I enjoy reading questions and answers on Quora. I learn about a lot of subjects and I like putting in my two cents on topics that I have some knowledge of. I do so under the name Rick Orlando, which is, of course, the name I use here.
Yesterday a question came up there that got me thinking: Are Nudists Born or Made? If you follow the link, you can read my response. Meanwhile at about the same time, Nick Alimonos of The Writer's Disease wrote a very interesting article Sex Nudity and Science which I think is a "must read". His article least likely to become a nudist has a lot of parallels with my own life. Including my growing up not very far from (actually, scary close to) where he grew up. Maybe it was something in the water...
Nick brings up the point that when he had a pituitary problem and his testosterone level sank, he lost interest in being naked. From my understanding, having low testosterone causes men to lose interest in just about everything. Plus, why do so many women love being nudists? Or for that matter, why do so many of us of "advanced age" with lower testosterone levels still love being naked?
Beyond that, in the "Sex and Science" article he ponders the "nature vs. nurture" question. In other posts I've talked about my background of being likewise painfully shy well into my 20's, yet raised in a family that was apparently more casual about nudity than most other families around me were. Humm... So did I come to identify myself as a nudist because it developed naturally from my upbringing? Or was I genetically predisposed to become a nudist because I inherited it from my mother, who was the most casual one in the family about nudity?
I thought back to when I was dating my then future wife and she told her mother that I liked being naked (she has a weird habit of outing me, which I've learned to appreciate). She said that her mother's response was a nonchalant "maybe he's a nudist". What the heck was she thinking when she said that? That men have their unique kinks, but at least that one's a rather harmless one? As in, sorry dear, he was born that way and that's the way he is. Or that he's been conditioned or influenced to be that way and maybe he'll grow out of it. What's the truth?
So yeah, why do I like being naked? The more I think about it, the more I think why the heck shouldn't I like being naked? It's more comfortable, it's often more practical, I feel better about myself when I'm naked, and I feel happy for others when they're naked and feel accepted by me simply as they are.
Thinking further about it, I'm just resentful that my culture doesn't accept everyone just as they are. And that for a long time, I didn't accept myself, simply as I was. It's not that clothing is a perversion, but that the need to hide oneself in it so quickly becomes one.
So am I different? No. I'm sorry to say that other people have just simply made themselves different from me. After a couple of bad decades of not being happy being what I was, I became happy to be as God made me and I've been happy to be that way ever since.
