Ontario naturist community facing threats after skinny dipping post goes viral
A Toronto-area skinny dipping club has come under fire this week for allowing nude youth and adults to co-mingle, but naturist groups in the province at large are now speaking out and calling the criticisms misinformed, as well as alleging threats to their safety.
Accounts like 6ixdriptv posted excerpts of a FAQ page for GTA Skinny Dippers, a group that calls itself “Toronto’s family skinny-dipping club” hosting indoor winter naturist events “[to] complement the local landed naturist clubs which keep a vibrant naturist community within the GTA.”
The organization, which seems to have first caught the attention of some non-target audiences while advertising at the Toronto Pride Parade last month, is now being denounced for allowing youth under the age of 18 to attend its events.
Screenshots from what appears to be an older version of the GTA Skinny Dippers site state that while anyone under the age of 14 who wishes to participate must be accompanied by an adult, “if you fall between the ages of 14 and 18, you are welcome to attend for FREE without a guardian.”
It also notes that all change rooms are co-ed, though women’s change rooms are reserved for single women and couples only.
(The webpage has since been updated to instead state: “If you are under the age of 16 you must be accompanied by an adult 18 or older. You pay the same fee as youth.” The question about changerooms has been completely removed, though there is a small mention that the facilities are co-ed.)
People quickly jumped in to express disgust at the rules and the club in general, with posts across multiple Instagram and X accounts — accounts unaffiliated with the community — racking up tens of thousands of likes and upwards of 3,500 comments.
As a result, naturist groups in the area have said they’ve gone as far as seeking out police protection due to “violent threats” launched against them.
“A misinformed and misleading clickbait social media post has unfortunately gone viral and resulted in people making violent threats online towards members of the naturist community,” reads a statement from Stéphane Deschênes, president of the International Naturist Federation and owner of Bare Oaks Family Naturist Park in East Gwillimbury, Ontario.
“Our whole community is being grossly mischaracterized as dangerous for children when in fact the opposite is true. This current fear of predators at family naturist parks is absurd — children in naturism are always with their families.”
Members are considering some of the discourse about them, in this case, to be borderline slanderous and paint them in a light that is “completely opposite to the true philosophy of naturism.”
They are also questioning the timing of the hate, which comes just before National Skinny Dip Day, a day that Bare Oaks and others are celebrating this weekend.
Deschênes, who is considered to be the most prominent proponent of and expert on the naturist lifestyle, and who recently informed a CNN travel article about skinny dipping etiquette, points to academic research that indicates “children raised in an atmosphere containing family social nudity benefit from the practice.”
“In a world where social media perpetuates a climate of sexual exploitation, objectification, and creates unnatural perceptions of beauty, we need the naturist message more than ever,” he says.
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