Nudity is the antidote to avoid the sexualization and reification of the body.

 

In summer, may be it’s because the season is favorable, I always like to write about nudity. I almost always say the same thing in a different way; the evidence that sexual tension is not increased by the absence of clothing, but precisely by its opposite: the forced and perpetual concealment.

It's a simple concept that I discovered many years ago.

In my adolescence, and due to the influence of my Judeo-Christian education, I was convinced that the strength, the sting, the fever, the rush of sexual attraction, ignited with nudity, and that the concealment of the body protected minds from the insurmountable force of sexual drive. Forty years later, I have evidence to the contrary; it is not an opinion, it is evidence, a proven fact, a progressive discovery. A coexistence in absolute nudity with diverse human groups of all ages, sexes, genders, shapes, cultures, styles... produces, in a very short time, the absolute assumption of the totality of the body as a neutral natural reality, which does not it has a direct and irrepressible relationship with sexual stimulation, or in any case it has it to the same extent as the clothed body has it. This short period of adaptation will depend on the user's decision, his education, the degree of repression to which he has been subjected... but anyway, it is a specific time after which that morbidity (that years of social concealment have been piling up in the conscious and unconscious corners of the human mind) fades like the fog descends on a hot summer day when the Sun becomes the lord of an immaculately blue vault of the sky.

This is why the fear that certain conservative religious groups have about the naked body and its vision makes no sense. What they have to do, if they want the human body not to be a fetish for them, is to incorporate it into the set of noble visions of life, to recover the naked human body for the sober day-to-day life, achieving that the material part of the human essence does not become a curse or an enemy, and that the education of children is not tainted or conditioned by concealment and fear. Nothing natural and human is cause for shame. Abandoning the use of bathing suits on beaches and swimming pools would be the triumph of the recovery of innocence; innocence damaged by concealment, by ignorance of the body, by fear, by morbidity... All in all, concealment is firewood for uncontrolled sexual tension, and cause of immaturity and neurosis.

And then, where would the sexual attraction be? Would we become asexual? No way. Sexual attraction is a treasure; it is not a phenomenon to be fought. But the boundary line of sexual attraction will be where we decide it to be, not where our repressed unconscious decides; and it is necessary, in order to be freer and to live happier, to respect each other more, to not stop seeing people, souls, where there are naked human beings, and to achieve that the spark of sexual attraction it is not born impulsively from the simple vision of the body, but submits itself to the most human features and expressions of people, in free relationships decided by the heart and the mind.

Nudity is not a scandal or a provocation. Nudity is not sex. Nudity is a part of the human essence. Nudity is precisely the antidote to avoid the sexualization and reification of the body.

Normalizing what is normal in a society that is not normal.

I do not consider that bathing in the sea and sunbathing without a bathing suit is an outrageous or strange practice. By my view, it is normal, pleasant, comfortable, civic, healthy, and it does not have a bizarre or exotic character. Normally, when I go to the beach I try to go there where traditionally this bizarre and paranoid society (that makes everything work) will not recriminate anything, nor it will throw stones at me for not wearing a swimsuit. This does not mean that down there everyone wears the same clothing; sometimes it will happen, sometimes it will not, but there are places where people do not have problems with the image of people.

And I want to emphasize that I just think about going to the beach, to the sea ... That is, when we get up in the morning, and decide to go to the beach, we don't usually think: "we're going to do nudism" nor even "we're going to a nudist beach"; instead of this, we think with desire and illusion: "we are going to the beach". And we think of the sea, the sun, the sand, the wind, the feeling of relaxation and fusion with nature ... I never think of human nudity, nor the word nudist or naturist , nor the feeling of going to a marginal or minority space, nor the conviction of being doing any strange practice. I am not an enemy of clothes; I like clothes, I like dressing as a form of identity expression, as a protection, as an artistic expression; clothing and fashion are another way in which art manifests itself, and at home I stay dressed,and in the city as well, and in everyday social life.

I don't consider anyone as an idiot for wearing a swimsuit, even though someone considered me an idiot for not wearing it.

Perhaps due to this habit of not considering the body a reality of obligatory concealment, it happens to me that naked or dressed bodies don’t dislodges or disturbs me if I do not intend to happen it. 
On the other hand, I realize that another negative consequence happens to many people; this different and negative consequence happens specifically to people that are not used to see naked bodies in a non sexual environment. These people see nudity and get excited. I can say that I usually observed this phenomenon; in fact, the same people who suffer from this phenomenon confirmed it to me. Therefore, I can certify that there are people (many people) that enter into a state of sexual alert, of excitement when they face to the sight of certain naked bodies.

