ON NUDISM

Dear Editor:

Apparently Pius XI, the Honorable Alfred Emanuel Smith, Father McCaffrey, Cardinal Hayes, and a great many other Roman Catholic leaders are totally unaware of the extremely interesting revelation in regard to their own minds that they are making by the furore that they have kicked up about the practice of nudism. In this fever for suppressing it they are practising vicarious virtue. They are poignantly aware in a part of their personality--the suppressed or subconscious--that any such practice as nudism simply means lechery to them. So they take out the punishment which they feel they should administer to themselves for these feelings by hot denunciations of nudist practice. Thus they attenpt to prove to themselves their own righteousness. Nobody can blame them for this. It is simply the way the comlex human machine works.

The bothersome part of it is, however, that they want to impose this vicarious sense of guilt on others who are lucky enough to be normally healthy minded in regard to the body. It is a curious thing, and a sad one for humanity, that people should hate to see others enjoy themselves doing what the critics are psychologically unable to do. It is certainly the mark of a serious disease, a serious twist, in the personality that feels the way. If these "moral" critics objected to other people's course of conduct because they feared that in the long run these others would not be happy on account of this conduct, that would be one thing. But when people object to what others are doing merely because those whom criticize are "pursuing pleasure" we deal with one of the most curious phenomena that we can encounter and one of the most "unreasonable." People who feel this way are possible persecutors, and when they have power do untold damage to the beauty and cheer and joy of other people's lives. It seems as if they did this because they cannot see their way clear to enjoy this type of life themselves.

I thank God that nudism is giving many of us a saner outlook on all of life and is helping us to discover more of its possible happiness.

Yours truly,

Mary E. W., Lewiston, Maine

(Source: The Nudist, Vol. IV, No. 5, May, 1935)