Stuart R Ward

Body Freedom Day

First published in paperback by Infinity Publishing.Com, 2004, ISBN 0-7414-1945-9.

Stuart R. Ward has been a naturist for decades. Around 1980, he left his native San Francisco to live off the land in "wooded, high desert land in upstate California". I freely admit that I don't know what a wooded desert might be, but the location is clearly well-suited to a life where the use of clothing is exceptional. Ward clearly regards such a life as healthy for body, mind and spirit, and his book is an attempt to promote this point of view. Such books have been produced before, and will be again, but Ward steps outside the conventional approaches of either setting out practical and other arguments, or of producing a novel where the Utopian benefits of naturism are the primary theme. Instead, he tells a story from the perspective of 2056.

In the 52 years between when Ward wrote Body Freedom Day and the date on which his fictional alter-eg, Zet Quimby, published his book, there have been enormous changes in US society. One of these is that nudity as become the normal, everyday dress code, and this is clearly Quimby/Ward's primary concern. However, he doesn't leave it to subsequent generations to make that change - instead, Ward sets the tipping point of his tale only two years into his future. A combination of evolutionary and revolutionary events and attitudes creates the climate within which the change to a truly clothing-optional society can become universal. These are centred on the 2006 Bay-to-Breakers run in San Fancisco - the eponymous Body Freedom Day, and this material also provides the core of the extracts.

To demonstrate that his forecast is realistic, Ward takes a third of this slim volume to set out the history of social nudity, working from "prehistory" through to 2005. This historical survey has been methodically-researched, but Ward has not always checked his facts thoroughly, or reads what he wants to read into them. For example, Quimby states that in the 1990s, "England had over two million registered nudists" - when the two million figure is an optimistic (but not ridiculous) extrapolation from an NOP survey indicating that approximately 2% of British adults regarded themselves as naturists. I also suspect that Ward is viewing his country from a less-than-representative viewpoint, in that Californians seem to be more tolerant of and amenable to clothes-free leisure than US citizens as a whole.

To be fair, my reservations in the previous paragraph can be treated as nit-picking, particularly since Body Freedom Day declares itself a work of fiction. However, I'd have been a lot happier about this aspect of the book if Ward had come down more clearly on the fictional side of the fence. For many years, SF provided the mainstay of my reading material, and I am entirely happy with the "future history" story. I see no need to bolster such tales with an overburden of detailed current history. Similarly, I found Ward's introductory and secondary tale of how the 2056 volume came to be available for publication in 2004 a complete waste of time - and, to me, it also showed up Ward's limitations as a writer of fiction. I would have much preferred a story written purely as the reminiscences of a 2056 centenarian, concentrating on that person's personal experiences and avoiding the documentary elements. In the context of the book Ward produced, such a story would have been an extremely short one, since Quimby seems keen to show his scholarship of pre-Body Freedom Day social nudity, enjoys providing a wide range of detail - both first-hand and from other sources - of the Day itself, but is reluctant to examine in significant detail the ways in which the change spread and was resisted. In particular, attitudes outside the USA are hardly mentioned, while the reactions of the Bible Belt and those states subject to a less nude-friendly climate than California's get little mention.

As a relatively inexperienced writer, perhaps Ward was right to set himself tight limits. If so, I hope this disciplined approach is also ensuring that he hones his craft and, in due course, produces the novel-length and fully-realised story of Quimby's life of which Body Freedom Day provides such a tantalising and limited view.

Ratings:

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2006 August 15.
 
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