It doesn't happen to me. A body is not enough for me to start a sexual desire. I find the human body beautiful. I can even affirm that nudity is the most beautiful dress of all. I can assure you that when I see naked people I always find them more beautiful than when I see them dressed, but this fact does not awaken any disturbances. And it happens to me whoever that people are, and no matter how old they are. I attribute this phenomenon to the fact that the habit of nudity on the beach throughout the summers makes my mind not to associate nudity with sexual excitement.

On the other hand, people who are usually denied the vision of the material and biological reality of the species do consciously and unconsciously attribute to it an erotic value, and therefore these people are unleashed an excitement, and sometimes this excitement appears even without nakedness, just because of the shape of a body. And some of these people, sometimes, end up seeking naked images in pornography, and so they feed back the phenomenon; that is, they further strengthen the nudity/sex association.

In my opinion, the habit of not hiding nudity in a normal and natural way on the beach undoes the sensual burden that social concealment increases.

We see what we are. We see things and people as we are and not as things and people are. The distance from the natural state of people, in all its spheres, does not lead to anything good, it falsifies each other, it turns us into objects of desire or tension, it further distances us.

On the other hand, the nudity on the beach is not just the custom of a group, or the habit of some associations, but a right of any person in society what ever ideology or militancy this person has. What is needed is to be respectful of everyone's way of life. This educational, civic, healthy value of not hiding human body should be understood better and better by people. Even today many people scandalize and prejudge and above all they lose the possibility of being humanly normal and not having a sex obsession in their heads when they encounter the vision of a body that is only human and that by the fact of existing, by the fact of going naked , or by the fact of going with tight clothes... it does not stop being spiritual, rational, cabin of an infinitely valuable spirit; a soul that is called to human friendship.

The human respect among people grows when we live this value; a value that is still unknown to many; the value of the custom of the normal vision of non-sexualized nudity in a natural, human, relational, playful and familiar environment.

And the first thing we have to do to normalize what is normal (in a society that is not normal) is to feel that it is normal, and therefore we have to avoid closets and secret groups. We don’t have to fear intolerant ones.

Even today, and even more so today with all the far right in power in so many institutions, and with the fear of everything installed in the hearts of citizens, we must work for freedom; the freedom that inquisitors of all times consider diabolical. With the slow and disguised cut of this freedom in the name of a thousand reasonable excuses, little by little the human species is moving towards a scared way of being. Enough is enough.

Kindness, evil, and teaching.

We want them strong like oaks; efficient, effective, safe, responsible. That's good. We should ask ourselves if we also want them to be human. Human in the sense of goodness.

Goodness has a bad reputation in our pragmatic world, even so it is the core of our species. As far as we move away from goodness, we lose humanity.

We want them to be empathic. I want them to experience empathy, feelings, emotions, understanding, respect. I want them to be flexible, dialogues. I want them to exercise an enough degree of reasonable tolerance.

I wish it for them and for the society they will build.

And I wonder if I have to punish them with harshness and without exceptions when they do not give the teacher all that they were asked. If I do not punish them, I run the risk of not preparing enough for a society that does not forgive the mistakes about time and time required. Even so, this last idea is the trap of the system.

The harsh and inhuman hardness of the system feeds on pedagogy that teaches us to live in a rugged and inhumane system. When I teach a boy or girl that when she does not deliver her or his homework, she or he will be punished, then I’m not only teaching her or him to be strong in this system, I’m also teaching him or her to become a controlling agent of this inflexibility. And this infelxibility is perpetuated. If I act like this, I teach him to be strict, not to understand, not to listen, and to turn (for someone else) into the difficulty against which I am preparing him or her.

On the other hand, If I decide that when he or she arrives and tells me that he or she has some family problems, trouble-makings, may be hard for him to be explained, and that have caused him or her to forget to take the order … so, if in these circumstances I listen to him or to her, and I encourage him or her to open up and tell me the problem, and if then, once I’ve listened to her or to him, I understand him or her, and so grant himor her one more day to deliver the work... Will not I be teaching him to be more human? Will not I be building a system that will work in a more harmonious way with the respect that individuals deserve as persons they are? Will not I be gaining his or her heart and making it more receptive to later teachings? Will not I make him or her stronger to resist a system that wants him or her to turn into an insect of the swarm?

I have the answer. Let each one answer for him.

My musical trip to IRELAND. Meeting Mickey McConnel and Gavin family.

On August 22, we met the Family Gavin, and their Gypsy Wagon TV. They had invited me to sing and to be recorded in their wagon, and I had the luck of knowing their natural paradise in the middle of Fintown's Nature; a green paradise of trees and grass, lakes, rivers... They were very kind with us and we spent a happy and nice afternoon of music and friendship. You can see their awesome channel of folk and music.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoiry3FOj-18ibNQe9FijDA

The other great experience of this summer was meeting Mickey McConnell.

