As you may know, I enjoy playing volleyball. It's a hobby I picked up from my experiences visiting nudist resorts over the last fifteen years. There's an annual tournament I used to like to attend, and this year I returned for the first time since the COVID lockdowns. The best part of the tournament is being able to play volleyball nude with other like-minded (open-minded) people, whether you win or lose. But I won't deny that another part of the fun is getting to sit on the sidelines and watch top level athletes - both men and women - perform at a professional level on the volleyball courts, in the nude.
A particular moment sticks out in my mind, that stirred up a lot of thoughts in my head. It's important to me that I describe this situation with tact, because I don't want to give the wrong impression. Between matches, one of the players stood in my line of sight, not ten feet from where I was standing, to rest and get a quick bite to eat. Although these things are subjective, to my eyes she looked incredible. And hers was a perfect, natural beauty - not the manufactured kind that utilizes plastic surgery and excessive makeup in a gross over-exaggeration of femininity, to stimulate men of poor taste who have only one thing on their minds.
As an artist, I was utterly mesmerized by the scene that had spontaneously formed in front of me. A beautiful young woman, completely nude, amidst a crowd of mostly dressed people (it was a bit chilly that day), in a totally relaxed atmosphere, without spectacle. Keeping in mind the typical demographic of someone who is comfortable being naked in a crowd of strangers, as a female under 40 (under 25, even!), she was doubly exotic. Triply, if you include the fact that she was in prime, athletic shape. I had to inwardly marvel at her calm acceptance of those circumstances. What a wondrous thing! I would hate for it to be ruined - for her to receive anything even remotely resembling negative or unwanted attention.
That said, I couldn't get over how picturesque the scene was. If this had happened on a public street, and I were a street photographer, and I'd snapped that shot, it would have been an award-winning photograph. (At the very least, great promotional material for the tournament). The juxtaposition of bodies, the novelty of the situation, the casualness with which it occurred, and the beauty on display... It goes without saying that this would never happen. Not on a public street - and on the grounds of a nudist camp, photography is strictly prohibited. I can't help that that fact stirs up a conflict within me.
Why should capturing an image of such a thing - such a beautiful, positive, and innocent thing - be forbidden? It kills me that people are the way they are - not the people who make these rules, but the people who behave in such a terrible fashion that these rules become necessary. What does that say about our own humanity, that we can't have nice things because we're so fundamentally rotten to our core? "In the face of beauty, evil was lost"? Rather, "by the hand of evil, beauty is lost". Is it so horrible that a scene like this would be preserved, to be shared with people who did not experience it firsthand, and to exist beyond the fading memory within my brain?
Sure, not everyone would appreciate the image for the "right" reasons. (For my part, my appreciation of the scene was predominantly aesthetic, and not erotic - I would admit it if that weren't the case). As I said, I would hate for the situation to have been ruined by poor behavior in the moment. That's something I like about nudism - that we can all hang out completely naked and still behave like civilized creatures. It's the reason nudist camps have tall fences and strict guidelines, despite how free-minded and laidback we generally are. I wouldn't change that. I just wish it could coexist compatibly with the mindset that beauty is a virtue, while acknowledging the potential for photography to be an innocent expression of that, and not solely the vile and existential threat it is perceived to be, in the unfortunate hands of the depraved*.
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*It won't win me any brownie points to say this, but I would argue that most people who just want to snap a picture of a hottie are pretty harmless. So they might add it to their "spank bank"? So what? There's no harm in that, other than a sociogenically manufactured psychic distress, which is born of a fundamentally sex-negative upbringing. Is it because it might be spread around the internet? I sympathize with the fear of being branded with the stigma we reserve for people our culture sees as having "loose morals" (which would pertain to those who willingly get naked in front of strangers, no matter how innocent the context). But that stigma is unjust. Such a fear only reinforces it. And it's not right, once again, to deny ourselves of what little pleasures this struggle that is life affords us, on account of the flawed nature of the human race. If I could nuke mankind and replace it with a more evolved species, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Meanwhile, I have to exist with the knowledge of what could be - the paradise we could be living in - frustrated by a daily reminder of the trash heap we've relegated ourselves to...
