Serving as an advocate for Dallas nudist culture comes with a responsibility to educate the Dallas community about basic issues where nudist culture and majority culture disagree. A frank discussion of the ongoing debate between nudists and non-nudists concerning social nudity and sex is a good place to begin.

Opposing views

Since the beginning of the modern nudist movement in America, opponents have persistently insisted that mixed gender nudity is simply about sex. It is safe to speculate that in a socially conservative environment like Dallas, steeped in a heritage of body and sex inhibited Victorian mores, many people who are uninformed or misinformed about nudism likely hold the view that nudists get naked for the singular purpose of engaging in lustful, unrestrained sexual activity.

The linkage between nudity and sex advanced by non-nudists has become such a source of consternation to nudists everywhere that nudists spend a great deal of time repudiating the view that social nudity is about sex.

Despite the consistent denials of nudists that sex and nudity are intrinsically connected and the complete lack of contradictory evidence, many non-nudists persist in their unsubstantiated beliefs and intolerance of the practice of social nudity. Some accuse nudists of denying sexuality altogether and others simply dismiss the nudist position with an unequivocal, “I don’t believe it.”

Why non-nudists regard nudity as offensive

All human societies recognize that sexual urges have the potential to be very destructive and cultures devise ways to control them through mechanisms like the establishment of standards of modesty and social taboos. These social norms attempt to curb lust and unrestrained sexual promiscuity which left unchecked, in the opinion of many, hold the potential of producing a total collapse of morality. Many people harbor deep anxieties that public nudity is a precursor to the very chaotic public debauchery that general society seeks to avoid. Accepting a simplified linkage between nudity and sex by the majority culture explains why wide-spread intolerance of nudism exists and justifies for many outside nudist culture the condemnation of nudists.

Fallacy of puritanical standards

Dominant culture seeks to control sexual urges and unrestrained sexual activity by establishing modesty standards that demand the covering of the sexual parts of the human sexual anatomy when in public with the goal of avoiding lewd behavior and sexual promiscuity. An unfortunate negative consequence of defining the sight of specific body parts, the genitals and female breasts as shameful, fosters an objectifying and dehumanizing obsession with those parts of the body and produces negative realities like the paradoxical insatiable appetite for pornography in America. Blame for the extreme sexual objectification of women can be traced directly to American majority cultural standards of modesty. The mere view of a naked female among a majority of men is all that is needed to produce sexual arousal and a strong urge to have sex.

Aside from the enumerated negatives the standards are also ineffective in preventing or even minimizing sexual promiscuity as evidenced by all the premarital and extra marital sex taking place in this country, the extremely high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and the large numbers pregnancies outside committed relationships, all of which far exceed comparative rates of incidence in countries more tolerant of nudity.

Nudism and sexuality

Humans are sexual beings and sexuality is undeniably a part of nudism since sexuality is an integrated part of the whole of every person. Yet that does not invalidate at all the sincere claim by nudists that nudity does not equate with sex and being nude in a mixed sex social setting is not an invitation for copulation. Nudists simply acknowledge their sexuality without obsessing over it through reciprocally sharing the view of their genitals believing that humans possess the capacity to interact with each other in a civilized manner without the mere exposure of the genitals inciting a mass orgy.