First of all, I met the song. “Only our rivers run free”. I listened to it some years ago, through YouTube, sung by a young man in a pub of England; this man seemed a worker or a syndicalist, and he sang for freedom. I felt upset with that song, it made me cry and I didn’t know why. May be It happened because its meaning was applicable to the situation of my country, Catalonia. As I told you, It happened some years ago.

From that moment on, I searched and I discovered that that song was written by a man called “Mickey McConnell”. I learnt things about him. He was born in Northen Ireland. His song “Only our rivers run free” talked about the constittutional status of Ulster, and this song became a hit in Ireland in 1968. He made many other songs like “The little drummer boy” and “Follow the flag”. The songs of Mickey were sung by singers like Christy Moore, The Wolfe Tones, Mary Black, The Kelly Family, The James Last Orchestra...

I listened “Only our rivers run free” again in YouTube from a young singer called Sheena (now she is older and lives and sings in pubs from New York. Few weeks ago she was in derry) and I cried again. Finally I learnt to sing this song, and... from time to time, even now, I perform it in the kitchen of my home for my daughter. Now she is 11, but when she was three or four, she hardly ate his dinner, and I sang this song, an others too, so that she had dinner easier, and really she did. Now, I have just made a Catalan version of the song. I told it to Mickey last night and he loved the idea.

So… after all that… I met Mickey McConnell through facebook one or two years ago. This summer, my family and me decided to visit Ireland and I asked Mickey where did he sing and he told me about McMunns, in Ballybunion. We went to have a dinner there on August, 26, and it was great, magic, exciting… My family and me enjoyed a lot, and, in two occasions, Mickey put his guitar on my hands and asked me to sing a couple of songs. It was very exciting to contribute to the magic of the pub with two Catalan songs. If only I had knew that I was going to sing I would have prepared some irish song; I usually sing “Grace” and “The great majestic Shannon” but I don’t know them by heart, and I sang two Catalan songs that I remember and feel very well. Anyway, It was great. The atmosphere of the McMunns was bewitching, entrancing, gripping, awesome… Mickey sang “only our rivers run free” “Viva la quinta brigada” and many others. Other man whom name I don’t remember that had been a very good football trainning (and player) many years before sang too (a deep song about a worker). A woman stood up and sang too (Me and Bobby McGee). Mickey made us feel welcomed; he dedicated songs to us, he explained to the whole pub that we had come from Catalonia, he introduced ourselves to one of the owners of McMunns and some other kind people, he helped us to feel very happy in a warm and kind human climate. That night, the Irish people of McMunns turned out to be like a group of friends for us, openminded, open to other culture (Catalan culture), cheery…

So… I want to thank Mickey such a wonderful night, three days before I turned fifty years old.

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Singing in GypsyWagonTV

Singing in GypsyWagonTV, on August, 22, 2018. In Fintown (Donegal, Ireland).

Children in cages

Children in cages,

and tyrants in the White House.

Smoke in suburbs.

Maroon velvet rugs under the feet of an artificial fool.

Children in cages and human beasts in the White House.

Those who have a sick soul inhabit the palaces of the republic.

The fighters languish in the suburbs.

Where have the America of California gone?

You no longer wear flowers in your hair.

You were afraid of the freedom of your soul

and you decided to imitate 

the decadent and unfair tawdriness of the Sun King 

and all the pathetic kings in the world

that are considered superior people.

Where have all the flowers gone?

They ripped them out of the earth 

and kept in the wicker basket 

of an old grandmother who had lost her head.

They now stink, and they will not be longer flowers.

Where is the harmonics of Key West?

Where does the girl with eyes of heaven live?

The girl who swam in the nude under the bridge of San Francisco?

She abhorred freedom because of a bad hangover,

and because of the silver mirrors 

with which they bought the sacred message of the Great Spirit.

Where are you John Sebastian?

Where did you leave the younger generation?

You don’t ask your darling to be home soon anymore.

You no longer stop your song in Woodstock to make the audience sing.

Where did you leave the spoon and the dreams?

Children in cages

Children in cages

Kids in cages and decadence in the White House.

Robert Conway, Shangrila, June 19, 2018

A better life

I think you've got me mixed up

when you direct me to expire

the sweet deep wish for wind and sand

for wildness and the pure desires

shining near the waves and foam

under the burning sky of fire.

I think you've got me mixed up.

Further the water, the line of dreams,

my heart is born at noon again.

I'm just a child naked and free,

only a man beside the sea.

Further the water, the line of dreams.

Where are you, fellows, taking me?

I don't get here often enough.

Your way is bright, empty and tough.

I only need a bit of love.

Where are you, fellows, taking me?

I'm pushing for a better life,

poorer, may be, but clear and nice.

I do not want a dice to choose

my steps, my thoughts, my words, my mood.

I'm pushing for a better life.

I think you've got me mixed up.

Further the water, the line of dreams.

Where are you fellows taking me?

I'm pusher for a better life.