The Nudist Idea

The Nudist Idea
Author: Cec Cinder
Publisher:
Total Pages: 678
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Nudism
ISBN: 9780965208505

Naked

Naked
Author: Brian Hoffman
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814790542

In 1929, a small group of men and women threw off their clothes and began to exercise in a New York City gymnasium, marking the start of the American nudist movement. While countless Americans had long enjoyed the pleasures of skinny dipping or nude sunbathing, nudists were the first to organize a movement around the idea that exposing the body corrected the ills of modern society and produced profound benefits for the body as well as the mind. Despite hostility and skepticism, American nudists enlisted the support of health enthusiasts, homemakers, sex radicals, and even ministers, and in the process, redefined what could be seen, experienced, and consumed in twentieth-century America. Naked gives a vibrant, detailed account of the American nudist movement and the larger cultural phenomenon of public nudity in the United States. Brian S. Hoffman reflects on the idea of nakedness itself in the context of a culture that wrestles with an inherent sense of shame and conflicting moral attitudes about the body. In exploring the social and legal history of nudism, Hoffman reveals how anxieties about gender, race, sexuality, and age inform our conceptions of nakedness. The book traces the debates about distinguishing deviant sexualities from morally acceptable display, the legal processes that helped bring about the dramatic changes in sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the explosion in eroticism that has increasingly defined the modern American consumer economy. Drawing on a colorful collection of nudist materials, films, and magazines, Naked exposes the social, cultural, and moral assumptions about nakedness and the body normally hidden from view and behind closed doors.

Naked at Lunch

Naked at Lunch
Author: Mark Haskell Smith
Publisher: Nero
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-05-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781863957342

'We are safely away and you can now enjoy a ... ' There was a pause, as if the Cruise Director was having trouble choosing what, exactly, he should call what was about to happen. Finally he said, ' ... a carefree environment.' Folk have been naked in public for centuries. But being a nudist is more complicated than simply stripping off. In Naked at Lunch, Mark Haskell Smith uncovers nudism's fascinating history - and gets involved, baring all himself. He visits a Spanish town where clothing is optional, and travels to the largest nudist resort in the world: a hedonist's paradise in the south of France. From clothes-free hiking in the Austrian Alps to a Caribbean cruise on the 'Big Nude Boat', Haskell Smith takes us on an entertaining frolic through the good, the bad, and the just plain naked.

Naked at Lunch

Naked at Lunch
Author: Mark Haskell Smith
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0802191789

“A delightful and informative look at nudism throughout history and around the world.” —The Seattle Times People have been getting naked in public for reasons other than sex for centuries. But as Mark Haskell Smith reveals, being a nudist is more complicated than simply dropping trou. “Nonsexual social nudism,” as it’s called, rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century. Intellectuals, outcasts, and health nuts from Victorian England and colonial India to Belle Époque France and Gilded Age Manhattan disrobed and wrote manifestos about the joys of going clothing-free. From stories of ancient Greek athletes slathered in olive oil to the millions of Germans who fled the cities for a naked frolic during the Weimar Republic to American soldiers given “naturist” magazines by the Pentagon in the interest of preventing sexually transmitted diseases, this book uncovers nudism’s amusing and provocative past. Coated in multiple layers of high SPF sunblock, Haskell Smith publicly disrobes for the first time in Palm Springs; observes the culture of family nudism in a clothing-free Spanish town; and travels to the largest nudist resort in the world, a hedonist’s paradise in the south of France. He reports on San Francisco’s controversial ban on public nudity, participates in a week of naked hiking in the Austrian Alps, and caps off his adventures with a week on a Caribbean cruise known as the Big Nude Boat. Equal parts cultural history and gonzo participatory journalism, Naked at Lunch is “an absolute hoot” (Los Angeles Magazine) and “a total joy” (Meghan Daum). “Smith puts on his reporter’s hat and takes off everything else as he explores the history and sociology of nudism.” —Los Angeles Times

A Brief History of Nakedness

A Brief History of Nakedness
Author: Philip Carr-Gomm
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1861897294

As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas—it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity. Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing the ways in which the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals the ways in which religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin—or even simply the word “naked”—to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses. From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, A Brief History of Nakedness surveys the touching, sometimes tragic and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies.

