MISCmedia for 8/16/00
The Least "Bizarre" Sight on Earth

CONTINUING OUR OCCASIONAL examination of those wacky, wacky imported British newsstand magazines, we recently noticed two of them with cover-blurbed stories about nudist camps.

The first, Bizarre, is a popular source for odd facts and myths from all over (UFOs, crop circles, weird crimes, religious animal-sacrifice rites, etc. etc.). Its story treated adults who walk around threadless among one another, displaying the most basic, ordinary facts of human existence, as an exercise in total goofball strangeness right up there with the likes of ritual scarification and erotic self-asphyxiation.

The same month, a fashion magazine called Nova had its own cover blurb on "How to Dress for a Nudist Camp." Like the Bizarre story, this one had plenty of full-frontal photos and textual vignettes depicting males and females with non-fashion-model physiques, engaged in such normal nudist behaviors as sunning, swimming, playing volleyball, hiking, jogging, and even skydiving.

While the Nova story's text was slightly less condescending than Bizarre's, the ultimate effect was the same. Nova, which like most Euro fashion mags regularly celebrates the unclad anatomies of supermodels, seems to think something's loony about males and un-"beautiful" females treating their bodies as unshameful.

Mind you, there are reasons (besides the fact that my carlessness makes it hard to get to the camps) why I've yet to persue the organized naturist lifestyle. As I've written recently, the old hippie-hating new-waver in me has issues with utopias, real or imagined, in which everyone's expected to be homogenously laid-back and mellow, in which expressions of energy or passion are forbidden.

Nudism, from its start as an organized movement a century ago in Europe, has been exactly that.

Its early literature was full of hype about wholesome good health, the physiological benefits of the sun (in the days before skin-cancer awareness), the psychological benefits of removing one's inhibitions, and the total sexlessness of the whole enterprise.

As the movement established roots in the sex-hangup-ridden U.S., the latter aspect of the movement's ideology became expressed with ever-increased insistancy. Today, a few camps outside the official movement publicize themselves with stripper beauty pageants; but mainstream nudism, as expressed through such groups as the Naturist Society, continues to propagate visions of quiet, happy, clean-cut couples and families; all of whose libidos are so completely under control that they can freely go naked with no fear of having, or causing others to have, those ever-troublesome erotic emotions. (How do those couples get those families? We can only presume a momentary lapse of self-control.)

No, nudists aren't weird in Bizarre's usual definition. They're normal. Extra-ultra-extremely normal.

Which is perhaps the weirdest possibility of all.

(P.S.: I've been to nudist camps and found them quite peaceful indeed; perhaps too peaceful for my tastes. I've found unorganized nude beaches, such as Wreck Beach in Vancouver, to be a little friendlier and free-spirited. And the effect of public nudity isn't sexlessness but an all-over sensual aliveness in which the lower parts are neither suppressed nor overemphasized.)

TOMORROW: A progress report on the print version of this site.

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