On Line Naturism.

I refer to the old Yahoo clubs as groups so as not to confuse the story further. It's confusing enough as it is. I don't use some people's names or Yahoo ID's because even though they may have given me a hard time, they are still basically good people. I tried to reconstruct this story from old e-mails and such. Unfortunately I didn't save everything, so things might not be in perfect chronological order. It's close enough for you to get the idea of what went on.


Unlike real world Naturism, on-line Naturism was/is not all positive for me.
My first on-line experience was joining Yahoo Nude canoeists group. They are, with a few exceptions, a great group. They answered all the questions that this beginner asked. Even questions that I asked of specific people were cheerfully answered.
My second excursion into cyberspace was to join Yahoo Barebackpackers. It was run by a teenaged girl. She created it when most of the members left Yahoo Freehiking because of the porn postings. It wasn’t the list founders fault, but the member posting the porn had the Yahoo ID "freehiker" so he appeared, at a glance, to be the founder. When he created a porn page full of the group photos and a dozen of so porn banners, the group members left as fast as rats leaving a sinking ship.
Barebackpackers grew steadily till a member with the ID "nuderacer" showed up. He began advertising the club heavily and it grew quickly. Unfortunately he was advertising it in the porn groups, exhibitionist groups, pic trading groups, Voyeurism groups and on his own page which included porn links and a counter that read in the, not very believable, millions. When he claimed total responsibility for the growth of the club, it was pointed out to him that most of the members he brought to the club had to be deleted. Ariel, the group founder, was not about to allow a repeat of the Freehiking fiasco. To say nuderacer objected strenuously would be a gross understatement. He responded by starting a flame war that affected a half dozen groups and lasted over 2 years. Nuderacer got the final word, at least as far as Barebackpackers was concerned. He posted some low angle nude photos taken from a group run by his friend "happynature." Back then, Yahoo had no adult section and nudes weren't allowed at all, anywhere on Yahoo. He appeared to have posted them late at night and by morning Yahoo had disallowed access to the club by Ariel. Locked out of her own group by Yahoo, she couldn't remove the Yahoo Terms of Service violating photos. By the next day the group had been deleted and Ariel was warned by Yahoo that she would get would loose all Yahoo privileges for even the tinniest further violation of the terms of service. It appears that nuderacer did have a Yahoo connection as he had claimed. Freehiking, Barebackpacking and the other clubs he created as competition and a non-naturist alternative to Barebackpackers were allowed to stay open as well as the group he got those T.O.S. violating photos from. Even a letter writing campaign to get Yahoo to do the right thing had no effect.
About that time I joined the real world Paddling Bares Canoe Club. In one of the newsletters was a recipe for Sally Lund Bread. It was absolutely delicious. I just had to thank the guy that modified it to work in an Outback Oven over a pack stove. I'll refer to him as Monty because of his resemblance to the Simpsons character Montgomery Burns. Monty was a nice guy and replied with all sorts of info about himself. We exchanged e-mails for awhile. It was lots of double entandre on my part and lots of dry British humor on his part. He seemed to love dropping straight lines for me to respond to with some remark with a double meaning. One day he just stopped responding.
Nuderacer found me hanging out in Nude Canoeists. He immediately set up a competing group and posted some of the same photos, in Nude Canoeists, which had gotten Barebackpackers shut down by Yahoo. He began objecting to the way Nude Canoeists was run and started up his flame war again. It was the same rhetoric he was spouting in Barebackpackers. In Nude canoeists, things were done right, Naturist principals; low impact camping and safe canoeing are the rule. I was never sure if he was out to get me or just liked destroying well run groups by presenting the alternative to the groups that maintain high standards and flaming in the well run groups. I immediately joined his group, Canuding, and started giving him a taste of his own medicine. This all happened back when the Yahoo Groups were still clubs and you couldn't keep someone from joining unless you caught them and banned them before they could leave. That is how he kept from being banned and that's how I kept him too busy to be a problem in Nude Canoeists.
I also created a new Yahoo ID. My new ID was a pic trader, exhibitionist, cheated on her husband and was all around scum. In order to make it look like he was just promoting another persons club, he needed to find someone to be the new founder of Canuding. It was less than a week before he made my scummy alter ego the founder of his Canuding group. He said it was obvious she was a real Naturist. That statement showed me just what he thought Naturism was all about and confirmed my opinion of him.
