Post by Jenny6833APost by Dario WesternThis guy (who is too cowardly to give his real name on the uk.rec.naturist
newsgroup) is granting free admission to under 35s to his nude swims at
Prested Hall in the UK, just near London.
I think that this is bad business ethics, as I thought that nudism/naturism
is supposed to be about treating everyone as an equal with no sense of
favouritism.
I gather you also object to kids being admitted free, first timers
getting a price break, unaccompanied females paying only half ground
fees, student discounts, etc.
In short, you object to pricing that seeks to cure the well known
demographic problems of modern naturism.
Define "modern"
The reason I ask is below is a link to an article from the 1970s
saying one of the things that nudists need to worry about going
forward is that it needs to attract a young generation.
Nearly 40 years later nudism is still here.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,905385,00.html
Modern Living: The Decline of Nudism
Monday, Jul. 19, 1971
Modern Living: The Decline of Nudism
Balmy Southern California has long been a natural habitat for nudists.
But now the new permissiveness has caught up with this once-daring
tribe. After visiting a former citadel of the cult near Los Angeles,
TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler reports:
Mel Hocker, one of the alltime great American nudists, is still out
there in the nude. But he is not smiling and carefree, the way you
would imagine a nudist to be. At 60, Mel sits alone in his little
office, a mass of naked wrinkles, glum, dispirited, forlorn. Forlorn
because just outside Mel's screen door, his own twelve-acre nudist club
—the Oakdale Guest Ranch—is going silently to seed in the dry heat of
the San Bernardino Mountains. In fact, the club's membership in two
years has plummeted from 300 to 60 couples, and it continues to
plummet as the elderly members die off. Another nudist camp near by
recently closed up for good.
"It's the sexual revolution that's killing us," moans Mel, who has
been nude nonstop now for 18 years. "The pornographic movies, the
topless-bottomless bars, the dirty magazines—they're making nudism in
America passé." To show what he means, Mel slips into shower clogs and
takes us on a tour of his camp, mercifully letting us keep our pants
on. The layout of the place hints of its past grandeur: 16 rustic
cabins idling on a hillside, and down on the flat, dozens of vacant
trailer slips where you can almost envision happy, laughing naked
people swarming around gaily decorated mobile homes. But now, Mel
says, the remaining members are mostly middle-aged and elderly couples
who come out only on the warm weekends. The grandiose pool is empty,
tennis and volleyball courts are unused, nets hanging limp in the sun.
The only sounds of life come from a screened hut with a sign on it
that says CORNER NUDE STAND. Inside, a pretty young woman is dancing
nude to a jukebox; the other patrons, mostly older males, sit drinking
beer, droning apathetically and ignoring the woman. A sign on the wall
says NUDI BURGERS. MORE MEAT LESS DRESSING. Hocker sits down, sips a
Coke and brightens somewhat. "I pioneered in nudism, you know" he
shouts over the music. "We were the first nudist place to serve beer,
and we were first with nude dancing. This place has attracted your
professional people, right down to the honorable janitor who pushes
the broom."
Hard to Upstage. Hocker's mind slips gradually back into nudism's
past, and he glowingly recalls how he became a nudist in the sedate
year of 1953. That was back when he was living in Long Beach and
nudism was still considered risqué. In their search for an outdoor
health spa, Hocker and his wife Ann stumbled on nudism. "We were the
talk of Long Beach for a long time," recalls Ann (equally nude), her
eyes gleaming with a certain mischievous pride. After four years
Hocker quit his job as a cost analyst with the Ford Motor Co., bought
Oakdale, an established nudist club just outside San Bernardino, and
made nudism a full-time way of life. "You can't beat it," says Hocker.
"It's so — natural. It just seems right not to wear clothes. You can't
upstage anybody around here with a mink coat or a good suit. Haha. And
then there's the sun. Believe me, after a weekend out here in the
nude, you can really kill 'em on your job."
But in the last few years, as the sexual revolution progressed, the
once tantalizing concept of prancing nude through the woods came to
seem tame indeed to Southern Californians. Even last year's special
event—nude skydiving with music by 15 bare members of the Long Beach
Municipal Band—was sparsely attended. Just as well, perhaps, since one
hapless skydiver was badly scratched when he landed in a buckthorn
patch.
