I'm going all out for World Naked Gardening Day, because I didn't get to celebrate it last year. No existential lamentations about the limits of freedom in the "land of the free", just glorious outdoor nude recreation! (And yes, I do consider yard work a form of recreation, as I enjoy it, and it gives me exercise). Be sure to check out the video I uploaded to YouTube [broken link], before it gets taken down!
[description: series of portraits of a naked man engaged in various gardening activities]
I started out cultivating the soil in this year's new and improved flower bed(s)! The lighting was tricky out under the direct, overhead sunlight, and it's always a gamble between shooting in the sun or shade. I started out shooting with my dSLR, but shamefully, my iPhone did a much better job at balancing the light and shadows, so I used it for the rest of the day's shooting.
Next up was watering this year's new sunflower patch, followed by trimming back the hedges.
As a disclaimer, I wasn't actually trimming the hedges (they could stand to grow out a bit more before that's necessary, and really only to keep a path clear for the gate to open), but I wanted a little more variety in activities to shoot (and I'd already cut the grass recently), so I settled for a pantomime. After all, your spring gardening doesn't get done in a single day - it's more likely spread across multiple evenings and weekends!
And we finish up with a little twist on the classic "kneeling and pruning" pose. Shooting on the pavement was rough on my knees, let me tell you.
[description: a nude figure viewed from behind crawls on the pavement on all fours]
I feel like this position is moderately inappropriate for nudists, and I suppose it's because it makes me think of "doggy style". Which is a little bit ironic, since most four-legged animals spend a lot of their time in this position, and they're even more natural nudists than we are. I don't personally subscribe to the notion that certain ways of sitting or standing are non-kosher for nudists, but how others feel is not irrelevant when you're trying to be part of a community. And anyway, if I'm advertising nudism to a textile audience, I don't want to give the wrong impression right from the start.
But why is it a problem if people think about sex a lot? Nudists are committed to "desexualizing" nudity, which I'll grant has its advantages, as nudity is not always about sex, and it should not be treated as such. But we're sexual organisms. If naked bodies sometimes (often times?) make us think about sex, why is that a bad thing? Thinking about sex and having sex are two separate things. Is it impossible to think about sex - even appreciate an erotic sight - without having to act on it in an explicit manner? No! Sexual behaviors are what is prohibited in nudist environments - the same as communal/public textile environments, proving that the nudity doesn't exist solely or even primarily as a sexual element. But that doesn't mean that nudists cannot still appreciate the sexual appeal of a naked body (just as textiles might appreciate the sexual appeal of a provocatively clothed body). It doesn't make them any less nudists. You don't have to be asexual to be a nudist. You just have to be able to behave yourself.
