How "they" see "us"

Nudity.  I don't understand why that's even a word.  Regardless of how we hide from each other, it's nothing more than what we simply are.  We're born preferring to be naked, not caring if other people are naked around us.  We had to be taught to be ashamed and intolerant of what we are.  Conditioning ourselves to feel that way about ourselves is cruel, and teaching that to our kids is a not so subtle form of child abuse.

I like being naked because it's more comfortable to be naked.  I like that being naked encourages others to do the same, and that their being naked with others makes them feel better about themselves.

We like to talk about nudism, naturism, or whatever label you prefer as if it were a secret technique, an alternative lifestyle, or a learned behavior in itself.  It isn't.  It's our natural behavior.  It's cooked into our DNA to like being human and to like what our own species looks like.  It's also our natural social behavior to accept each other's flaws as part of what binds us together as people.  That's why it takes so many years to condition children not to be naked, and why, as adults, that conditioning is so easily shaken.

People who have never allowed themselves to experience that freedom view us as curiosities.  A little perverted, driven by an exhibitionist streak that we're in denial about.  But mostly harmless, as long as they don't have to see it.  But with the Internet and the need to fill the 24 hour news cycle, people can't resist the fact that we do exist, and they're puzzled by it.

The trick is o get people to try it.  Until they immerse themselves in it for at least several hours, they can't and they won't understand.  They'll continue to criminalize what their own species looks like and they'll continue to believe that being naked is something sinister and sexual, when it's not.

We can continue to feel smugly enlightened in the privacy of our homes, at the beaches our friends would never be caught dead at, or in our walled in clubs and resorts they don't know we go to.  Or we could reach out.  If each of us convinced one other person to try it.  Not to go to nude beach and keep their swimming suits on, but to immerse themselves in it for a day, it would make a big difference.  They'd start to "get it" and we wouldn't have to be so secretive.