Last week, Cleo from Topless Topics announced that she’s throwing in the towel. Although we should rather say that she’ll wrap it around. For the longest time, Cleo has been promoting gender equality and the right for women to be top-free on pretty much every social medium out there. But one after the other kicked her out and shut her down. Why? Because she leads her movement by example. In all her content, she would be bare-chested. Sometimes talking about the right to free the nipple, other times about completely random topics, with the hope that people would finally get used to seeing a half-naked woman and not immediately think about sex.
Cleo will continue her fight for gender equality, but she will do so following the rules of Silicon Valley. Meaning either clothed or blurred on any of the mainstream social media.
Censorship on social media
Everyone who creates content that includes some sort of nudity is always walking on a thin chord when it comes to social media. We’ve personally spent a fair amount of time in Facebook jail and had our account on Instagram banned several years ago. And let’s be honest, the number of “sensitive body parts” that we publish online is hardly any more than the average commercial for shower gel.
Here’s a quick overview of the nudity policies of the most popular social media platforms:
- Instagram & Facebook: No genitals or female nipples. Butts are allowed if they are not the main topic of the image.
- Youtube: Nudity is not allowed when the purpose is sexual gratification, nor when breasts, buttocks, or genitals are the focal point of the video.
- Twitter: All nudity is allowed, including porn, as long as it’s legal and doesn’t promote sexual abuse.
- TikTok: No nude breasts, genitals, or buttocks are allowed.
- Snapchat: Only allows depictions of nudity in non-sexual contexts.
- Pinterest: Nudity is allowed when it’s in a non-sexual context.
Interpreting the rules
This leaves us with many questions. For example, what is the “main topic” or “focal point”? In Cleo’s case, she’s most often sitting topless in the center of the screen. Focal point? Well, probably, hence her videos get banned from YouTube. Would it be better if she was sitting on the left or right side of the screen with something bright and flashy next to her?
Another hard one is “when the purpose is sexual gratification”. It’s quite absurd because sexual gratification is mostly in the eye of the beholder. Are Cleo’s videos meant to sexually arouse people? Absolutely not. But it’s pretty sure that several men and women have had sexual pleasures from watching her videos. If we shouldn’t post anything that could sexually gratify people in any way, they’ll have to shut YouTube down. Lots of people have a fetish for feet, nylons, bathing suits, lingerie, and so on.
It’s not only up to the creators to interpret the rules, but also to the moderators. And that’s where the problem lays. If the person (or algorithm) that needs to approve your content thinks that it’s sexual, you’re doomed.
When nudity is allowed
A long time ago, we’ve given Snapchat a try and remember that it did contain quite some nudity. In fact, the principle of only showing a picture for a limited amount of time before it’s shredded has probably been one of the accelerators of modern-day sexting. Until people found out that you can take screenshots and that the half-naked picture your crush was only supposed to see for 10 seconds now lives on for eternity on the web.
We don’t have a lot of experience with Pinterest either, although many of our pictures are on there and until now, we haven’t received a single complaint. Given that the platform attracts a lot of artists, including photographers, we imagine that Pinterest people need to try to maintain the balance between non-sexual and sexual nudity more than any other platform.
This brings us to Twitter, currently the only mainstream social medium that allows most kinds of nudity. Non-sexual and sexual. The one place where naturist content creators can live without fear and completely be themselves. Or is it?
The disadvantages of allowing nudity on social media
For a very long time, naturists and nudists have tried to explain to the world that nudity doesn’t need to be sexual by default. That there can also be something like non-sexual social nudity. The current landscape of social media doesn’t play to our advantage. Most often, either no nudity is allowed or all nudity is allowed. Which pretty much states that there are no different types of nudity. An unspoken but very clear message that they send out to their billions of users.
On Twitter, we see what happens when nudity is allowed. Lots of naturists can happily be themselves and post their naked holiday pictures. But these get completely mixed up with sexual accounts. If we look at our follower list, many of our followers (re)tweet porn images or videos. Which makes us wonder why they are following us. Of course, one can be interested in both naturism and porn, and that’s completely fine. But we doubt that those who only tweet porn are reading our messages about non-sexual nudity.
Once again, we can only guarantee the purpose of our content. How it is perceived by others is completely out of our hands and not something we should worry about. Except, when our content is being reused. We may post a picture with the purpose of showing how great a certain naturist resort is, someone else might post the same picture on another account for completely different reasons.
Fake naturists and other strange accounts
Nudity sells, that much is sure. If you quickly want to grow an audience on Twitter, a couple of naked pictures (preferably of young women) can do a lot of magic. If you’re running a fake dating site, for example, this is a great way to get attention. Unfortunately, there seem to be millions of people out there who easily get seduced by the thought of dating a young naked woman. These villains won’t bother hiring models and take out a camera, they just steal pictures from other accounts.
Others create fake accounts just to get attention. If you’re a middle-aged man looking for erotic chats or picture exchanges, a profile with a handful of pics of you sitting naked at the coffee table won’t easily get you noticed. If you pretend to be a young woman or a couple, the odds will be much more in your favor.
