FicWad

Guest Site by: Nicolette Barischoff
When I first came out as a naturist to my family (made up of Burning Man hippies and ultra-conservative Christians alike), reactions ranged from "Yeah, I kind of figured," all the way to "Didn't you do this a few years past?"
I have pretty much always been nude. It is hard to pin down when or how that happened. My parents were both fairly conventional nondenominational Christians, and the need for modesty was stressed at me early and often. It only did not really require. I recall countless lectures on the sanctity of a woman's modesty, the mysterious and unexpected weight of duty that was a Woman's Body. "You have a woman's body, now, you can't simply go around without thinking!" I recall quiet, cautious, pressing asides reminding me how critical was my part in ensuring that men were not frightened filled with unshakable lust given incorrect ideas about me. I wasn't trying to obstruct them, I simply never quite deciphered what there was to be embarrassed about.
You see, I was born with spastic cerebral palsy. Put simply, my brain fires in arbitrary directions to make my muscles do all kinds of bullshit that I did not request them to. I don't walk; I use a wheelchair to get around, or if I am at home, my hands and knees. I've always needed more help than most individuals. That often meant help getting dressed or using a specially inaccessible restroom. When my parents were not around, that meant help from near-strangers. This modesty, this easily splintered virtue that I was supposed to guard more attentively than a girl guards anything else, had to be shed in a instant if the situation demanded it.
How was I supposed to know when to care about who was pulling up my underwear, and when to not? It did not take long for me to realize that nobody had any really great answers. If strangers chosen by chance and necessity could gaze upon my nude body without turning to rock, just who exactly was I protecting? The children? (The same ones who would happily run through the streets of my community naked as the day they were born until their beleaguered parents wrestled them into some coveralls?) Myself? No, I still did not give a shit. Men? Not even gonna dignify it.
I think what I'm saying is, despite the efforts of my exasperated kin, I never learned modesty. It never felt important. I 've to lay on the floor to pull my trousers up. Fuck that. I will be used to people who shouldn't see me nude seeing me naked. They all resided, and so did I.
Still, I never took that plunge and called myself a naturist. Old ideas die hard.
My first ever experience with deliberate public nudity would not come until I was twenty-one, on one of those enormous European College tours, faced with my first French beach. The feeling was a disclosure. I'd known that European seashores were usually topfree, but I was not expecting the sheer naturalness of it. Bodies of all shapes and sizes, naked to the waist with neither snarky opinion nor creepy leer. Youngsters and their mothers.
And their mothers' moms. Grownup sisters. Locals and apparent tourists. And teen boys weaving through them all, utterly unfazed, as if they've seen this every day. Because they have. I looked over to my newish boyfriend (who'd later get promoted to complete partner) with a question within my eyes. His response to that question was that it was not up to him. It was my body, and so up to me. Off the top went, as fast as I could get rid of it.
It is odd to comprehend that our society doesn't permit our breasts to feel ocean air. And then that feeling, that sweetness of liberation and excitement and daring, passed. Astonishingly quickly. And then I was just a human, one among hundreds, existing as I was most comfortable. I never looked back from that.
Nicolette Barischoff Getting Naked and Painted for BodyPainting Day
I've been naked in public a lot since then, among other people and, sometimes, all by myself, the nude voice of reason among a lost and clothed crowd. I have been to Burning Man, to Faerieworlds, to Seattle's World Naked Bike Ride. The wonderful women of the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society were kind enough to compose an article about me. But to date, I've never participated in an art project on the scale of Bodypainting Day. On Saturday, I 'll strip to your skin in the middle of Manhattan with a hundred other amazing people, all professionally painted, in full view of a city that could not understand me, and I 'll feel more comfy than I ever do wearing clothing.
It's challenging to have an optimistic body image when you're disabled. People approach disability with this type of spectrum of premises, and thoughts about what you should do or be or how you should behave. And this never includes having a body. That old notion of modesty comes extra hard when people aren't used to thinking about what you might look like nude. That's why I am doing this, why Bodypainting Day is so vital that you me. It is the greatest expression of body-positivity. It's art and acceptance and independence. It is an exploration of our relationship to the body, and a direct challenge to the infantile belief that most of us "just should not be seen nude."
I sincerely hope you may join me.
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The next NYC Bodypainting Day is on Saturday, July 18, 2015! Learn more at www.bodypaintingday.org.
About the Author: Nicolette Barischoff is a Locus and World Fantasy Award-adjacent science fiction and fantasy writer. She can be reached on Twitter at @NBarischoff, or on her site nbarischoff.com, where she talks about writing, impairment, and body-positivity. She likes being nude, and if that doesn't bother you, she likes you also.
Young Naturists & Nudists America
Group: Body Image Sites, Naked Body Painting and Nude Body Art, Naturist Website, Social Nudity Websites
About the Writer (Author Profile)
Guest blogs written completely for Nudist Portal.