Reasons to be naked No.13

Clothing hides the natural diversity of human body shapes and sizes. When people are never exposed to nudity, they grow up with misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations about the body based on biased or misinformed sources–for instance, from advertising or mass media.

As a result, breast augmentation has long been the leading form of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. In the 1980s, American women had more than 100,000 operations per year to alter their breasts. Helen Gurley Brown, past editor of Cosmopolitan, says, “I don’t think 80 percent of the women in this country have any idea what other women’s bosoms look like. They have this idealized idea of how other people’s bosoms are. . . . My God, isn’t it ridiculous to be an emancipated woman and not really know what a woman’s body looks like except your own?”  Paul Fussell notes, by contrast, that “a little time spent on Naturist beaches will persuade most women that their breasts and hips are not, as they may think when alone, appalled by their mirrors, ‘abnormal,’ but quite natural, ‘abnormal’ ones belonging entirely to the nonexistent creatures depicted in ideal painting and sculpture. The same with men: if you think nature has been unfair to you in the sexual anatomy sweepstakes, spend some time among the Naturists. You will learn that every man looks roughly the same–quite small, that is, and that heroic fixtures are not just extremely rare, they are deformities.”

Taken from “205 Arguments and Observations in Support of Naturism” compiled by K. Bacher