And then there are the voyeurs, who get excited by seeing people naked without them knowing and by sharing their candid pictures among their communities.
Why don’t companies want their ads among nudity?
When we tried to earn a bit of money with advertising on Naked Wanderings, we were surprised to see how our applications to the main advertising platforms got rejected one after the other. The reason was always the same: Nudity. But our nudity isn’t even explicit. You’ll have to spend a lot of time on our website to even encounter a female nipple, let alone genitals. Why is it ok to have their commercials appear in movies with much more explicit scenes than what you find on our website? It doesn’t make sense…
Once again, the question is how to further define nudity. We imagine that many companies may not have such a big problem with seeing their ads next to our scenic shots that happen to include a naked butt, but next to a hardcore porno clip is something completely different. Or next to a candid picture of naked teenage girls. Or next to pictures that have been stolen.
Other than that, nude accounts often tend to be, to quote a wise man from Alabama: “Like a box of chocolates”. You never know what you gonna get. Today, the account looks very genuine, tomorrow they might start posting porn. The moderation process is just so intensive and time-consuming, that the easy solution is to ban nudity altogether.
The copyright solution
Imagine this: What if you were only allowed to post content on social media that is your own or to which you’ve gotten the official consent to republish it? This would eliminate all the fake accounts and plenty of porn accounts. Filling up an account with other people’s pictures and videos is easy. But if you can only publish your own, it requires hard work. And as a consequence, it requires that you’re comfortable with having your own naked body on the internet.
We’re sure that the number of accounts that publish sexual and non-sexual nudity would drop hugely. Which could mean that nudity won’t be such a big disturbance for social platforms anymore. The chances that ads appear next to something nudity-related will be much less, and if it happens, at least you’ll know that it’s genuine.
Here’s a shoutout to those who dream of becoming Silicon Valley hotshots: If you can make this happen, you can actually redraw the social media landscape. You may not just solve the problem of nudity but also that of fake news and probably plenty of others. How hard can it be to check every image or video you try to post against a database that contains the data of the creator?
The revival of naturism on social media
As long as the fake accounts, the voyeur accounts, and the porn accounts outnumber the genuine naturist accounts, we shouldn’t expect less censorship on social media for non-sexual nudity. But if we can solve the copyright issue, it might not take long before Cleo can once again advocate for topfreedom in her most top-free way.
Another welcome consequence could be that fewer naturists might be reluctant to put their nudity online. Today, we need to be very aware that everything we post on the internet might start leading a life of its own. What we post on our Twitter account today, could easily appear on someone else’s account tomorrow. Or on a voyeur porn site. But if we would be certain that it can’t be used anywhere else without our approval, online naturism might really start to flourish.
TIP: If you want to keep following Topless Topics, here’s an overview of where to find Cleo now.
PICTURE CREDIT: Some of these pictures belong to Topless Topics. Of course, we’ve asked permission and you should do so too if you want to use them as well.
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MeWe seems to be the best medium for simple nudity on social media at the moment which is why both Christian Naturist Fellowship and FuerteNat are based there. No censorship.
Reddit is another platform that allows nudity. It does allow all nudity including porn, but there are a few good quality, well moderated naturism/nudism related subreddits.
Your social media solution is a good one I must agree.
But we do this to ourselves. Many popular naturist blogs mix nudism with sexuality. I’ve read “the future of naturism is the LGBT community.” Wrong.
And why is there a gay section on every nude beach? Is that not blending sexuality with nudity?
It’s not just that community. Mazo Beach in Wisconsin got shut down due to illegal behavior, part of which were couples of all sexualities heading into the weeds for “trysts.” Another popular Wisconsin resort shut down last year because of nudists who couldn’t behave sexually. Still another was nearly shut down by the couple running it for the same reason: “those people violated our home,” the owner told me, nearly in tears. They remain open but only to previous visitors with extensive background checks. No newbies.
And that is all within 100 miles of my home. How much more abuse of our lifestyle is occurring out there?
Until us true nudists actually enforce the simple standard of non-sexual nudity, we will forever be stereotyped. The national organizations need to do a significantly better job at educating the public (and nudists) as to what real naturism is. And us real naturists need to do a better job of weeding out the misfits.
It’s definitely true that there’s an abuse of naturist places and that this is a really hard problem to solve. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying. We’ve met several naturist groups who actively control one or more nude beaches. Most of the time, only their presence is sufficient.
See, Cleo has a serious point – using something like Mewe *defeats the whole purpose of what she is doing*. Why? Because, while its a bit hyperbolic to say so, “Why use a social media system that no one uses?” This is obviously not accurate, but her intended audience is literally *not* the people that already agree with her. There just isn’t any point in shouting loudly into a room full of people that already think social nudity is fine about how people need to stop seeing social nudity as a bad thing. It might feel better than being shot down all the time, but its basically pointless.
