nudism as an illegalism

A confession: the name of this project, “nudism as an illegalism”, is no strongly felt affirmation, but a slogan that I thought sounded cool.

Some readers may not be familiar with the illegalists. These were the historic anarchists—chiefly in francophone and italophone Europe, or associated with Italian diaspora communities in the United States and Argentina—whose practice was either openly or outrageously criminal. I would count Jules Bonnot, Severino di Giovanni, Luigi Galleani, and Renzo Novatore among their number. Guns, bombs, and bank robberies were a big part of what these folks got up to.

As a historic episode, I would date the illegalists from about 1900 to about 1925, but nothing really goes away, of course. Different sorts of illegalism continue to this day, often informed by the same broad sort of ideology (especially Novatore's individualism and nihilism), but more importantly rooted in life circumstances. People don't shoplift, in general, because they read a book that told them they could; they do it because they need calories and rent money.

Regarding nudism, it seems useful to rep illegalism because the naturist movement—reflecting the mostly normative, mostly liberal-to-conservative political orientation of the vast majority of its participants—is woefully legalistic. The horizon for most folks on the movement's activist fringe is to make nudity legal (which is even the name of a subreddit). And that's just something I don't give a fuck about, personally.

Like the illegalists of old, I kind of want immediate results, for myself and my crew only if necessary. I'm not interested in waiting for society to change, because I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime. I'm even less interested in waiting for the institutions to change, since they are quite likely to lag behind society as a whole. I'd prefer a more direct approach, and one which thinks less to optics, public opinion, and so on. I tend to think that those who do worry about those things, from the perspective of advancing the case for social nudity to the public at large, are a bit deluded about things, too.

There is no programmatic way to translate anarchist illegalism, as it has usually been conceived, into a methodology of pro-nudist activism. Bank robberies and getting naked are different things. That said, at some point, things just need to be done, regardless of what the law says or what polite people will think. I think most “practicing nudists” probably understand this on some level, too.