The trouble with nudism online is it is too visual

The internet has been a marvel of communication, but it has its drawbacks. For instance, whilst giving us a hitherto unimagined door to contacts around the world, who we would otherwise never meet, at the same time it leads us to spend time liaising with people we will never meet in person and indeed will never truly know. Online nudism carries a further problem which could in time compromise our moral lifestyle and bring down the community as we know it. It is sharply exemplified here, in True Nudists. One of the first principles of nudism is the outright rejection of body elitism and the acceptance of all bodies as equal to the lifestyle, regardless of origin, shape or ability-level. Equally important is the distancing of ourselves from becoming a sex-dominant community. Yet, look at the "Most Popular Nudists" featured regularly on our front page. It is a virtual Penthouse of nudism. There are only two criteria for being featured in this section; near body perfection and sexual attrraction, in other words, body elitism and a sexual mindset. Now this is not Truenudists's fault, other than perhaps the site should NOT feature such a section against the very principles of true nudism. It will be the same everywhere, on every site, and is the very reason that online nudism will never be a substitute for the real thing. When you visit a club, a venue or an event you meet real people. I have noticed that in those circumstances we rarely even look at our companion's body, let alone focus on it. This is where personality rules. It is the person inside with whom we are interested and, more often then not, we forget we are all naked. Online, however, it is very difficult to get your personality, interests, lifestyle and emotions over. All that is finite is what we can see, images. So our rection to our contacts is first and foremost visual, pertinent to the body, explicitly sexual. If you check comments across the internet they are very rarely to the point of "you look a very fun person". The keywords are invariably "attractive", "body", "sexy", "lovely", "beautiful" and even body-areas of sexual reference. This trend rises to the top like cream or scum, depending on which view you take, in member popularity leagues. We will never really know if these people have any real personality at all or are even total dorks. You see, a sexual-attraction league, which is what this amounts to, works both ways . It can unfairly pigeon-hole a perfectly intelligent, fun person as nothing more than a sex object. So a handsome guy might just find himself attracting the type he does not want. Now Truenudists can easily drop the popularity league, but that would be only be a short part-way to a solution. The league is not the cause of the problem but just the tip of the iceberg. No site will, in my opinion, ever be able to overcome the flies to a lightbulb focus on the body itself in online nudism. Probably the only answer would be to exclude photos as a site feature, but that would punish the true nudists, with their holiday snaps and their naturist country walk filmreels, as well as the poseurs and sex objects. So we are stuck with what we have. But, with national and local authorities around the world making it nore and more difficult for nudists to stage events and find facilities, the genuine lifestyle could slowly be eroded and washed away by the online body- and sex-orientated environment that is online nudism. Will Golden