Also, on the note regarding copyright.. This makes me uneasy in all sorts of ways. We have already seen the effects, sometime suicidal on the part of the people pushing it, of corporate copyright pushing an agenda of, “No one should be allowed to post anything any place, ever, which we claim belongs to us.” From fan sites shut down by the very companies they gave free advertising to, to one guy whose *only* method of getting bloody youtube to stop feeding all the money he made of a video to some other person with more power, and a false claim of copyright on his own content (which still isn’t cleared up), was to actually file a claim of his own on his own video, so that any money made from ads shown with it would “split” and be paid to both him, and the other claimant, and who knows what other insane madness is out there due to this stuff, without a great deal of precise language, care, and a very narrow definition of what is being protected and why, any “copyright” designed to keep people from stealing nudes and reposting them on porn sites is inevitably going to get used by some bastard to screw other people out of legit usage. And, in the end, the nudists are likely to still lose, and it will be to some idiot with 10 lawyers, and endless pockets, who figures out a way to twist the law around and make it look like the people posting their own family photos have someone stolen their corporate IP.
I am not saying I don’t agree in principle that there needs to be a fix, and that expanded IP protection might be part of it. But.. almost no one, outside of corporations, has won jack shit from anything passed so far to expand such things. Which makes me real wary of how any such protection, what ever the intent might be, can work, without someone finding ways to twist it, and use it as a knife against the very people it was intended to protect. In theory, *existing* law already makes all this stuff illegal already. It doesn’t seem to help.
About the only thing I can think of would, maybe, be a clear rule that you can’t, without clear permission, and/or ownership, post things to porn sites.. but, that doesn’t do anything about porn bots, people that steal everything from every place already, etc. And, again.. no expansion of this sort of thing has ever protected the “little guy”, so far, only the people who can hire a bunch of lawyers to argue something like, “It was posted on our site, which we bought last week, so we claim to own everything on the site, so we own the right to repost it to the porn site we also bought the same week. We have 5 lawyers. What do you have?”
I don’t freaking trust the legal system, as it stands, to do anything other than shove “undesirables” further into a corner, and hand everything not nailed down over to corporations. Too many people, have, are, and will continue to be, screwed over by such legislation, while the one that *should* be punished… keep skating by, untouched.
Imho, a huge amount of care needs to be taken, going down that path, at least here in the US, and.. recently, Europe, and other parts of the world, have been taking their cues *from* the US on copyright, patent law, etc., to everyone’s detriment in far, far, far too many cases.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Patrick!
In fact, copyright regulations already exist. If someone takes a picture of this website and publishes it on another website, that’s a copyright infringement and we can sue them. But who does that. Theoretically, it shouldn’t be too hard if we and the other website owner are in the same country. But that hardly ever happens. Especially porn sites are hosted in countries with few rules or enough corruption to make lawsuits a joke. It would take lots of time and money and there would be very little guarantee.
Additionally, social media often have small letters saying that by posting media on their platforms, you’re giving them the authority to re(publish) your content. What happens when one of their users republishes our content is quite unclear.
So we’re not really looking towards a legal solution, but rather a practical one. A way for us to make sure that our content just can’t be republished, without having to ruin a picture with a huge watermark.
Yeah. A practical solution would be nice, but.. I can’t imagine what the heck that would even be. There are all sorts of attempt to prevent people just saving a pic to their computer, then reposting it, for example, but short of demanding that every company stop making, and/or disable, all ability to take screen shots…. And, even if you managed that, some idiot would just use their cell phone. So, then what?
Its bloody frustrating, but legal solutions are a mess, and “practical” ones.. may just not be possible. Closest I could think of is imbedded ID data (not a visible water mark, in the image). Some formats allow additional meta data, but that is easy to find, and any such solution would need to be “known” to be useful, and that lets it be stripped out, and it doesn’t stop someone republishing, it just makes it very clear (until they find a way to rip out the data and then claim it never contained any) who it belongs to. And, you are right back to, “The legal system is a mess, and no one can afford to sue every idiot that is doing it.”
I don’t know what, if any, solution exists, or is even possible.
How about face recognition? If you are able to register your face, you could technically prevent others to publish anything that has your face in it. And we’re pretty sure that at the moment body recognition is possible too.
Today, if you’re working with models, a model release needs to be signed. This too could be registered, saying that your account can’t just publish pictures with your face, but also that, that, and that face.
Hmm. Interesting idea… Body recognition is a bit.. iffier though. Face recognition is like mapping a finger print. There is enough clear variation to not “confuse” two people, but, kind of like finger printing, its only “assumed” that it will always work in all cases (usually its like, “If it seems to be a 90% match, accept it.”, thing, or like that, since even with a finger print there is no way you could get a machine to hit 100%. Faces.. betting, even with the best tech, you would need it to be like 80%. The “deep fakes” everyone is terrified of now days require 40+ hours (or more. I don’t remember the actual number) of the application learning the face its trying to map, by redrawing it, and learning to map it to another body, just to work at all, and this is using GPUs that normal do stuff like run the latest high end 3d game, to do the processing.
