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This is where the issue touches me personally. I am autistic, and among other things that means I have sensitivities that other people don't. I feel food moving around inside me, I need more anaesthetic than dentists expect, and I have what's called "tactile defensiveness", where light touches to my skin are irritating and uncomfortable. And that includes clothing. All clothing, with the sole exception of hats.
The problem is mild (but never zero) when it's cool; in the winter, I prefer clothes to the cold. When it gets warmer and I start sweating, the discomfort gets very bad very quickly.
This means I can't stand exercising with clothes on. I know perfectly well what not exercising does to my life expectancy and general health, but the feeling is unbearable.
How bad could it be, you ask? Imagine everything you're wearing next to the skin is made of sewn-together burlap sacks, and you're trapped in a slow-cooker.
Notwithstanding the origin of the word "gymnasium", I doubt that nudity is going to fly in any gym in town for more than about thirty seconds. Any physiotherapist would suggest swimming as a solution; trouble is, wet swimming-togs are worst of all. They cross the pain threshold. They feel like knives.
There's a Catch-22 for neurodivergent people when it comes to talking about sensitivities. If you do it often, you're just a whiner and your complaints are dismissed. If you don't do it often, well, it can't be that bad if you didn't say anything before, can it? -- and your complaints are dismissed.
The trick is to find the middle ground where your complaints are dismissed for both reasons at once.
I have exactly two options for dealing with this sensitivity, which are
(1) naturism, and
(2) shut up complaining about it no-one cares.
As far as what good it does me, any proposed solution which does not allow me to practise naturism amounts to "shut up complaining about it no-one cares." I'm sure people mean well when they express their sympathy, but it's exactly as much help to me as "shut up complaining about it no-one cares."
(Which doesn't mean I think any the worse of you, if that's your primary concern. "Shut up complaining about it no-one cares" is society's default response to autistic sensory issues. At least it's better than "I'm going to trigger you on purpose to teach you not to be a pussy.")
There's this one particular beach in my home town that I go to for nude walks. (There was a time when I was in a naturist walking group, but that's long past now.) It's not an official nude beach because New Zealand doesn't have any because technically there is no law specifically banning public nudity for them to be exceptions to.
What there is is a law against "offensive behaviour", and where and when nudity counts as "offensive behaviour" is complicatedly context-dependent.
(There's also a law, with more serious penalties, against "indecent exposure", but public nudity alone hasn't been the legal definition of "indecent exposure" in New Zealand for over forty years. Since 1981 it must also be "obscene", i.e. done to harass people. Surprisingly few people know that.)
There are thirty years of legal precedent saying beach nudity is not offensive behaviour -- on a beach where it's common practice or can be expected to occur.
This is one of those. Currently. Occasionally. It's had quite a few naturist visitors while I've been going there, but no regulars except me.
Most people ignore me; some are friendly; there have been a handful that were hostile. There's been one particular guy, recently, who kept hanging around where I was. I don't mean like chilling on the beach, I mean he kept kind of walking around and walking past me, making sure I knew he was there.
I came back after my beach walk to my stash of stuff to find the messages "No nudists!" and "Cover up cunt" written in the sand nearby.
(I wrote a reply saying "See you in court: Police v. Ceramalus 1991", referring to the court case that proved nudity on a beach is not an offence in New Zealand. But, well, I wasn't getting the vibe that he was threatening legal action.)
There is no other beach that is both clothing-optional by established custom and within reach of public transport from where I live. And I take care to go during school hours so I don't run into kids. And I stay out of people's way and, apart from my walk, I try and stay at the less-populated end where you get about one passer-by per hour on a weekday. And that's apparently not good enough.
Yes, I know. This world has other people in it besides me. I can't ask society to rearrange itself for my sake. I can't expect an entire culture to suddenly overturn all the associations and meanings it puts on the human body, all in a day.
Naturist organizations have to vet new people very carefully to make sure they're not going to behave inappropriately, which just goes to show society at large isn't ready to turn naturist just yet.
All of that is true and none of it is unreasonable. But the consequence of all this reasonableness is that my needs as a neurodivergent person will always come last.
Guess what kind of mental illness has the highest death rate? No, it's not suicidal depression, it's eating disorders. Anorexia in particular is deadly.
It's usually not a great idea to blame mental illnesses on things in society or the media that we don't like. In most cases it's either wrong or over-simplistic. But eating disorders are the one big exception. Eating disorders are caused by having a negative body image (plus the usual predisposing factors), and negative body image is caused by the depiction of a few idealized body types in the media to the exclusion of all others.
If your own body is a bit saggy and pudgy, and no other body you get to see is even the least bit saggy or pudgy, you start to get the idea that you are a pathologically saggy and pudgy person.
Most people are pretty saggy and pudgy by the standards of the media. These days even supermodels' bodies are Photoshopped to within an inch of their life before they'll let us see them. Whether in sports or ads or movies, we get a very small and idealized selection of the range of human body sizes and shapes held up for us to admire.
And to a point, we can blame capitalism for that. Idealized bodies sell. It's how media companies make money.
But only to a point. Capitalism is riddled with problems, but I'm afraid I hold the unpopular opinion that "Stop capitalisming!" is not a helpful solution to them. There are multiple different problems that will require multiple different fixes.
Idealized bodies sell because we pay to see them. It's hard to think of an alternative that doesn't involve some authority deciding what kind of bodies we shall be allowed to see; and I for one can't imagine how that ends without the authority becoming at least as bad a source of body-shame as what we currently have.