Being appointed founder of a group started by someone trying to destroy your favorite group presents some real possibilities. I did my best to be the scummy person he wanted as founder, but I didn't delete those that disagreed with his point of view. He went ballistic. In all his other groups, he had total control and could belittle and insult everyone that he chose to target. I merely presented a level playing field. I never did anything, as founder of the club, to cause him grief. Well, at least not at first. When he got really obnoxious towards my alter ego ID, the scummy founder that he liked so much at first, I turned the club over to myself. I guess that needs an explanation. The scummy alter ego resigned as founder and turned it over to the real me. Nuderacer really went ballistic. I then did the cruelest thing possible. I let nuderacer continue to post anything he wanted. He made himself look like an idiot with little help from me.
About that time I found out why Monty broke off contact. I had forwarded a joke e-mail to him and a dozen or so others. It was a spoof of the "emoticons" like the smiley faces :) and such. The e-mail contained "assicons" like wide ass (__I__) , tight ass ( * ) and dimpled ass (*I*) as well as a real ass not well covered by a thong with the caption "You've just been e-mooned." He was highly offended and started warning people that I send out "unsolicited sexually oriented material." I guess humor is one of those things that don't pass through e-mail very well. However, everybody else thought it was funny.
Nuderacer was beginning to make an ass out of himself in the Canuding group. At least he was relatively quiet in Nude Canoeists. That was when I first encountered someone I'll refer to as Marge. She doesn’t look like Marge from the Simpson’s, but any name will do for the purposes of this page.
I joined one of Marge's on-line Naturist Groups during a discussion of Naturist standards. In a post I suggested she check out a set of guidelines for on-line clubs that Ariel, the founder of the defunct Barebackpackers group had written. Ariel wrote the guidelines to help control Nuderacer and as a way to make some sort of connection between the Yahoo groups that were run to Naturist standards. Then as now, you can look through dozens of groups and not find a single real Naturist group. The idea was simple, listing the groups that used those guidelines on the bottom of the page. With that link list, Ariel had hoped to help Naturists find the roses among the massive quantity of thorns. Marge stated that those guidelines were simply common sense and not needed, deleted the posting mentioning them and banned me from her group. She later told a friend of mine it was because I was telling her how to run her club.
Marge runs a real world Naturist club and is a well respected nationally known Naturist. Her real-world club is a non-landed travel club that has full schedule of events. She posted an announcement of her up-coming canoe trip in Canuding instead of Nude Canoeists. That gave some respectability to Nuderacer's Canuding group and at the same time didn't get the announcement to the real paddlers in Nude Canoeists. I asked her not to post there, but instead use Nude Canoeists. She declined. As the Canuding group was an embarrassment to Naturism, I didn't want a Naturist leader like Marge to post there and lend any air of respectability to the group. Several well-known Naturists were posting answers to Nuderacer's charges, but they all used different Id's so they wouldn't give the impression that the Canuding Group had anything to do with Naturism. I had to delete Marge to keep her from posting there with a recognizable Id. I didn't want to delete her, but to promote Naturism in a positive way I had to. It turned out that she and Nuderacer were on-line friends.
Nuderacer was really getting livid over not being able to delete his opponents from the Canuding group. He wasn’t satisfied with insulting people in Canuding anymore. He expanded his threats, insults and innuendo to other groups. In Freehiking he could delete rebuttals, so we rebutted him regularly to keep him busy. He even deleted Monty for posting "Why can't we all get along?" That ended Monty's tenure as a Freehiking member. He was one of the first to join Freehiking when Nuderacer started flaming Barebackpackers. Monty doesn’t appear to mind being a member of a club that encourages pic trading and exhibitionism like the groups that Nuderacer ran/runs. In Pinelands Canoe and Kayak Nuderacer accused me of cyber-stalking him. The founder deleted him immediately.
I was feeling a bit guilty about using the kind of tactics that Nuderacer had been using against me, but he did start this whole thing. The main difference was that I was doing it to protect something worthwhile. He was trying to destroy something worthwhile.
If I had met Monty, Nuderacer and Marge on-line before I had met a few other Naturists in real life, I think I would have avoided Naturism like the plague. Something about the web seems to bring out the worst in people. Good folks can be a bitch on the web and the bad guys are really bad. The intermingling of the 2 can cause strange circumstances.
It turned out that reason that Nuderacer felt he could claim the moral high ground was that Marge was nice to him in her Groups. The approval of a well known Naturist was all he needed to justify his attacks on any and all Naturists he decided to go after.