Body recognition… I just don’t see it. I very much doubt there is enough “data” there to make an accurate map, unless you are mapping bits that wouldn’t be obvious outside a porn shoot (I am reminded of the wall of vagina’s someone did as an art piece, using plaster casts of dozens of women…) Ironically, you probably could get a nice “map” of the electromagnetic field of a person, and they used an experimental version of this at a HOPE conference to have the modified wifi system they had set up track people by how their own EM field caused unique disruptions in the network signal as they moved around the transceivers, but that doesn’t exactly show up in photos. lol
Still, for IDing who is “in” a photo and thus who it belongs to, maybe.. for using it as an, “Its a photo of the person that is trying to upload it.”… well, err, that kind of limits *what* you are going to be posting by a fair margin, since that kind of excludes friends, people you got permission from, but who don’t want to be in the database (or which you can’t easily add), etc. And.. if you used it for that purpose, then oh boy would trouble start if you did “body recognition” and the person’s body being posted wasn’t an adult (since there are bound to be people screaming, how ever stupid the screams might be, about how the, “authentication system must be storing pictures of kids in it!”, despite this not being bloody how any such system would work.
I can’t even manage to explain how to scan a bar code on a phone to someone, and why just “taking a picture of it”, isn’t the same as using the store’s coupon app, trying to explain to someone in the “moral minority”, as my brother likes to call them, that, “It maps distances between things, and you can’t reconstruct a body from that, so no, there are no actual ‘pictures’ on there.”… Might as well try to explain global weather patterns to a flat earther.
It could be a tool in the arsenal in some ways, I suppose, but probably only as another means to “prove ownership”, not really as a, “I really own this, and have the right to post it.”, kind of thing. Especially since the best “AI” we have, and it would have to be an AI that determines if this, “do they own it/or are they in it?”, test is passed or failed “still” flags cartoon sheep, tree limbs, patio furniture, and stuffed animals as, among a long list of other silly things, “nudes”, sometimes.
Important to mention is that we haven’t really thought this through in a very technical way 🙂
But if you upload an image, mapping it to other images in an existing database should be piece of cake. Because other than faces and bodies, there are many other aspects of an image (colors, patterns, etc). This could largely solve the problem of stealing pictures.
And even if it only works 50% of the time, 50% fewer fake accounts would already be a huge step forward 🙂
Facebook have been doing effectively this on their own platform for a long time. Obviously it’s only on their platform but you could imagine it could be extended to other platforms. I couldn’t comment on the practicality of applying it across the entire internet.
See this story: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/19/571954455/facebook-expands-use-of-facial-recognition-to-id-users-in-photos?t=1615543703297
“ Facebook is expanding its use of facial recognition software to alert users when photos of them are posted on the platform — whether or not they are tagged in the photo.”
We know that Facebook uses face recognition because now and then the platform tries to auto-tag us in our friends’ pictures. But given the number of pictures of us that get stolen and republished by others on Facebook, their notification system still seems to have a lot of flaws…
Nick and Lins, I think you’re being disingenuous about Cleo and her troubles on the internet. It would actually be much more interesting if you would do an honest examination of what she’s doing, and question whether naturists should have any sympathy for her. Cleo is a webcam model (that’s a term you can look up on Wikipedia). She makes videos where she appears partly naked, and hopes that people will send her money. Some webcam models offer much more clearly pornographic material, but I think it’s necessary to consider the audience for Cleo’s videos, and what that audience wants to see. I don’t think it’s enough to say as you did, “sexual gratification is mostly in the eye of the beholder”. This is nudity being used to bring pleasure to viewers, with the hope that they’ll be willing to hand over cash. If she kept her clothes on, or were male, she might have less difficulty with the media hosts, but her enterprise would never have had any chance to make money.
And that leads to another awkward issue which you’ve failed to address. You said “Cleo has been promoting gender equality”, and maybe that’s true as long as it suits her. But I would claim that the whole operation depends on complete lack of gender equality: who’d ever want to see a man dressed like Cleo and acting the same as Cleo? We live in a society where voyeurism is completely routine, and it’s very largely women who are the ones everyone wants to see. Later in your article you talk about how showing images of attractive women is guaranteed to get attention, and so there’s a motivation to steal pictures. If gender equality is a virtue, then I think we’ve got to be ready to say we don’t want to consider images of women as more interesting or attractive than images of men. And when we see anything being advertised using pictures of women, naturists should be the ones to point out what’s happening. That might involve naturists seeming very eccentric compared to the rest of the world!
I agree that these are awkward issues and it’s easier to ignore them than to tackle them. But then again, maybe the things we don’t want to talk about are the things that are most in need of being talked about!
Really? REALLY? Maybe you need to watch her videos, see what she is promoting, and saying, and how many bloody times she has flat out said the exact opposite of what you accuse her of, and been pissed off that most of the people that view stuff from her seems to be porn bots or idiots that can’t freaking comprehend she isn’t doing it so they can get off (Some of the more stupid ones I have seen her, or a moderator, ban on the spot). And, how the f is she “acting”? Sitting, topless, but only topless, in front of a camera, and talking about social issues, politics, etc. Just talking. Nothing else, just freaking talking. Yeah, there have been 1-2 cases of her full nude *when talking to naturists*, or other people comfortable with that.
Seriously.. I think you are the one with the problem here John P, and some of your assumptions, including, “Why would anyone want to see a topless man dressed that way and talking about the same sort of things.”, borders on… well, you follow it up with sexist comments about voyeurism and attractive women, so.. use what ever label you think is appropriate for that kind of BS.
