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Title: Revolutionary Nudism Author: Émile Armand Date: 1934 Language: en Topics: Anarchist Encyclopedia, individualism, morality, nudism, sexuality Source: Text retrieved on September 14, 2011 from http://kropot.free.fr/EArmand-nudisme.htm Notes: Originally published as “Nudisme révolutionnaire” in Encyclopédie Anarchiste. Translated by Alejandro de Acosta.
Nudism may be considered “a kind of sport, in which individuals get
naked in groups to take a bath of air and light, as one bathes in the
sea” (Dr. Toulouse), that is, from a purely therapeutic point of view;
it may be considered, as the gymnomystics do (gymnos means nude in
Greek), as a return to an Edenic state, restoring humans to a primitive
and “natural” state of innocence (the thesis of the Adamites of
yesteryear). These two points of view give way to a third, ours: that
nudism is, individually and collectively, among the most potent means of
emancipation. It seems to us to be something else entirely than a
hygienic fitness exercise or a “naturist” renewal. For us, nudism is a
revolutionary demand.
Revolutionary in a triple sense: affirmation, protest, liberation.
Affirmation: to vindicate the ability to live nude, to get naked, to
walk around naked, to associate with nudists, with no other care, as one
uncovers one’s body, than the possibilities of resisting temperatures.
This is to affirm the right to the complete disposition of one’s bodily
individuality. It is to proclaim one’s casual indifference to
conventions, morals, religious commandments, and social laws that, under
various pretexts, keep humans from disposing the different parts of
their bodily being as they see fit. Against social and religious
institutions in which the use or usury of the human body is subordinated
to the will of the lawmaker or priest, the nudist demand is one of the
most profound and conscious manifestations of individual freedom.
Protest: to vindicate and practice the freedom to get naked is, indeed,
to protest any dogma, law, or custom that establishes a hierarchy of
body parts, that considers, for example, that showing the face, hands,
arms, or throat is more decent, more moral, more respectable than
exposing the buttocks, breasts, belly, or the pubic area. It is to
protest against the classification of different body parts into noble
and ignoble categories: the nose being considered noble and the penis
ignoble, for example. More importantly, it is to protest against any
intervention (of a legal or other nature) that obligates us to wear
clothes because it pleases another — whereas it has never occurred to us
to object that they do not get undressed, if that is what they prefer.
Liberation: liberation from wearing clothes, or really of the constraint
of wearing a costume that has always been, and can never be anything
but, a hypocritical disguise insofar as it increases the importance of
what covers the body — of the accessory — and not the body itself, whose
cultivation, however, is the essential thing. Liberation from one of the
main notions on which the ideas of “permitted” and forbidden, of “good”
and “evil” are based. Liberation from coquetry, from the conformism to
an artificial standard of appearance that maintains the differentiation
of classes.
Let us imagine the general, the bishop, the ambassador, the academic,
the prison guard, the warden — naked. What would be left of their
prestige, of the authority delegated to them? The rulers know this well,
and this is not the least of the motives for their hostility to nudism.
Release from the prejudice of modesty, which is nothing but “shame of
one’s body.”
Release from the obsession with obscenity, currently provoked by the
uncovering of body parts that social hypocrisy requires us to keep
hidden — freedom from the restraint and self-control implied by this
fixed idea.
We will go farther. We maintain, taking up the perspective of
sociability, that the practice of getting naked is a factor in better
camaraderie, a less narrow camaraderie.
There is no denying that for us a less distant, more intimate, more
trusting comrade is the one who reveals her or himself to us not only
without intellectual or ethical ulterior motives, but also without
hiding their body.
The critics of nudism — moralists or conservative hygienists of the
State or Church — suppose that the sight of nudity, or the regular
association of nudists of both sexes, exalts erotic desire. This is not
always the case. However, contrary to most gymnist theses — for which
opportunism or fear of persecution is the beginning of wisdom — we do
not deny it either. But we maintain that the erotic exaltation
engendered by nudist projects is pure, natural, and instinctive. It
cannot be compared with the artificial excitement of the half-naked, the
gallant in revealing clothes, and all the artifices of make-up relied on
in the dressed, half-dressed, or barely dressed milieu in which we
currently operate.