Now there are some who would argue that body-shame is a good thing, because idealized bodies are healthy and shaming people for having un-ideal bodies will motivate them to get healthy. This is wrong on several levels at once.
Weight and fitness are two different things. Fitness is far more important to your health outcomes than weight. Even the smaller difference that weight does make, it only makes if you're unfit -- if you're fit, your weight has no bearing at all on your health.
And at least some of the difference that weight makes, even if you're unfit, is caused by society's perception of weight rather than the weight itself.
How does that work? Well, suppose an obese person goes to a doctor with a moderately serious illness. Suppose the doctor prescribes a weight-loss programme.
Suppose the illness actually has nothing to do with the obesity, and the real cause is missed, and the illness gets worse and the person dies. They're now a mortality statistic because of the misdiagnosis.
But doctors won't make that misdiagnosis on people with "healthy" BMIs. So obese people have a worse shot at being correctly diagnosed and properly treated and surviving.
How will this show up in the statistics? Why, it'll show up as an association between obesity and poor health outcomes. Rinse and repeat.
On top of that, the actual effect of fat-shaming is to discourage obese people from getting fit, because you get fit by exercising, and exercise is when your fat body is most open to being seen and shamed.
I'm sure you can figure out for yourself what effect that has on obese people's fitness, and what effect that has on the statistical association between obesity and poor health outcomes.
Yes. If you shame fat people for being fat, you are not just not helping, you are actively making the problem worse. Don't do it.
I'm afraid that logic still applies if the fat person you're directly shaming is yourself. Other people hear you and infer what you value, and it confirms their own shame.
As I said, I'm not sure we can police the media's depictions of bodies without just creating another source of body-shame. So perhaps the solution lies outside of the media: not in the bodies we see on screens, but in the bodies we see in everyday life.
You know what's been shown by a recent study to help with body image? That's right, naturism. If you grew up seeing naked people a lot, you have a lower risk of developing negative body image.
As far as I know, no study has yet drawn the connection all the way through and shown that naturism helps prevent eating disorders, but given what we do now know, that seems likely.
Western modesty standards have served colonial racism ever since colonization was a thing, and they continue to do so.
I'm not sure if this is still the case, but within my lifetime there were still Indigenous Australian communities where clothes were something you put on when you had to go into town.
In New Zealand, where I live, Māori people adopted European clothing by about the 1900s. Previously they had had a variety of garments for formal occasions and bad weather, but for day-to-day life in the summer women could get away with an apron the size of a handkerchief, while men could go completely naked as long as they were able to avoid getting aroused in public.
Adapting to changing conditions is part of Māori culture, and that included accommodating European sensibilities. In response to the requirement that women cover their breasts, they invented those now-iconic intricately woven bodice tops you see in kapa haka performances. But there were other consequences that haven't gone away.
The Treaty of Waitangi, after being held as legally binding for over thirty years, was declared a nullity in 1877, so that white people could take the land and carve it up as they chose. All racial inequity in New Zealand ever since can be traced back to that declaration.
The reason given in the 1877 court case for nullifying the Treaty was, to cut a long and depressing story short, that Māori occupation of the land didn't count as ownership; they were just squatting there.
"Primitive barbarians" was the phrase the judge used. But a more common term used in the colonial discourse of the time, leading up to that case, was the racist slur "naked savages".
Nowadays we think of the Victorian attitude to nudity as conservative, traditionalistic, perhaps fusty and old-fashioned. But although the Victorians were great enthusiasts for romanticizing and pedestalizing (European) tradition, that wasn't what they were doing here. To them, covering up nudity and hushing up all suggestion of sexuality was progressive, modern, and civilized.
And when the Victorians said "civilized", it always meant "white".
The flip-side of this coin is the relentless colonial sexualization of indigenous women, which has been particularly acute here in the Pacific. It created what came to be called the "National Geographic double standard": you can print photos of naked people for general consumption as long as they're brown.
Nowadays I think National Geographic is doing at least better than that. Instead, the problem has shifted to YouTube. YouTube puts displays of nudity, including female-presenting nipples, under age restrictions. Following complaints from a number of indigenous groups, it makes exceptions for at least some traditional cultural expressions, notably from Brazil and southern Africa... so once again, you can display breasts as long as they're brown.
I mean, you can see the bind YouTube is in. If they age-restrict all breasts, they're being racist by repressing indigenous cultural expression. If they make exceptions for brown breasts, they're being racist by participating in the sexualization of indigenous people.
The not racist option would be to not age-restrict any breasts, regardless of race. But in the present climate that's unthinkable. Instead, YouTube of late has become so censorious that videos of paintings showing breasts have to be covered up in the thumbnail. Even the Victorians weren't as prudish as that.
Fictional depictions of indigenous people -- whether historic indigenous people (as in Disney's Moana) or made-up indigenous people (as in James Cameron's Avatar movies) -- always impose Western nudity prohibitions on them. (In the Avatar movies the way the female characters' neck ornaments always just happen to fall so as to hide their nipples is frankly laughable; Moana just, anhistorically, puts upper-body wrap garments on pre-colonial Pasifika women.)
And I'm afraid this practice spills over into what are supposed to be historical depictions of real people. Accurate depictions of pre-colonial Māori life are considered unsuitable material for New Zealand schoolchildren to see.
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