Nudism is the word today quite often can be heard in everyday life or in the media. However, not everyone knows what it is; and those who think they know have a very dubious idea of ​​him. Let’s try to figure out what nudism is.
Naturism
To understand the meaning of the word, for a start it’s worth a few words to say what “naturism” is. This word is even less clear and audible much less. Nevertheless, it denotes a way of life, its philosophy choosing unity with nature (from lat. Natura, which means "nature").
Naturism is an entire social movement, it is even represented under the auspices of UNESCO in the form of the International Naturism Federation (INF - International Naturism Federation), founded in 1953. Naturism involves many practices, and only one of the few used in its framework is nudism (from lat. Nudus - “naked”), which provides for a naked lifestyle.
It is worth noting that nudism itself does not include the whole philosophy of naturism. Moreover, many of those who only learn what nudism is and joins it, are not guided at all by the signs of movement, but are exposed from any other motives. From all this it should be concluded that it is not entirely correct to identify the concept of “naturism” and the word “nudism” in speech and texts. Nevertheless, many media outlets are guilty of this, using a word familiar to most thanks largely to scandalousness.
From the history
As always, when you want to figure it out, to do it correctly, we turn to history. Even in ancient times, nudity was religious, sacred, mystical in nature. The ancient Greeks were exposed for gymnastics, wrestling and other sports exercises, and the cult of sports, as we know from the history of the Olympic Games, in Greece was extremely important: after all, it was dedicated to the gods of Olympus themselves!
Almost bare and fought. In the preserved monuments of antiquity we find images of naked, or half-naked, athletes and warriors.
Even during the time of Alexander the Great, even though the word "nudism", the meaning of which we are considering, was not even mentioned, the Greeks in a special way distinguished Indian ascetics practicing nudity as a symbol of renunciation of mortal life. They called them “hymnosophists”, that is, translating every Greek root, “naked sages”
The tradition of exposing and chanting the naked human body began to fade away with the advent of a new era and the spread of Christianity throughout Europe: the theory of human innate sin condemned nudity and, as a result, tabulated corporeality.
Culture is returning to "nature" in the fine arts of the Renaissance. What are some relief sculptures of Michelangelo and the detailed muscles of the heroes of his paintings and paintings of his contemporaries!
The nudism of our day
The origin of nudism, as such, occurred in Germany. The starting point can be considered the appearance of two books by Heinrich Pudor on nudity: “Naked people. Glee of the Future ”and“ The Cult of Nudity ”. They focused on the Nordic race. Perhaps that is why they have spread mainly among the military society of the time of Nazi Germany. The development of nudism continued after the Second World War in the German Democratic Republic, subsequently, having gone beyond the boundaries of one country and gradually spreading throughout Europe and the world.
In Russia, they learned about what nudism is at the beginning of the 20th century. His main ideologist at the time was the famous writer Maximilian Voloshin. Also at the dawn of the USSR, nudism was quite popular. Lenin himself saw in the concept of exposure the "proletarian principle."
Practice of nudism
So what is nudism is now clear. How is it practiced? Despite the fact that nudists advocate a naked lifestyle, they do not deny the need for existence in the ethical and aesthetic boundaries established in society. That is why special beaches and venues are created for holding the corresponding kind of events so as not to infringe on people not involved in the practice of nudism.
However, people with good intentions do not always come to nudist beaches. Sometimes voyeurs, exhibitionists and other people with unhealthy inclinations or mental disorders, as well as people taking photos of nudism mix with the crowd.
Pros and Cons of Nudism
It goes without saying that the practice of nudism involves both positive and negative consequences. So, psychological self-improvement can be attributed to beneficial ones. Entry into the environment of nudists allows you to free yourself from complexes associated with your own body, better and faster to accept your own physiology, learn to love your strengths and not pay attention to shortcomings. In addition, getting used to walking barefoot and lying naked on the textured surfaces of a sandy or rocky beach, a person gets used to new sensations with his skin: he not only receives a kind of “massage”, but also becomes more resilient.
Of the negative ones, it can be distinguished that a naked person, spending a long time under the sun, receives a significant dose of ultraviolet rays, therefore, the risk of oncological diseases increases. In this case, the main thing is not to overdo it with sunbathing. In addition, in many conservative cultures, even European ones, nudism is condemned as something depraved, shameful, which does not fit into the established framework of the acceptable and decent. And if in such countries nudism does not meet open resistance or hostility, then, in any case, it often reveals bewilderment and embarrassment in relation to itself.