‘WAIT A MINUTE!!” I can almost hear you yell, as you open this post and are confronted with a bunch of naked bums gleefully enjoying a wonder day at a nude beach. “What on EARTH does this have to do with hypocrisy??” Well, my friends, it’s kind of like this…. and bear with me, I’m not pulling punches here today.
Hypocrisy is the concept of saying, believing, acting or pushing on others ideas, statements and activities that the person doing, saying or believing then have no intention to follow themselves. “Outlaw abortion!” Pro-lifers scream, while simultaneously supporting laws and programs that abolish nutrition, health care and other important needs to save the lives of children. “Gays are evil!” scream conservatives that are continually caught having homosexual encounters on the sly. “Drag Queens are groomers!” Scream men that are consistently and constantly actually abusing children. The list goes on and on and on, and while hypocrisy exists among all of us, in all groups and societies and ‘isms’, the most blatant, disgusting and dangerous hypocrisies always seem to happen with two major groups. Conservatives, and Fundamental Religious Groups.
Which brings me to the drawing I have included today, because the hypocrisy I most wish to focus on for today’s post is the hypocrisy of conservatives and religious fundamentalists against the human body. Oh, the naked human body. That fount of depravity, shame, ugliness, lust and perversion. Or so these two groups have long believed, and are once again in a massive campaign to have everyone believe again.
Yet take a look at this picture. Is there anything there that actually invokes those negative feelings you’re ‘supposed’ to have? Anything at all? Does anyone look lecherous? Shameful? Dangerous? Coerced? Ugly? No. None of that, and while it is a snapshot in time and anything can happen before and after, the truth is that the people that engage in family nudism tend to carry this air of happy positivity pretty much everywhere they go. Yet, as of the last couple of years, nudism is one of the largest groups of people being attacked by conservative and religious forces out there, outside of transgender folk.
Yet time and time again, no matter how much these people scream about nudists being a danger to children, or having a perverted lifestyle, or being disgusting and horrid, the news continues to fill up with CONSERVATIVES AND THE RELIGIOUS being arrested and caught doing the things that they are so adamantly accusing nudists of doing, and NOBODY seems to fucking call them out on it. Nobody but nudists, that is. Certainly not the media. Definitely not the authorities, who seem to side with conservatives and churches far more often than with parents simply trying to raise their children with a stronger set of ideals about the human body.
The church (especially catholic) is intensely hypocritical on this subject. More children and women suffer abuse at the hands of clergy than just about any other major demographic outside of men in general, and yet they are so glued to their brutal dogma that is supposed to be so fair and just and wonderful… if you’re a white male, that is. Priests shuffled from one church to another while consistently molesting boys, but those same priests will stand at a pulpit and tell you how disgusting nakedness is. How utterly against God. How unclean it is. How its evil will corrupt men into lust and desire… like men need a naked body to do that. It’s horrific, really, and yet once again, nobody with any real power will speak out about it. Mostly because those with any real power rely on the power of the church to benefit them.
So yesterday I spent an afternoon being naked with other naked people, including children, and guess what didn’t happen? Nobody got abused. Nobody felt ashamed. Nobody felt lustful. In fact, nothing negative happened at all. It was an extremely pleasant, enjoyable, lovely day. Much fun was had, we talked openly and frankly about the body in some instances, the kids felt safe and respected, (as did the adults), and life went on.
Funny how that works hey? Meanwhile, even more conservatives were caught secretly fucking our society over with greed, lust and hatred while us naked folk just focused on joy.
Go figure.