As for her “making money” from it.. the same bullshit argument could be made for any group that collects money, then uses that to pay for permits to go into public to get their message across, while nude, or topless, or anything else. Some people even make a living off of advocacy, and Cleo doesn’t come even close to doing that, but, by your logic, they should ever do anything, unless its entirely free, without getting any thing for doing so, even if the money is spent on a web site, or computer equipment, or just paying bills. Nope – the only “good” advocate is the one that never asks for donations to keep doing it.
Sure… And getting money makes her a cam whore, not an actual advocate. Yeesh…
Well. I’ll take it that you disagree, then.
Obviously, Cleo’s videos are often watched for the wrong reasons. But there’s absolutely no way to avoid this. And as long as she also gets her message through to the right persons, it’s a win. If among 100 wankers, there’s one woman who thinks “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with my breasts and it makes no sense that society’s rules are different for men and women”, Cleo has made a change.
Hi John, as women tend to be much more objectified than men, images of naked women still appear to be more attractive than images of naked men. This is exactly what Cleo tries to tackle. By always appearing (half) naked, she partially hopes that people will get used to seeing a naked woman without it being something sexual and partially she claims that it should be her right to appear half-naked and not be banned, just like men can appear half-naked. Because that’s what gender equality is about.
We’ve known Cleo for quite a long time and have been following her actions. And we can promise you that what she does is genuine. But we understand the confusion because of the monetary aspect. We’ve been written about this in previous blog posts too. Creating videos, pictures, blog posts,… takes a long time. In most other niches like travel, fashion, food, etc, content creators have a variety of options to earn money with what they do. But when your content is about nudity, those options disappear. We can’t use mainstream advertising platforms, there are few brands willing to work with us and social media constantly limits our options.
That’s why many naturist content creators are moving to sponsorship platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans, or are exploring platforms that do allow nudity, but those are unfortunately often linked to porn.
Some time ago, Stella Cordes (aka A Naked Girl), started doing naked cooking shows on the Chaturbate website. We very much regretted that decision, because Chaturbate is obviously a porn site and by having her show on that platform she basically links non-sexual nudity with porn. But we also understand her decision. If no genuine platform is willing to host your content, you need to do something…
I fully agree “A Naked Girl” on Chaturbate sounds like the last thing we’d want connected to naturism! But I don’t think Cleo was very helpful either. However, you say she’s stopped her webcam lecturing, so there’s no point in arguing. You two have a site that’s about naturists, a man and a woman together, out doing naturism, and that’s what I believe makes us look best.
Not going to bother addressing the point that your.. implication was unreasonable, and bordering on equating her with sex workers (not that I actually personally have a problem with those. I happen to think its insane that rapists are treated more fairly that people that sell sex, just as one example, and the new, “they are *all* victims” nonsense has actually even robbed them of help and support they would have gotten as a criminal.), so will just point out a basic fact here. Cleo isn’t trying to make “naturism” look good, or promote it. Sure, she grew up a nudist, would certain promote it if that was her sole cause, but what she is trying to accomplish is to change opinion about the idea that nudity, and specifically female nudity, is so heinous that its always porn, and should always be treated as such. Assuming you live in the US, like I do, and that may be a wrong assumption, then half the states in the nation have laws that “technically” make nudity legal, as long as it doesn’t cross certain lines, and more than a few states, or merely cities in some states “allow” women to be topless, but.. most of the country doesn’t, its not a protected right, or what the law says is flat out ignored, because “women showing breasts is sexual, therefor they are always breaking the law, even if technically full nudity might be legal, or not specifically illegal.”
And, as has been pointed out, it weirdly “costs money” to do advocacy, unless you are doing it as some sort of half assed hobby, and invariably, do to the fact that this stupidity is, if anything, worse on the internet than it even is in the real world, the only “options” you end up with is, “Spend even more money to host it yourself, or host it on the only places that won’t just flat out ban you, which is a porn site.” The former costs money, the latter *undermines the whole point of trying to convince people its not about sex*. And, your solution seems to be, unless I am utterly mistaken, “Hide behind walls, like a normal nudist/naturists and don’t even bother trying to change the minds of all those idiots out there that don’t get it!”
Great, if that is your thing, you do you. But, some people would like the attitudes about nudity in general, never mind social nudity, to change, and that only happens if all those clueless people, who don’t get it, are given at least the “opportunity” to watch something by someone like Cleo, and go, “Oh! That is what is going on. Now I get it!”
And, it needs to change, because between dwindling numbers, “moral minority” type conservatives, who want to erase everything they don’t like, if they can get by with passing laws to do so, and everything else going against nudism/naturism, without a serious change in view by the public about some of it, there won’t “be” any way to defend it. Right now, the authoritarian purists have other fish to fry, but some of those fish are on the “edges” of nudism/naturism, and it would only be a matter of time as they win victories in their mad goal of erasing ideas they don’t like, before they start in on the already “existing” lies they tell each other, about all the freaky sex stuff they are “sure” really happen in our fortressed walls, out of the public eye.
