Nudeness and teenagers

Maybe it's because I'm a father of a teenager that I deeply know the mind's attitude of the teenagers who live in a nudist environment during the summer. I'm grateful to nature powers for the gift of not living chained to any social taboo, and the chance to teach my children to love wild nature, starting with their own body and mind.

The teenagers of this environments are 12, 13, 14... until 17 years old. In these places that people call «naturist», nudeness is not tied to eroticism, but rooted in a natural, familiar and friendly, sense. These characteristic produces a feeling of calm and normality. Adults and children are usually always naked, however sometimes teenagers put a swimsuit on, or take a swimsuit off, when they want. They like often change their image, and by their view, clothing is not a way of hiding their bodies but a tool that they use to adapt their image to what they feel in every moment. They usually strip to swim, play with the waves, sunbath, walk along the beach, but they put their swimsuit on when they want to play volleyball.

Campings make possible a deep friendship between young ones of different cultures, languages, styles... Girls and boys, Catalan, Navarrese, German, French, Dutch... spend hours laying on the sand, in the nude, without swimsuits. They usually speak for hours in english about many different matters, about the usual issues they are interested in. They spontaneously share knowledges, exchange cultural characteristics, laugh, enjoy... These moments show us how people are equal wherever we are, whatever our cultural environment is. Everybody tries to survive, fit, be accepted , accept the others, share, know, expand cultural horizons. I realize that despite the violent pulses in the human hearts, and despite the social strengths... deep in the heart of human being, kindness exists, and in the natural environments, all of a sudden, it appears. Kindness is a reality that stands inside all the human hearts when we are born and when we grow; however, as time goes by, prejudices, bias and ambition... stifle it.

There is one difference between the teenagers of free-clothes areas and teenagers of traditional and conservative campings; this difference is the obsession with the body, and specially the obsession with the hidden parts of the body that many teenagers of traditional areas feel when they meet young ones. However, the teenagers of nude areas assume the body with calm, they don't feel the necessity of watching the parts of the body that in the daily life of the society, people hide. When the young ones are used to coexist in the nude, I realise that the relationship between boys and girls in the daily society is more egalitarian, they are free from the inner strength of discovering the hidden shapes of the bodies they wish; and I'm talking not only about their life in the nude areas but also about their posterior life in their usual towns. Sometimes, the romantic love appears (the tipical summer love), and even though they live in the nude, they don't mainly fix on the topic hidden body areas, but in the color of the eyes, the beauty of a smile, the deepness of a glance, the voice, the way of being, the sweetness of a face... I talked away a long time to some of them about this matter, and instead of being fixed on the parts of the body that are usually hidden, they feel them assumed as any other part of the body. There's no obsession, there's only normality.

And they speak so long in english that they feel as if they had been in an english summer camp. At the end of the summer, they exchange their instagrams, their whattsapp, and henceforth they keep talking in the distance during the school year, despite the fact they are thousands miles far away.

The following summer, they meet again; they are older, but they do the same than the precedent summer: blue paradise of golden sea, coppery or brown free skins in the nature, cheerfulness shouting, smiles, beach parties, volleyball, dancing on the sand during the full moon nights, respectful community spirit, parties without strange substances nor stunning drinks, welcoming attitude towards newly arrived, farewell towards those who depart, interest in the culture of the country, beauty, freedom, sanity... and the skills, traits and normality of their awkward age.

Sometimes, in the beach, some strange men appear as if they were ghosts; they are the classic «voyeurs», who arrive to the beach rigid and expressionless. They walk outlandish and extravagant, everybody notices their aims. They are usually harmless, but they make themselves ridiculous. They are victims of their poor education; they are collateral damages produced by the puritanical society that condemns and hides the nude body instead of assuming its natural value. Fortunately, they are sporadic, an anecdotal minority.

At times, some integrist ideologist turns up with his inflexible rules about nudenees in FKK areas.The other day, I saw one of them He wore a cowboy hat, and he was upset because some teenagers had put their swimsuits on to play volleyball. He thought that those young ones had broken the enforced nudity of the naturist areas. «That's not right here!» he said, and I realised that everywhere the integrist people work in the same way. The integrist people assume nudeness as an enforced uniform instead of embracing freedom as the sign of any kind person. We have been evolving from a hard repression that banned the beautiful picture of the nude human body towards a freedom that we love and embrace. That old repression sentenced many generations to live in the dark of the traditional morality. According the integrist people, it seems that we have to accept the imposition of the nudeness, as if it was the victory over the old prohibition. The victory is not the imposition but the freedom; the freedom to choose, the freedom of speech, the freedom of deciding our own image. In a free society, nudeness will be chosen the most of the times, we don't need impositions. The aim that can't survive without impositions doesn't deserve to exist. The teenagers wear in their souls the spirit of the freedom; they don't fear nudeness and they don't fear freedom to choose in every moment.

In the society, the members of some families, or some groups of friends, don't think always the same about being naked at the beach; some of them like being nake, other ones prefer wearing a swimsuit. According some integrist people they should be separated and segregated even in the natural public areas, as if they belonged to different worlds. Will a group of teenagers destroy the naturist movement just because they prefer wearing swimsuit when they play volleyball?

The integrist people of any ideology (political, religious, social...) prefer the quantitative growth of their group to the growth of the freedom's level in the society. They dream about uniforms and homogeneous groups, without shades, hues or tints. They are intolerants for fear that everybody freely choose their aesthetics, ideas, believes, strategies... They are afraid for the extinction of the orthodoxy of their group. They need the orthodoxy to feel safe, because they feel that freedom it's not good enough to get their safety. Even though sometimes they think themselves pacifist, they are an army; even though they say they fight to get freedom, they are intolerant; and even though sometimes they say thet are naked, they wear uniform. Fortunately, all the aims that want to be fair and healthy breathe freedom, and integrist people are a minority. Diversity is the favourite trait of the human being, because it stems from his or her freedom, and because it also produces a new and posterior freedom. Diversity comes from freedom and produces freedom, yet the strongest chains are not the chains of integrist people but the chains forged by the tradition, the morality, the old religions, the poor education... One day people will be free at least.

Nudeness is the most beautiful dress; the natural dress of the human body. The view of the human body (of the human bodies in a natural landscape) gets to improve the human mind and its growing. The natural views, the views that all we have saved inside our brain, make us feel that we are at home, we are in our homeland, in our landscape, in our healthy environment. The natural views adapt us to our adult life, to our necessities and our maturity. On the contrary, the prohibition of that views, cuts the developing of our mind, and produces tense and repressed people, even though they don't know they are repressed, tense or nervous. What do we prefer? A teenager that has been knowing and assuming the human body as a natural and good reality in a familiar environment during his or her growing from the born to the adult life? Or a teenager with a part of the body of his or her own species banned and condemned, and continuously tied to the eroticism, as if his or her own body was a fetish? This prohibition developes a dark attraction. Forbid someone something and he or she will be for ever tied to the banned thing. The prohibition of a thing is like pointing out that thing to someone, and if that thing is a human and natural thing, the prohibition turns that thing into a dark mistery when in fact that thing is just a natural reality.

The attraction that society feels towards the banned body is exploited by some unhealthy industries and by the marketing, so... it is also a tool of manipulation and a dark shadow that works against the equality between men and women.

Maybe it's because of all this realities, that human kind (slowly but surely) is releasing from the group's morality. As years go by, nudeness is accepted as a non sexual reality; at least, no more sexual than any other reality of the life. The best ideology is the freedom; the freedom to decide our own image, and to live as everybody feels. The will of liberty will never vanish. The wish of liberty will be always beside any fair and victorious fight.