Nudism VS. Fur

What is this with us humans and being naked? Gosh we are so squeamish!

We seem to be so proud of having lost the fur what makes us oh so distinguishable from our fellow primates, and now we go berserk if there is naked flesh on show. Well, almost all of us lost the fur, and although to some body hair has a rugged attraction I am assuming that the majority prefers the groomed look, the more that the remnants of our ancestral skin cover have a tendency to show in areas where they are less attractive.

Couldn’t we just have kept it, made a style out of it and got on with our lives? Would have saved us a lot of money for fashionable supplements and bickering about wobbly bits. But NO! We have to make it part of our civilizing efforts to determine what can be on show and what has to be hidden away. It however seems to be a cultural thing as well: The Germans, for example, have an extremely weird reputation. They are thought to be hairy AND naked…

I don’t know where this ‘Germans are hairy’ thing is coming from. I am pretty sure that they as well spend a fortune on getting things sorted as human culture demands these days. But the naked thing is absolutely true.

I got inspired to think these few thoughts by some holiday greetings a fellow commentator on Mr Jam’s Diary had send. At first the poor thing was shocked to find that on visiting a sauna in the lovely city of Stuttgart all sorts of naked folks was hopping around.

Having escaped the experience alive and with a still sound mind, Angela moved on to the Mediterranean and then made a tiny mistake. She entered the boat of a German skipper who gave her a close-up view on a pretty beach of Mallorca. Not knowing that half of Mallorca is occupied by Germans, again she was in for a bit of a surprise when there were naked people basking like grill chickens in their hundreds.

The same happens when I go on my winter holidays to Fuerteventura. German hotel beach equals naked people, and of course each hotel has at least one pool for the nudes and of course you go to the sauna in the costume you were born with.

And every time I go there something weird happens. I go with the flow and throw off my clothes – and it feels… normal! For once it feels really weird when everybody is naked and you are not; it is much worse to be the odd one out, rather than being naked.

But there is something else. These days it doesn’t feel just normal, it feels liberating. I have written about this subject before and depicted that it can’t be in my upbringing. I had a phase when I only joined in under group pressure and wasn’t comfortable at all – although I looked millions better back then. It must be an old age confidence thing then, and apparently I have become one of these ‘confident due to not having to lose anything anymore’ culprits myself. Hence most of the nudes are not the ones who can afford it, but the amazingly many – oh well, how to put it kindly – oddly shaped people who drop their clothes.