Having the only people that advocate for change, at all, to the public, have to use the very sort of site that they are trying to convince people we are not associated with, and/or spend money they don’t have to host stuff themselves, then jumping all over them if they try that, for “asking for money”… yeah, that’s not going to do anything to either change minds, or stop the fanatics from successfully lying to anyone that will listen to them.
Personally, I think a lot of the naked advocacy stuff “is” changing minds, to some extent, but… no one expected the dirty dozen of wacko right wing religious nuts to proclaim they thought we should have a king again, and that said king should erase 100 years of social progress, to “fix” the nation, *and* pick a cross between PT Barnum and Lex Luthor, with a bad spray tan, to be that would be king. Sensible people should be terrified that this happened at all. Anyone who isn’t in an “acceptable group”, according to the sorts of that supported that insanity should be, if not terrified, then damned nervous. Because, lets be honest here, unless DT had been invited to watch a nudist resort reenact scenes from Game of Thrones, and the women there lets him, “Grab their ….”, there is no way in hell, if nudists had ever been on his radar, that one of his evangelic backed bills, or executive orders, wouldn’t have banned them entirely.
And none of the mad monks that backed him, or anyone else that supported his, or anyone else’s, pushing to, “rid the world of sexual deviants”, have magically gone away since he left office.
We need more people like Cleo, and, unfortunately, *everyone* who does what she tries to do is going to be victim of the same censorship, harassments, misrepresentation, and hate, from people who think we are all freaks. And, at the bare minimum that is just sad and unreasonable. But, reality is that its way beyond that, and it wouldn’t take much, with “no one” really trying to fix the perception, or change minds at all, for the enemy to convince the public that we are a “problem”, and not just weird.
Thanks for this long comment. An important thing that you mention is that Cleo doesn’t promote naturism/nudism. She promotes gender equality and fights for less objectification of the female body. But we understand that her actions can be misinterpreted. Some people might say: “If you don’t want your body to be objectified, hide it”. Make sure to cover your roundings. But it doesn’t work that way.
It’s similar to keeping nudism behind high fences. One could argue that when nobody can see it, the chances of running into trouble are much smaller. But also here, this doesn’t work because you’re just feeding the idea that nudism/the nude body is something bad and shameful that should be hidden.
In the end, the forbidden fruit is often the most attractive and the source of fears, misconceptions, and legends. What is out in the open is much easier considered normal.
Exactly. And yet, some people flat don’t get it. They see such advocacy as a threat to their own interests. This is usually backwards though, because it means the people that don’t understand, and maybe even fear it, have free reign to misrepresent and attack the thing that such people imagine they are “protecting”, by insisting on walls. This is ridiculous for many reasons, not the least because *we* where not the ones that insisted on the walls in the first place. It was a poor/false compromise with people who where already misunderstanding, and wanted to end nudism in the first place.
I always find it ironic that, as much as there has always been an element of the madness of thinking that nudity and sex are intrinsically connected, it wasn’t a “problem” that needed to be legislated a few hundred years ago, and you can find historical records of both a) people stripping down to swim, without a thought of any of this nonsense, “OMG! You can’t do that!”, and b) even the religious people, who are often the worst detractors, allowed it in certain cases. The latter being, I think, the funniest. It went from, “If you wish to be cleansed of sin, then stand before god as you where born, and be baptized in public, in the nearest river.”, to doing it while clothed, but often with something that becomes transparent when wet, to being hidden in the basement, to, finally, making even the robes thicker, so as not to result in anyone, even family, who may be all that witness left at this point in many cases, seeing anything. And.. for what exactly? And why, if the original rules for this made sense, doesn’t this offend their god, instead of making him happy? lol
Someone put it well, when talking about some books that have come out in the last few decades. Such books often list all the ways we improved our thinking, and then tack on, as one of those improvements, “We are so much more rational that people in past centuries.” It would be funnier than heck, if they where not actually being serious when saying this. We are not becoming Vulcans at all, as much as I kind of wish we where some times.
Or, as someone else put it, we misnamed ourselves. We claim to be homosapien – “Wise man”, but, in reality, we are “homonarans” – “the story telling man”. And a bloody lot of those stories are neither wise, nor rational.
Dear Patrick,
Please don’t group “conservatives” in a lump. I am a conservative, however, I am also a Christian naturist who believes 1) that God created the human body naked and unashamed, and called ALL of us “very good” (Genesis 1:26-31), 2) that the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45 – Jesus Christ is the Last Adam) restored us to our “prelapsarian condition” (see Leo Steinberg’s book, “The Sexuality of Christ in Early Renaissance Art & in Modern Oblivion”), 3) and there are MANY passages about good nudity in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, which most Christians either ignore or deny they exist. Ignorance, to them, is “bliss.”
From my perspective as both a biblical scholar and a Christian naturist, having an attitude of awe and wonder about our beautiful bodies, both male and female, has brought me a freedom, a peace, and a sense of balance I had never known before. I attempt, on a regular basis, to inform people who are ignorant of the truth of our beauty, by doing live figurative sculptural illustrations in public venues (such as art galleries). I have noticed how my artwork has positively impacted MANY people, even bringing them to tears. One woman, after standing behind me (unnoticed by me, she was so quiet) while I was working on a nude sculpture), said, “Please don’t stop doing your artwork!” I turned around, and tears were pouring down her face. She had been standing reading my testimonials included with my artwork on the walls of the gallery. She was only one of MANY who have said similar things to me, while viewing my artwork.
