of losing the bathing suit completely. I think that the reason that simple nudity has not been generally accepted is because the media always links nudity with sex. Therefore, people get the wrong idea about simple nudity.
Also, yes, how do you earn money for all of your trips? Have you ever thought about leading naturist tours in different countries? I think that people would be interested in, say, a tour of naturist beaches in Croatia.
It’s not just that we want to reach people that aren’t comfortable with nudity, we also want our content to be easily shareable. If we would use different styles in different media, it would become a mess to post links on social media. For example, on YouTube we are already not allowed to link to our website because it contains nudity. Even though there’s nothing explicit.
We have different income streams: Support from our readers and viewers via Patreon, advertising & sponsorships, and freelance marketing jobs for naturist businesses are the main ones. All together, it’s enough to keep us on the road. We have looked into organising trips, but that takes so much work that we would need to stop doing some other things. And we really enjoy creating content.