Seekers of the Naked Truth

Seekers of the Naked Truth
Author: Paul LeValley
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 8120841697

Why would I spend a good portion of my time over the last 35 years gathering information on the Gymnosophists? The story begins even earlier. As an undergraduate student in the Flint College of the University of Michigan, I pursued an English major with a strong history minor-always looking for something between the two, and rarely finding it. Then in my practice teaching, I happened into one of the early experimental high school courses in Interdisciplinary Humanities. With the exciting interrelationships between art, literature, music, philosophy and history, I said YES-this was what I had been looking for. So I pioneered in teaching high school Humanities for the next few years. Interdisciplinary Humanities was a bottom-up movement. Gradually, colleges began offering Masters programs to give teachers the rich background they needed. I decided I was not tied to Michigan where it was cold; I would find the best Masters program in Humanities anywhere in the world, and go there. Well, it turned out that the best Masters program in the world was at Wayne State University in Detroit, of all places. Unlike other programs that were really just double majors, Wayne offered truly interdisciplinary classes. Moreover, they offered an Eastern track and a Western track. Knowing that I would never find that Eastern track anywhere else, I studied interdisciplinary courses in the cultures of India, China, Japan, and Egypt. (The middle-eastern professor was on sabbatical when I was there.) I especially liked India-perhaps because I had already travelled around the world, and India impressed me the most.

The Catholic Church and Modern Sexual Knowledge, 1850-1950

The Catholic Church and Modern Sexual Knowledge, 1850-1950
Author: Lucia Pozzi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2021-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030797864

This book is the first to present a comprehensive historical picture of the modern Catholic concern with the body and sexuality. The Catholic church is commonly believed to have always opposed birth control and abortion throughout the centuries. Yet the Catholic encounter with modern sexuality has a more complex and interesting history. What was the meaning of sexual purity? Why did eugenics matter to Catholicism? How did the Society of Jesus interpret the idea of overpopulation? Why did Pius XI decide to issue the notorious encyclical Casti connubii on Christian marriage – the first modern papal pronouncement on birth control, abortion, and eugenics? In answering these questions, Lucia Pozzi uncovers new archival and unpublished records to dig into Catholic responses to modern sexual knowledge, showing the Catholic church at times resisting, but also often welcoming, scientific modernity.

Free and Natural

Free and Natural
Author: Sarah Schrank
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 081229629X

From Naked Juice® to nude yoga, contemporary society is steeped in language that draws a connection from nudity to nature, wellness, and liberation. This branding promotes a "free and natural" lifestyle to mostly white and middle-class Americans intent on protecting their own bodies—and those of society at large—from overwork, environmental toxins, illness, conformity to body standards, and the hyper-sexualization of the consumer economy. How did the naked body come to be associated with "naturalness," and how has this notion influenced American culture? Free and Natural explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body and the environment from the early twentieth century to the present. Sarah Schrank traces the history of nudity, especially public nudity, across the unusual eras and locations where it thrived—including the California desert, Depression-era collectives, and 1950s suburban nudist communities—as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. She also highlights the many tensions it produced. For example, the blurry line between wholesome nudity and sexuality became impossible to sustain when confronted by the cultural challenges of the sexual revolution. Many longtime free and natural lifestyle enthusiasts, fatigued by decades of legal battles, retreated to private homes and resorts while the politics of gay rights, sexual liberation, environmentalism, and racial equality of the 1970s inspired a new generation of radical advocates of public nudity. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Schrank demonstrates, a free and natural lifestyle that started with antimaterialist, back-to-the-land rural retreats had evolved into a billion-dollar wellness marketplace where "Naked™" sells endless products promising natural health, sexual fulfilment, organic food, and hip authenticity. Free and Natural provides an in-depth account of how our bodies have become tethered so closely to modern ideas about nature and identity and yet have been consistently subjected to the excesses of capitalism.