If we would simply testify to the beauty and goodness of our naked bodies, even if we do this while clothed, the truth of this would sink in first, and change the minds of those who might have been uncomfortable with nudity in the first place. Truth first. Experience second. This is my philosophy based on my own experience.
I am so disappointed. I joined the Patreon yesterday and was heartbroken over what was happening with her. I’m 47 and retired 10 years ago. When I am able to align my beliefs with someone who clearly has the same, and I can add value in time or resources, I feel obligated to at least get involved and use my past experiences. I am so disappointed that it was so misrepresented. Now I’m beginning to think back, and she wanted to find a way, as long as it wasn’t on a porn site. Because as a stop gap, it could have rested on their servers, even if they were not made available to see. Then probably create a g-suite and build ala carte of needed things. And then rock and roll. I am so very confused on what the true story is now.
Cleo unterstützt Naturismus nicht, wenn er als jene Bewegung definiert wird, die sich versucht strenger an sogenannte moralische Regeln in Bezug auf Sex zu halten, als die wildesten Tugendhüter.
Cleo würde ich als Künstlerin sehen. Auch jene Nacktköchin ist eine solche. Künstlerinnen zeigen etwas, wie sie es ganz persönlich sehen und wie sie in der Lage sind, es darzustellen.
Nun kann das Publikum sehr unterschiedlich sein. EIn großer Teil wird wegen der weiblichen Nacktheit zusehen, besonders auf einem Pornokanal. Hier wird aber nicht Nacktheit als Verkaufsförderung oder Pornografie gezeigt. Das werden alle sehen und aushalten müssen. Wie Kunst wirkt, ist kaum zu messen. Sie kann aber etwas anstoßen, in Bewegung setzen.
Die Freikörperkultur, der Naturismus oder Nudismus wurde auch durch künstlerische Provokationen in Gang gesetzt.
Es waren Tänzerinnnen, Malerinnen und Autorinnen, die etwas in der Gesellschaft bewegt haben. Leider schließen viele Naturisten einen großen Teil dieser Geschichte aus der Freikörperkultur aus.
In Deutschland wird der nationalistische, schwülstige Fidus weit höher gewertet, als Künstler der Brücke, die sich zum Zeichnen nackt an Seen trafen.
Eine Olga Desmond wird als Teil der FKK gesehen, weil sie mit Pionieren bei sogenannten Schönheitsabenden auftrat. Die große Zahl anderer Tänzerinnen, die ebenfalls nackt auftraten, wird als zu unmoralisch gesehen. Es wird nur selten versucht, das etwas differenzierter zu sehen.
Wie viele Menschen, die solche Kunst sahen und erlebten, fühlten sich angeregt, es auch einmal mit Nacktheit zu versuchen? Alle hatten ihre ganz eigenen Gefühle und Ideen dazu. Wenige haben etwas darüber hinterlassen. Viele Menschen und Organisationen, die den Nationalsozialisten nicht gefielen, gab es am Ende des Krieges nicht mehr. Was ging da alles verloren? Müssen wir die geschichtlich entstandenen Grenzen des Denkbaren beibehalten? Nein, wir brauchen mehr Übertretungen, wenn wir mehr soziale Nacktheit wollen.
Das Bild von den Naturisten, die sich hinter Mauern verstecken und die die Einstellungen zur Nacktheit, die ausserhalb existieren, hinnehmen oder sogar unterstützen, finde ich sehr treffend.
Hello,
I have wright my Text in german. Now the Text is very modified. What´s the Problem with the translateprogram? I can test, to whrite an text in english, but it is very difficult for me. My german text should be cleared please. It´s terrible.
The Translation from english to german it´s o.k.
Hi Eckhard, the reason is that our translation program thinks that everything that is written on our website is in English. Including the comments. So, it tries to translate your German comment from English to German, which doesn’t work and results in strange text. If you look at this blog post in English, you’ll see that your comment shows just fine in German. Sorry about the inconvenience.
Copyright law is very complicated. There are a lot of grey areas, especially with images on the internet. If you publish an image on a website, whether it has a copyright watermark or a digital signature, you are by publishing it giving permission for it to be downloaded to a computer or other device, because the computer cannot display that image without downloading it. Now, once that image is on your computer you can open it in editing software and if you significantly alter it (and there’s one of the grey areas – what constitutes significantly altered?) there is an argument that you have created a completely new piece of artwork which you then own the copyright on. Then it comes back to whether the original creator of the image can afford the time and money to go to court to argue the case. Someone said to me, if you don’t want your images stolen from the internet, there’s only one sure way to prevent it – don’t post them on the internet.