When he started flaming me in Marge's main group I got a new ID, joined and responded just as I had when he flamed me in other groups. I also deleted myself after each response to his charges so Marge couldn't delete me. He accused me of all sorts of things, including spreading Sexually Transmitted Diseases. I responded as calmly as I could, but Marge would delete my responses. She didn't allow my posting responses, but his charges would be left in place. After several of my responses, she would delete his insults. She only deleted his after deleting several of mine as if she was deleting his only as a last resort to stop my rebuttals. He was a member in good standing, yet she announced that she would delete me for flaming if she got the chance.
In one e-mail exchange between, Marge and myself, she explained that she doesn’t care what people do in other groups, only what they do in her's. I pointed out that he was flaming me in her group and I was only responding to his flames. She said simply that it's her group and she can do what she likes.
Eventually Marge realized that I wasn't the problem and allowed me to stay in her group and participate in the regularly scheduled chat sessions. Looking back on it I wonder what here motives really were. During the second weekly chat I joined, nuderacer showed up and started insulting me by P.M. and baiting me in the chat room. The following week he repeated he insults, while Marge and others thanked him for setting up the group and all he had done to make it a success. I just couldn't stand it anymore and tried to convince Marge, by e-mail, that it was her support of nuderacer that made him feel he could continue to insult people, flame other clubs and be a general pain in the ass to the detriment of Naturism in general. She eventually did ban him, but he kept coming back, under new ID's and she took her time banning him again. It wasn't long before nuderacer and myself were banned again. She told a friend of mine that she didn't ban me, but it must have been done by one of the other founders. I did some e-mailing, but none of the others would 'fess up either.
Nuderacer's behavior regularly violated Yahoo's Terms of Service, yet neither Yahoo or anyone else would lift a finger to curb his activities. Those of us that he was going after had no real control over him and those that did have some minimal degree of control over him, didn't seem to care what he did. I just can't understand how Marge could ignore all he did to negatively "promote" Naturism. Her support of him is totally beyond my comprehension.
Just when I thought it was all over, Monty snuck up on me. It started when I responded to a post in Nude Canoeists. He said, in a less than gentlemanly way, that I was responding to a post from another group. I checked the other group and saw that the original poster had posed his question in 2 clubs with only a slight difference in wording. Apparently Monty was in such a rush to make me look stupid that he didn't notice that I did it right. I documented everything in detail and responded sarcastically. Monty didn't even attempt to apologize, he just contacted the group founder and had the whole exchange deleted. Chivalry is truly dead.
Things got quiet for quite a while. Nuderacer finally realized that I would defend the groups I was in as well as myself. He pretty much disappeared. Monty ignored me completely. No great loss either account. I was banned from Marge's group so there was no further friction there. I was accepted as a member of the groups I was in and things were going smoothly. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end.
Ariel had been co-founder of the largest Naturist group on Yahoo for nearly a year and due to her heavy class schedule she couldn't check it once a day or more as she had been doing. She asked me to fill in for her after clearing it with the group’s founder. I was checking it at least twice a day and keeping the porn posters at bay. Marge was also a moderator. I stayed out of her way and she ignored me. We were both working for the benefit of Naturism.
Things went smoothly till a bunch of exhibitionists started uploading pics. You know the type, penis close ups and dozens of the me-by-a-rock, me-by-a-tree, me-on a-trail, on an on.... They rarely, if ever, participated in the group. All they wanted was for people to see them nude. When they did post, it was to announce that they had uploaded more nude-with-an-erection pics.
I noticed that nearly all of them were from the UK. Banning them and deleting their pics was getting to be a pain. As they were British, I decided to use a British tactic I picked up from the movie "Patriot." During the revolutionary war the British would hang civilians that were sympathetic to the rebels cause from trees and leave them there as a warning to others. I deleted all but one of the exhibitionist's pics and changed the caption under it to say that this sort of pic is not allowed and the guy that uploaded it had been banned. The sudden flood of penis pics ended as quickly as it started.
It was then that somebody complained about my warning pic. Nobody cared that it stopped the ongoing problem. Nobody cared that I had deleted dozens of similar pics. They wanted my hanging civilian removed. I went to delete it and found that Marge had cut back my moderators privileges to virtually nothing. I was a moderator in name only. I don't think I could have deleted it if I tried. What I did do was remove myself as moderator. If I couldn't moderate anything it didn't make sense that my name would be on the moderators list. At least it would be apparent that I no longer had anything to do with any problems that might come up. That wasn’t enough for Marge. She banned me from the group entirely.
Marge also cut back Ariel's moderator privileges to next to nothing. Several months before, Marge had let Ricci Schenk, founder of the Surf N Sundogs and the sworn enemy of the Naturist Society post whatever she wanted. It had been Ariel, and ocasionally myself, that got up at 2:00 A.M. to delete dozens of posts by Ric and her dozens of alter egos. Ariel checked the group 8-10 times a day and several times even caught Schenk in the act, banning her ID Du Jour on the spot. It was a huge amount of work to keep the Sun Dogs at bay.