Looking for Longhairs. Now, it appears, Oakdale has only one slim
chance left for survival: a transfusion of good old American public
relations techniques. Earlier this year Hocker decided to hire Sparky
Blaine, a promoter and manager of topless dancing girls, to push
Oakdale back into the big time. For Sparky, 43, Oakdale was a
revelation. He abandoned his Beverly Hills office, together with his
clothes, philosophizing that "I do most of my work by phone anyway,"
and moved right into one of the Oakdale cabins. "Out here," he mused,
"I can float nude in the pool while my nude secretary sits on the edge
and takes a letter—working conditions are marvelous."
Sparky's big job is to promote the Miss Nu
de Cosmos Pageant, a nude beauty contest held at Oakdale each summer.
His first change has been to bill the pageant "The Woodstock of the
Nudist Movement." He explains: "We've got to get the longhairs in
here. Only way to save the place. And why not? They took their clothes
off at Woodstock. Why can't they do it here?
"The old nudes have got to step aside or this place is going to die.
What we should do, we should let all the good-looking girls join free,
then we'd have something. It's youth, baby, that's where it's at. The
old blood's dying with the trees." Sparky continues ecstatically:
"Just give me ten showgirls out here, and varoom, the young guys'll
come out of Los Angeles in first gear. I'm putting up a big stand; I'm
gonna have two go-go girls dancing on top of it at night, with
spotlights on 'em, so people can see 'em from the highway."
At 60, Mel Hocker sits alone in his little office, a mass of naked
wrinkles, glum, dispirited, forlorn, brooding about the passing of the
golden age of nudism and wearily watching Sparky Blaine trying to
create a last varoom.
-----
Gosh, you know what is REALLY Going to Kill Nudism? That Ice Age we
are going into.
Can there be anything done to stop this Global Cooling? By 2001 we
will all be under miles of snow. Try nudism when everything is
covered by Ice.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,944914,00.html
Monday, Jun. 24, 1974
Another Ice Age?
In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding
terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in
parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst
flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly
and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a
disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has
suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A
series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West,
while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the
mildest winters within anyone's recollection.
As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the
past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to
suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations
are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the
weather varies from place to place and time to time, when
meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they
find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the
past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.
Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for
the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of
another ice age.
Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and
thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward
migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the
Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about
2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported
by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of
Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his
wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern
Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had
suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever
since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example,
were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered
year round.
Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one
thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry,
high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep
from west to east around the top and bottom of the world. Indeed it is
the widening of this cap of cold air that is the immediate cause of
Africa's drought. By blocking moisture-bearing equatorial winds and
preventing them from bringing rainfall to the parched sub-Sahara
region, as well as other drought-ridden areas stretching all the way
from Central America to the Middle East and India, the polar winds
have in effect caused the Sahara and other deserts to reach farther to
the south. Paradoxically, the same vortex has created quite different
weather quirks in the U.S. and other temperate zones. As the winds
swirl around the globe, their southerly portions undulate like the
bottom of a skirt. Cold air is pulled down across the Western U.S. and
warm air is swept up to the Northeast. The collision of air masses of
widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms—
the Midwest's recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.
Sunspot Cycle. The changing weather is apparently connected with
differences in the amount of energy that the earth's surface receives
from the sun. Changes in the earth's tilt and distance from the sun
could, for instance, significantly increase or decrease the amount of
solar radiation falling on either hemisphere—thereby altering the
earth's climate. Some observers have tried to connect the eleven-year
sunspot cycle with climate patterns, but have so far been unable to
provide a satisfactory explanation of how the cycle might be involved.
Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The
University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists
suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as
a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more
sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.
Climatic Balance. Some scientists like Donald Oilman, chief of the
National Weather Service's long-range-prediction group, think that the
cooling trend may be only temporary. But all agree that vastly more
information is needed about the major influences on the earth's
climate. Indeed, it is to gain such knowledge that 38 ships and 13
aircraft, carrying scientists from almost 70 nations, are now
assembling in the Atlantic and elsewhere for a massive 100-day study
of the effects of the tropical seas and atmosphere on worldwide
weather. The study itself is only part of an international scientific
effort known acronymically as GARP (for Global Atmospheric Research
Program).
Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be
extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a
1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface
could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it
sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred
years.
The earth's current climate is something of an anomaly; in the past
700,000 years, there have been at least seven major episodes of
glaciers spreading over much of the planet. Temperatures have been as
high as they are now only about 5% of the time. But there is a peril
more immediate than the prospect of another ice age. Even if
temperature and rainfall patterns change only slightly in the near
future in one or more of the three major grain-exporting countries—the
U.S., Canada and Australia —global food stores would be sharply
reduced. University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former
president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the
continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave
the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: "I
don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if
there are more than three years like 1972 in a row."