Censorship on Instagram and Facebook (the former owned by the latter) – It’s really crazy, but on Instagram, where nudity exposing genitals and female nipples is not allowed, there are literally thousands on images, new ones posted daily, of braless women wearing see through tops where their nipples are clearly visible, or very thin tops with the outline of their nipples very clear. Then there’s the camel toe. Again, thousands of images of women wearing shorts, yoga pants, bikini bottoms, with very obviously no underwear, often doing yoga or other gymnastic poses involving spreading their legs, or any pose for that matter, that clearly displays a significant camel toe, i.e. the clear outline of their vulva with the material often deep into the cleft, leaving almost nothing to the imagination. Instagram and Facebook seem to be OK with this, despite that it’s obviously done to cause sexual arousal.
Another grey area is the one of naturism versus pornography and where the line is. It isn’t a line it’s a large grey area. As you have mentioned whether something is arousing is really down to the viewer more than the photographer or subject. There are people who would be turned on by the mere sight of an attractive naked young woman walking along a beach. That sometimes comes from their own psychology rather than just the visual – some men find it arousing to know that there are girls who like to walk about in the nude.
There’s also mention by several people of the term “genuine naturists”, what constitutes that? There are a lot of women/girls (this mostly applies to females) who are genuine naturists but also do nude modelling from art to porn. One example is a beautiful Russian model called Katya Clover who has been around on the internet for years and has shown in many posts and websites that she genuinely is a naturist or nudist but also an erotic art and porn model. There are photos of her in poses on beaches that are quite obviously posted on the sites they’re on for their erotic value yet are no different to what you can see at any naturist beach. Again, a large grey area. Who is to say that a person can’t be a genuine naturist but still find an attractive naked young woman arousing to look at?
You’re absolutely right about the gray zones, and we believe that these are the main reason why mainstream social media believe that censorship is necessary. It’s very easy to define which level of nudity is allowed because you can express it in body parts. But it’s impossible to define which “type” of nudity is allowed. How do you define non-sexual nudity? A naked woman alone on a beach should obviously be considered non-sexual. The same naked woman on the same beach with her legs wide open is a completely different story.
Most of all, it creates a loophole. Who did ever say that a naturist woman is not allowed to sunbathe with her legs open? Maybe she’s taking a nap and opened her legs while asleep. But people with the wrong intentions can obviously use this loophole to publish sexual content under the term “non-sexual”.
There’s this example of a naturist magazine that won a court case decades ago about publishing naked families in their magazine. This seemed like a huge win for the naturist world. Finally, they proved that family naturism is not perverse!
But it also opened pandora’s box. Even today, there are websites where you can buy images and videos of naked children and families. They categorize themselves as “naturist”, so there’s not much to do about it. But which genuine naturist would buy videos of some stranger’s kids???
As you mention, even by excluding certain body parts on social media, the porn problem isn’t solved. There’s the see-through clothing, the cameltoes, and so on. The IG account of Pornhub has more than 12 million followers. They follow the rules, there’s no female nipple or genitals to be found. But come on…
I think the problem is and always will be that as long as we (humans) are sexual beings, which we are, there can never be non-sexual nudity. We as naturists may go about our business in the nude without any sexual activity or intentions, but there will always be other people who are stimulated by it. It’s not abnormal or perverted for a normal red-blooded man to find a gorgeous naked girl sexually arousing to see, whether she is simply relaxing in the nude or not.
Why shouldn’t a naturist woman sunbathe with her legs open? No reason at all! My exes all used to do it, not because they were exhibitionists, but because it’s comfortable, and allows the patches of skin between their thighs and vulvas to tan. They weren’t doing it for attention or to give anyone a thrill, but that doesn’t stop someone getting a thrill from it.
It’s no different than seeing an attractive girl in the street. She may well be wearing a short skirt and high heels because she thinks it looks nice and she likes the style, but it doesn’t stop guys seeing it as sexy and arousing. Shall we ban girls from wearing short skirts and high heels? No of course not.
But I’m afraid that’s why non-sexual nudity will never exist 100%, even if recreational public nudity becomes the norm, just as clothing can’t be entirely non-sexual. The only difference between being nude and not being nude on a beach, for example, is if you’re nude your genitals are uncovered. If they are hidden in even the skimpiest of bikini bottoms or swimming trunks, you’re not considered to be nude. And that’s the simple reason that many non-nudist/non-naturist people see nudity as sexual.
The problem isn’t that we are sexual beings. Naturists can also find other naturists sexually attractive (some won’t admit this to “safe the name of naturism”, but that’s baloney), but we learned how to handle this. For us, there’s no difference between finding a naked person attractive or a clothed person, we’ll react in pretty much the same way. But this is where it often goes wrong. People who don’t understand naturism will interpret our nudity differently. This is why it’s important to educate people about naturism and nudity. To explain to them that our nudity is not an invitation, nor is it meant as entertainment for others.
I disagree. It’s definitely part of the problem that we’re sexual beings. You can’t educate someone to not have those feelings and urges, because they’re a natural instinct. If someone who isn’t a naturist becomes turned on by seeing you naked, you have no control over that no matter what your intensions are, and most probably neither have they. Which is why you are right to say, “People who don’t understand naturism will interpret our nudity differently.” I would say, even if they do understand naturism, they still might interpret our nudity differently.
Well said @timA