Marge had allowed the Sundogs to post whatever they wanted in her other groups. I felt that anybody that constantly threatened lawsuits and made libelous statements, like the Sundogs do, should not be given a forum. Marge didn't seem to care. After all it wasn't her real world travel club that was being threatened. It was the Naturist Society that was threatened with the lawsuits. It was also the real world club I consider to be my 'Home" club and it was some of the individuals that got me started in Naturism that were being threatened. Naturism itself was being degraded by the propaganda the Sundogs spewed forth on the web. Ariel cared and I cared. We got the shaft and Marge is in power now.
If you ask Marge why, she will tell you it was because Ariel and I wanted to keep that Naturist club on top of Yahoo's list. That group had over 19,000 members. Yahoo ranks groups by size and that put it on top of the list. All the other large Naturist groups on Yahoo are exhibitionist and pic trading clubs. With that group on top of the list, the first club they would look into would be a real Naturist Group. Sure, many of the members joined looking for pics to trade and for other non-naturist reasons, but as long as the group was run to naturist standards they could stay and learn something or leave. Ariel had set the group settings to hide the membership list and allow only moderated posts. The people that didn't belong there couldn't post and their profile, no matter how good or bad, wasn't visible to anyone other than the moderators. All the perverts could do was keep the membership high enough to keep the group on the top of yahoo's list, where it served one very important function. It was a point of first contact with newcomers to Naturism.
Marge didn't see things that way. She didn't want people to see all the perverts on the membership list. She didn't seem to understand that the list was hidden from all but the moderators. She spent many hours deleting those she thought unfit to participate, till the group dropped way down the list. It never was an active group, but at least it served as a point of contact. Now it's just another Naturist group with too little participation to be useful. She and the founder liked to use an analogy to a garden and they were weeding. They both didn't see the value of all the manure, in the form of non-naturist members, that gave the group it's single useful trait, the number one slot. Now, when someone uses Yahoo's list to find a Naturist club, the top clubs are all pic trading, exhibitionism, voyeurism and swinging groups. I don't like the idea that they get to represent Naturism instead of Naturists.
Marge also didn't seem to understand how the Yahoo Groups software works. She relies on Yahoo to notify her of new uploaded files and apparently assumes that includes bookmarks and photos, it does not. Since she got no notification from Yahoo she assumed there was no new uploads to the photos and bookmarks, so there is no reason to check them periodically. That's why many new penis pics got missed along with bookmarks linking to porn sites. When asked, she blamed them on me. NO WAY! I never allowed them and I checked the photos and bookmarks at least once a day. She did check the bookmarks at least once. I know because the link to this site was deleted. The stuff posted by "Slutwife" wasn’t deleted, but this site was.
Marge deleted/banned over 13,000 members, including some nationally known Naturists.
Ariel, who's work with her local Naturist club got her on the Surf N Sundogs "To Sue list", and who worked so hard to get the group up to Naturist standards -BANNED.
The president of my "home" club, who has had 2 articles published in N magazine and is on the Sundogs "To sue" list for being an active Naturist group -ASKED TO LEAVE.
Myself, who only wanted to help and who spent countless hours keeping the attention of Nuderacer the pic trader/perv off of several top notch Naturist groups that he wanted to destroy -BANNED.
Several friends of mine, who's only transgression was knowing me -BANNED.
I could go on and on but you get the idea. It seems that Nuderacer's threat from years before still was in effect. He told me that I, and any of my friends, would be deleted from any club he had anything to do with. He said that included Marge's clubs. He was right.
I have pretty much given up on helping people on line. I got crapped on for doing a stint as a "Yahoo Expert" on the topic of canoe camping. I am still catching it for standing up to Nuderacer. I'm now on the Sundog's "to sue" list. At this point, I think if I make it to the next Naturist gathering I'm going to use an assumed name.



By now I'm sure that you are wondering if I have a point to all this rambling. Well, I do. The point is not to let on-line Naturism put you off of real world Naturism. Being on-line brings out the worst in people. Most of the so-called Naturist Groups on-line have little to do with Naturism. Most are Pic Traders trading pic of naturists, Exhibitionists or Voyeurs that go nude to get their kicks seeing and being seen, or Swingers trying to cloak their activities under the guise of Naturism.
If you want to get involved in Naturism, check out the links on this site, hook up with a real world group and don't tell them you know me.